We’ve been able to manipulate photos since the early days of film cameras. While technology has made them easier to mess with, they’ve never been truly trustworthy.
This has been the case in Asia for 7 years or more now. Every single photo of a person on a China-bought phone has had a filter you couldn’t turn off.
Well it depends.
Just from the subject: are mobile photos real
(to simplify this and avoid a definitive no, well not talk about photos beeing real or not in numeric form).
Photography is a complicated topic on mobile phones, with plenty of algorithms enhancing what a tiny sensor can deliver.
- But let’s assume there is a phone and algorithm, which manages to represent a photograph as close as possible to what I see.
Are my photos real because they represent what I see at one precise point in time? Because it is what I remember something was?
Or are they not real because of the algorithms interpreting the results to make it look like I see it?
- Now let’s assume I have another phone, like a Samsung or whatever. Such phone may take a picture, but that picture is modified, there is maybe more saturation for the sky and grass, while combining multiple pictures to do HDR… And plenty of other things.
Now are these photos real?
They change what I see, but would that make them less real for you/me? How do you see your pictures?
about the article : When ai/photography manipulation is brought in the question, in order to change the first result :
-
It could slightly change colors, then I guess we could maybe comme back to above, is this interpretation real or not? More or less real?
-
It could be a modification of what and how elements appear in that picture. Here, for me, there isn’t any question. The reality of the pictures are completely broken as they do not represent anymore what I could see.
My takeaway from the article was that Your photos are no longer real because the AI portions have altered the image captured. Your face has been cleared of wrinkles and blemishes, your eyes made larger and rounder, your aging features reduced without your knowledge or input. Of course, with your input your proportions could be manually or automatically enhanced, but also the sky replaced with a more interesting one, or people or objects “in the way” of your desired composition removed and replaced with mimicry in the background.
The adjustments available - both automatic and manual - for balance, clarity, and color temperature have always been available in analog film, even if only to a limited extent in either film selection or in developing. The AI enhancements available in modern software, especially those baked into the Camera apps which are automatic, can be far more manipulative.
I do a lot of photography for a museum. In documenting historic artifacts (as in journalism) you’re not supposed to do any post processing. Not that I’d use a phone camera for those photos, but it’s an issue as those features creep into more serious cameras.