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The AI photo editing era is here, and it's every person for themselves

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Re: The AI photo editing era is here, and it's every person for themselves

#11
"Like me, not everyone will have the stomach for it. In fact, some people are running in the opposite direction as fast as they can."

A tiny minority. Everyone will use this. Eventually, the system will remove the vaping "dinguses" automatically just as it automatically adjusts the exposure.

Re: The AI photo editing era is here, and it's every person for themselves

#12
post #2

Before I wrote a single line of code, I championed my abilities to add/subtract individuals from photos for family and friends, first using ClarisWorks Paint! My Samsung S22 can now do this within seconds and better. I removed a TV in front of some liquor bottles on the wall. It repeated the bottles but not even the same ones!

Before I became an engineer and I was doing odd jobs, I got hired by some rich guy (whose name was basically Donald Duck) as an assistant to do some data entry, but really the first task he gave me was to photoshop some photos he took of him and his son after they finished climbing a local mountain. He had me remove people behind them, and had me whiten his teeth.

I think there's a big publicity cycle going on currently due to the AI backlash, but in actuality, no one cares about any of this. People just want nicer photos. They're not sitting around philosophizing about 'what is a photo'. 99.99% of people would say the edited photo in this post is nicer and would prefer it. But if you show it to someone who is all excited about hating AI technology, of course they'll wail that the original was so much better.

Re: The AI photo editing era is here, and it's every person for themselves

#13
post #3

As someone who's role involves some elements of image editing, Adobe's GenAI feature is a welcome tool... however, as someone who's read 1984 and is concerned about the future tidal wave of scams, I'm not so keen on ever a$$hole and his/her dog being enabled.

[dead]

Re: The AI photo editing era is here, and it's every person for themselves

#14
post #7

Every photo is a lie. https://fstoppers.com/documentary/every-photograph-youve-eve...

That’s a great topic for late night dorm bull sessions but it’s not what we’re talking about here. People know that photographers can be selective about what and how they cover things, but there’s been an understanding that photos are recording something real in a way which is no longer true at all. Yes, people played dark room and photoshop tricks but those were labor intensive and hard to make pass a detailed exami…

When we jumped too machine guns we had WWI and people weren’t prepared either. That’s how technology usually works.

Re: The AI photo editing era is here, and it's every person for themselves

#15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love Adobe's GenAI, but I also hate it. The problem is it has been programmed with some pseudo Judeo-Christian moral guidelines. Trying to edit my gf's beach pics to remove crap from the background, it freaks out on some bikini pics and pops-up with an angry yellow box, basically lecturing you on your life choices for not covering your entire skin with clothing. You have to chop the image into new documents, fix ea…

> The problem is it has been programmed with some pseudo Judeo-Christian moral guidelines. That's because there are already a multitude of services offering to "nudify" people for cash (which the customers then not just use for their own spank bank but for extorting women), and Adobe does not want to be associated with that kind of disgusting (and in some jurisdictions illegal) behavior.

Okay, but shouldn't you be able to edit the background of a photo that has a person with a bikini in it? Why couldn't they just disallow you to edit the actual human body or the clothing?

Re: The AI photo editing era is here, and it's every person for themselves

#17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is it has been programmed with some pseudo Judeo-Christian moral guidelines. That's because there are already a multitude of services offering to "nudify" people for cash (which the customers then not just use for their own spank bank but for extorting women), and Adobe does not want to be associated with that kind of disgusting (and in some jurisdictions illegal) behavior.

Okay, but shouldn't you be able to edit the background of a photo that has a person with a bikini in it? Why couldn't they just disallow you to edit the actual human body or the clothing?

Law of unintended consequences. Better to be safe than have to make sure your tool can't be inadvertently used as a blackmail generator.

Consider the example given. A person in a bikini at the beach is a normal image that few find objectionable. Let's make it objectionable by only modifying the background.

We modify the bikini picture's background to make the person appear in a strip club on the stage. Or we make the person appear in the bedroom of an ex.

Blackmail generated by only modifying the background.

I'm not 100% sure they're taking the right route, but given the complexity of the situation I certainly understand a cautious and conservative approach.

Re: The AI photo editing era is here, and it's every person for themselves

#18
post #9

Every photo is a lie. https://fstoppers.com/documentary/every-photograph-youve-eve...

That statement is similar to the "everything has been done before", or "everything is art" reductivism. There's a marked difference between fixing the color shift to better capture the mood and straight up removing people like Stalin's photos.

Post-modernism is like salt and pepper. A small appropriate amount of salt-pepper would make a meal great. But salt and pepper by themselves can never be a proper meal. In similar vain, you need post-modernism to get a borader perspective of things. But that doesn't mean post-modernism, by itself, cannot be the only way to discuss things.

Re: The AI photo editing era is here, and it's every person for themselves

#19
I want photos to be a record of my perception. I want them to match what I see in front of me as closely as possible. I do not care if data is mangled to make this happen — in fact, the reason I love my iPhone's camera so much is because it mangles the raw sensor data so much. Apple's computational photography pipeline is state-of-the-art, and it is designed to make photos look as close to my perception as possible. All my favorite sunset photos have all been taken on my iPhone.

I do not like these AI photo-editing features. Or rather, I do not like the use of them, and will not be using them myself. The technology itself is stunning and exciting! But it entirely defeats the purpose of taking a photo for me. If someone blinks in a group picture, I want the blink to stay. If there's some obnoxious piece of garbage in the background, I want it to stay, because the whole point is for a photo to be a representation of reality consistent with my eyesight at the time it was taken.

I truly love candid photos. I am open to computational photography and even AI processing, but it should exclusively serve the goal of making the photo more candid. I feel that the AI photo editing features being pushed out these days will only make photos less candid.

Re: The AI photo editing era is here, and it's every person for themselves

#20
post #14
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a great topic for late night dorm bull sessions but it’s not what we’re talking about here. People know that photographers can be selective about what and how they cover things, but there’s been an understanding that photos are recording something real in a way which is no longer true at all. Yes, people played dark room and photoshop tricks but those were labor intensive and hard to make pass a detailed exami…

When we jumped too machine guns we had WWI and people weren’t prepared either. That’s how technology usually works.

WWI was one of the worst things that ever happened in all of history, it destroyed many millions of lives and scarred an entire generation of people across the entire world and led pretty directly to WWII and the Holocaust. I'm not sure "that's how technology usually works" is a good argument here.
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