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‘There is no such thing as a real picture’: Samsung defends AI photo editing on Galaxy S24
(www.techradar.com)
this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2024
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It's not even a true statement. "A real picture of a pipe" has never once in history been interpreted as "my golly - there's an actual goddamn pipe trapped inside this piece of paper". We know it's a freaking representation.
The "real" part refers to how it's a product of mechanically capturing the light that was reflected off an actual pipe at some moment in time. You could have a real picture with adjusted colours, at which point it's real but manipulated. Of course with digital photography it's more complicated as the camera will try to figure out what the colours should be, but it doesn't mean the notion of a real picture is suddenly ready for the scrapyard. Monet's painting is still a painting.
Everyone knows exactly what you mean when you say a real picture. Imposing a 3D model over the moon to make it more detailed, for example, constitutes "not a real picture". Pretending this is some impossible philosophical dilemma is just a corporate exercise in doublespeak.
This is fuckin' brilliant. A picture worth a thousand mutilated words.
To play devil's advocate, even traditional photography involves a lot of subjective/artistic decisions before you get a photo. The type of film used can massively affect the image reproduced, and then once the photos are being developed, there's a load of choices made there which determine what the photo looks like.
There's obviously a line where a photo definitely becomes "edited", but people often believe that an objective photo is something that exists, and I don't think that's ever been the case.
Of course - there's a huge difference between a "real photo" and "objective reality", and there always has been. In the same way an impressionistic painting might capture reality accurately while not really looking like it that much.
It's actually way worse. Modern smartphones do a LOT of postprocessing that is basically just AI, and have been for years. Noise reduction, upscaling, auto-HDR and bokeh are all achieved through "AI" and are way further removed from reality than a film print or a DSLR picture. Smartphone sensors aren't nearly as good as a decent DSLR, they just make up for it with compute power and extremely advanced processing pipelines so we can't tell the difference at a glance.
Zoom into even a simple picture of a landscape, and you can obviously tell whether it was shot on smartphone. HDR artifacting and weird hallucinogenic blobs in low-light details are telltale signs, and not coincidentally rather similar to telltale sign of AI-generated photorealistic pictures.
Anyway it's still important to draw a line in the sand for what constitutes a "doctored" picture, but the line isn't so obviously placed once you realize just how wildly different a "no filter" smartphone pic is from the raw image straight from the sensor.