288
‘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
288 points (95.6% liked)
Technology
59374 readers
3671 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yeah, this is a great example of a true statement that just serves to muddy the water of the actual argument.
A better way to think about it is: an AI-dependent photo is less representative of whatever is in the photo versus a regular photo.
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.
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.