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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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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.