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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

> In a world where every celebrity is having sex with gorillas, doesn't such an image lose its charge? Will Norms and values around sex/body shaming change?

I hoped this would happen with social media. Everyone says stupid shit online and everyone has past beliefs they’ve outgrown. So what’s the big deal?

Instead we went the opposite way. Everyone is super self conscious and censoring at all times because you never know who’s gonna take it out of context and make a big deal.

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This is not the same though, it's about being able to deny that that photo of you is real, not that it's taken out of context.

Well what’s a “real” photo?

If I take your photo and photoshop (very well) different surroundings. Is it a real photo if you?

If I photoshop your face (very well) onto a different body. Is that real?

If I feed your photos into a model that can create realistic versions of those photos in different poses or with different facial expressions. Is that real?

They all start with something that is very definitely a real photo. You can’t (yet? ever?) generate a realistic photo of a specific person from a textual description. The machinery needs a source.

A real photo is one created by photons outside the camera

You’ll be surprised to learn that doesn’t work without some amazing tech to process the photons. Different settings will produce a different photo.

Hell, just changing focal length makes a bigg difference to what your face looks like: https://imgur.io/gallery/ZKTWi no digital manipulation required.

Which of those faces is “real”? They’re all just recording photons hitting the camera, but look very different.

It gets even worse when we start talking about colors. For example: it took cameras decades before they could accurately capture black faces. Where accurately means “an average person would say it looks right”

https://www.vox.com/2015/9/18/9348821/photography-race-bias

Edit: here's a fun example of how journalists use perspective and focal distance tricks to support their desired story angle. No digital manipulation https://twitter.com/baekdal/status/1254460167812415489

Simple: a "real" photo is one in which a light field from the real world impinges on a photosensitive media (CCD, film), and directly encodes that information, with some allowance for global light levels, gain, ISO, and speed. Anything else is a modification therein. HDR, multi-exposure compositing, etc, aren't truly "real". They may be 99% real, but aren't 100% real. If you crop it, it's 99.9% real (we have models which can detect cropping and even from which region it originated, obviously it can't reconstruct the missing data).

Yes, by that definition, most photographs already aren't real.

So if I take a photo of a photoshopped photo, it is a real photo.

It is a real photo of a photoshopped photo, not a real photo of the photoshopped photo’s subject.

> Yes, by that definition, most photographs already aren't real.

What if I use no digital manipulation at all, but play around with focal lengths or perspective to produce the desired effect. Is that a real photo?

For example from covid reporting: https://twitter.com/baekdal/status/1254460167812415489

Sure, I'd say that's a real photo - you could easily pull it off with a single exposure of film.

Just because the photo is real, doesn't mean it's free from deception. I could take a "real video" of gorilla suit^W^W bigfoot and it'd still be deceptive.

It is an interesting point [the hope that values will adapt to reflect typical mischievous patterns of social dynamics within various clusters].. I used to marvel during the dotcom era at the salivating delight of "the internet never forgets" of college students caught smoking a bong and the subsequent impact on their career (virtue signalling?).. I saw hope that society could then adapt about ridiculous FUD biases. There is a strange relationship of scarcity & opportunity and these windows into souls painting a distorted picture of the darker side of our ambitions. It is a cancer. Also, humans are always testing boundary conditions - curiosity, discontent, security,insecurity. Some inherent desperation of people jockeying for the next path from frying pan to fire in the search for greener pasture breeds opportunism that seems certain to favor desperation and negativity.

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