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Comment by johngossman | Hacker News Reader

This is going to be like Photoshop usage. Very quickly it will be expected that papers use AI to write parts, just as fixing white balance in Photoshop doesn’t require alerting the viewer that the photo has been enhanced. More extensive use may need to be acknowledged. But I’m not sure…design tools are rarely credited except in cases like a Fx heavy movie

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This is a more serious problem than that, because AI does in fact make stuff up, and will bullshit logical connections that make superficial sense but don't match the system under discussion. I think a better analogy is airbrushing photos to remove people; it changes the facts of the photo in a way people care about. Likewise, it's a problem if people sloppily use GenAI to fix up text or graphs or whatever, and it creates things that match the paper really well but don't match reality. Those are _exactly_ the kinds of problems that will slip through peer review very easily.

Fixing white balance, or a thousand other old-school photo changes, is very different; the underlying structure of the photo is there and nobody cares about white balance or most of those old corrections, because our eyes and brains are constantly mucking with them anyway. People care about airbrushing or GenAI-"airbrushing" parts of the picture, because the information content we care about is changed.

> I think a better analogy is airbrushing photos to remove people; it changes the facts of the photo in a way people care about.

I was thinking about this a lot recently with the announcement of the Pixel 8. One of the big announced features was "Magic Editor", where you could edit all your photos to automatically put smiles on people who were frowning, remove people altogether like that inconvenient homeless person or garbage truck: https://blog.google/products/pixel/google-pixel-8-pro/

This may be a bit "get off my lawn", but honestly I was disgusted. Why do people feel their everyday family photos need to match some Insta-bullshit ideal? Some of my favorite old family pics are where something "wrong" or unexpected happens.

I don't fault Google for this, and I think it's natural to want to touch up photos when you're taking an important picture. But I feel like we're careening towards a future where we're starting to forget what reality actually is. When TikTok came out with their extremely realistic "makeup filters", I remember seeing a video where a photographer commented that she would take pictures of women who were shocked at how "ugly" they were because they weren't used to seeing "un-Facetuned" photos of themselves.

Sorry for the semi-rant, just feels like a situation where any individual, small technological improvement makes sense, but in totality we end up at a place that is overall worse than where we started.

I think that once you start editing a picture in a way that isn’t equivalent to just having different camera settings you aren’t capturing a moment anymore, at best you’re creating a new artwork which is fine but I don’t think it’s good to pretend to yourself or others that it’s actually what happened

Agreed, but that is clearly not how Google is positioning "Magic Editor":

"Magic Editor in Google Photos is a new experimental editing experience that uses generative AI to help you bring your photos in line with the essence of the moment you were trying to capture."

Then here is the example video they show of a sample photo edit: https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/ori...

After all, why take a picture of your family when your kid is making a silly face when you can instead "fix" him so that you now look like the Stepford-family, JC Penney ad that God intended.

To be clear I agree and my comment was adding to yours rather than arguing against it

Absolubtely. Im involved in writing right now and i've caught people using its output. It's hard to make an outright ban, heck ive used it myself for things like tricky LaTeX formatting (make this stuff into a nice table with color boxes corresponding to the rgb values).

But as with all papers the issue is just a lack of dilligence, be it people straight up using hallucinated sources or the paper bizzarely fawning over every aspect of the project, even things that are objectively rubbish and author knows that when questioned (such as a paragraph praising the high quality of servo motors used when they are blamed for test failure in a later section). Someone taking the time to use it well will use it well, someone lazy will still be lazy.

> Someone taking the time to use it well will use it well, someone lazy will still be lazy.

Exactly. It's a self-solving problem as long as draconian luddites don't outright ban LLMs.

I don't think authors need to credit AI in their written works, but I do think this is the double-edged sword of claiming partly AI-generated content as your own (for reference, the WGA recently won the right to claim AI-inspired and partially AI-created work as a human writer's own work without having to credit the AI). I think it's fair for a scientific human author to take full credit for papers that are partially written by AI, but any logical errors and hallucinations inserted by AI should also be attributed to the human author. It's the human author's responsibility to ensure the final written work is accurate.

Edit: for further context, I have published a few scientific papers in recent years, and using AI is not all that different from a senior author relying on junior authors. Early on in my career, I created the first draft of most papers, and my more senior co-authors would verify my work and create direct edits or suggestions for me to revise the draft. The final paper was created after a few rounds of this cycle.

Reminds me of when teachers told students not to use Wikipedia for research purposes.

My wikipedia account is over two decades old, and I often bring this up when talking bee -keeping stuff... them both being "bottom up organization that results in a beautiful exchange of information."

This experience "went full circle" for me, January 2023... when ChatGPT cited SOMETHING I HAD WRITTEN into wikipedia (re: transistor density).

I clearly remember getting in trouble in class each year for using Wikipedia.

My podunk teachers couldn't fathom the difference between directly citing Wikipedia (just cite the source it references instead) and merely reading it.

Pain.

> just cite the source it references instead

You also shouldn't cite sources you haven't read yourself.

I agree?

Some teachers notice if you only cite sources on the Wikipedia page, too. More likely if the whole class is writing on the same topic.

The work-around is to write it from Wikipedia, but find sources by searching on Google Books. Being able to read a couple pages around each part you’re citing is enough, so their page allowance for restricted works is usually plenty.

Hit your citation count and real-book-source requirement (if they still do that second one) without leaving your chair. Barely more work than writing from Wikipedia and not covering your tracks.

And while we're on the topic (Getty Images created a generative AI that gives credit to the source images) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37793579

I don't mean to be super nitpicky, but I've got to strongly disagree with your comparison to photoshop / photography.

There's been an ongoing debate in the Photography community going back as far as photographic editing has existed, regarding when and how acknowledgement of editing has been performed, whether it be literal, physical cutting and pasting of printed media, or a digital equivalent.

Some of the more famous personalities in Photography seem to lean to something like this:

"Minor adjustments like removing dust from the lens, adjusting colors to match the 'true' colors as it was taken (or to make it 'more visually pleasing'), cropping and level correction are fine and expected. The use of things like Sky Replacement [1] or content-aware fills [2] should be attributed or referenced somewhere if they are the focal point of the photograph."

There are others who do much more "artistic" styles of photography [3] where they argue something like:

"No person in their right mind would believe that there isn't some amount of editing going into nearly photograph, so why mention it at all?"

"Because editing has been so heavily used, by so many famous photographers for so long, without mentioning editing, it's fine if people don't mention the use of digital (or physical) editing."

"Popular services like Instagram have built-in filters that users can use to make themselves look different - should the people who post photos that have those filters on also be pressured into mentioning that their photo was edited? If not, what's the difference?"

There's really not any solid consensus on what is "correct" when it comes to editing attribution. Most tend to agree that doing the bulk of the work "in-camera" (cropping by moving in closer, for example) will make your life easier later on, but, there are some outliers that strongly advocate that any form of editing in post, is "not photography".

Things get even weirder when you get into print. The same photograph printed on different mediums of paper, or with different printers, or different ink, or different DPI settings can come out looking noticeably different even to laymen (imagine a smeared blotchy photo versus a crisp, clear one - there are times where you might want the photo to look somewhat blotchy for aesthetic reasons). In a way, choosing one form of medium over another is a kind of editing, because the end presentation is measurably different from the original. A quick example might be noticing the difference between modern movies that are shot on digital vs traditional film. There is a kind of "feel" to the end product, because of the medium that was used to record and distribute it.

TL;DR The photography community is very much not in agreement to what amount of editing is, or is not permissible, or when it should, or should not be attributed or brought up, or even how that information should be conveyed. Some are fine without any mention whatsoever because of historical reasons. Others want it mentioned under the use of certain tools or criteria. Still other don't consider a photographer to be a "real" photographer at all, and instead should be called a "stills editor" (or something like that) if they use any editing at all, outside of "in-camera work".

[1] https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/replace-sky.html

[2] https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/content-aware-fill.h...

[3] https://www.lookslikefilm.com/2019/08/15/artistic-photos/

Cropping can make a huge difference in the meaning or messaging imparted by a photograph. It's akin to picking a phrase out of a longer speech or passage and interpreting it by itself. It's potentially a far more impactful edit than color balancing, adjusting contrast, or those sorts of things. On the other hand it could just be removing an irrelevant distraction that was captured in the original framing.

Totally agree and I thought about that example. But cropping is an inevitable part of photography (or painting) and was done in camera or in the darkroom before digital tools with identical power and results (albeit, cropping digitally is a lot, lot, lot faster). To push this analogy to its breaking point, cropping digitally is like using a keyboard to write instead of a pen.

Good points. As you point out, it depends on the community. Photojournalism and nature photography have much higher standards for what is acceptable than advertising or personal photographs and artistic photographer is different again. I remember when Galen Rowell burned a hole in a slide with a loupe and had to write an apology for fixing it digitally. And you could make that analogy for writing too. For creative writing, knock yourself out (though there is already a raging debate on this topic), but for scientific writing you need to be more careful. If I was going to extend the photo journalism example to papers, then there is a difference between using AI to change the data (change the sky) than as a grammar checker (fix the white balance).

Ah, I think I see the error that I made. When I read your comment about white balance, I took it to mean "things like white balance" as in "almost everything", not just minor corrections. My mistake! :)

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