AI photo editors are ushering in a distrust of everything we see | Hacker News Reader

AI photo editors are ushering in a distrust of everything we see

wired.com

14 pointselorant20 comments

The good news is that none of our memories, mental representations, or even current perceptions are "real" either.

The even more terrifying part is that they are recreated when we remember. Ask me why I don't value eyewitness testimony.

TIL memories are .mp3s and not .bz2s

>or even current perceptions

This is always fun to think about, that there's lag to everything from the time light bounces off an object and travels to my retina to the processing my brain does to understand what it's being shown. So by the time I have processed a visual "reality" it doesn't exist in that state any longer.

Add in relativity and I could be experiencing a different time than someone else, AND a different space. If we are fundamentally fluctuations in various quantum fields coalesced into energetic matter that can interact with each other, the lag time between that field fluctuating and those fluctuations interacting with other fluctuations makes me marvel that we can even interact with each other lol

> This is always fun to think about, that there's lag to everything from the time light bounces off an object and travels to my retina to the processing my brain does to understand what it's being shown.

It's even funnier (or more disturbing) to think about all the ungodly pile of hacks this processing entails - like using the high-level understanding of how the scene is lit to override color perception (see: tower / checkerboard color illusion), interpolating or otherwise guessing most of what we "see" (see: saccade, blind spot), and lying about passage of time to "cover the tracks" of all the hackery that's going on.

I have ADHD and I've noticed that for some reason, color is one of the things my brain will autofilter and remove. I still see color, but I will have times were someone mentions something being a certain color and my vision suddenly updates what I'm seeing to be the "correct" color it was all along.

Honestly it's humbling to acknowledge that I have no true understanding of anything that's going on around me and can only survive because our brains are incredibly tuned guessing machines.

In order for visually-guided organisms to operate within an environment, such as humans, we need to have some level of trust in visual representations of actual things that happened. While others point out that our mind recalls are not true representations, nonetheless, they are a construct that we need to put some level of trust in. Learned information from the world around us can also help in establishing a level of trust.

AI on the other hand is putting more distrust towards online and computer behavior. Online has always had a level of distrust, it's only getting worse.

When people show me their photos taken with their smartphone cameras, I like to tell them that it is probably not what they really saw, as the colors are usually tweaked before saved to computer memory. But it's close enough. This is why I enjoy film cameras, it's an attempt to get as close to the real (visual) moment in time as possible.

Film photography is not real either. Different films and different development processes will produce different results, analogous to tweaking colors in lightroom.

It's not about what is real or not, that's binary. I'm talking about a spectrum. It's about how close we can get to the real thing with minimal processing in the capture. It will always be a representation.

Besides, digital copies are even further removed. We don't see 1's and 0's. A computer has to process the display to us. On the other hand, we can see light reflecting off chemical structures. One less device in the process.

>When people show me their photos taken with their smartphone cameras, I like to tell them that it is probably not what they really saw

Don't be that guy.

Guess what? They were never real. From day one. I am sure Wired can do better than posting clickbaits.

"The New Pixel Phone Allows Laymen to Easily Alter Photos With Generative 'AI' Functions" didn't have quite the same ring to it.

Literally the definition of an image: "An optically formed duplicate, counterpart, or other representative reproduction of an object, especially an optical reproduction formed by a lens or mirror."

This depends on the definition of what is "real".

I consider photos before the era of AI quite real.

> A notable incident of controversial photo manipulation occurred over a photograph that was altered to fit the vertical orientation of a 1982 National Geographic magazine cover. The altered image made two Egyptian pyramids appear closer together than they actually were in the original photograph.[30] The incident triggered a debate about the appropriateness of falsifying an image,[31] and raised questions regarding the magazine's credibility. Shortly after the incident, Tom Kennedy, director of photography for National Geographic stated, "We no longer use that technology to manipulate elements in a photo simply to achieve a more compelling graphic effect. We regarded that afterward as a mistake, and we wouldn't repeat that mistake today."[31]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photograph_manipulation#Use_in...

the camera lies

Good? Humanity is on a path to further reality breaks unless something changes, and stuff like people believing "Instagram Face" is normal because of automatic digital makeup is just one example of how attitudes can change and affect everything.

I remember being taught "don't believe everything you read" but that doesn't seem to be how people approach the internet anymore. The world got way crazier once the internet could affect day to day reality.

> The advantage of what AI instills, Ashe adds, is a “healthy skepticism to our idea of the photograph as a document of objective truth.”

Healthy skepticism was learning that we could doctor photos all along, and how it was merely easier with photoshop. Now we create even more in an unbelievable, unstoppable tidal wave of bullshit, and almost everyone has stopped giving a fuck. We’re beyond healthy.

I think "post truth" is the most apocalyptic concept invented

> None of Your Photos Are Real

They are real. They are real photos / images. They just aren't 100% accurate representations of the original scene. But then, no image would be.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images

Thank God. Almost nothing we see is trustable in the first place.

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