The AI photo editing era is here, and it's every person for themselves

I love Adobe's GenAI, but I also hate it. The problem is it has been programmed with some pseudo Judeo-Christian moral guidelines. Trying to edit my gf's beach pics to remove crap from the background, it freaks out on some bikini pics and pops-up with an angry yellow box, basically lecturing you on your life choices for not covering your entire skin with clothing. You have to chop the image into new documents, fix each part and then reassemble them so that it never sees the whole.

Then there is the fact it marks any image using AI as made with AI (and the user cannot disable it), so the meta data makes it look like you fabricated the whole image. I used GenAI the other day to extend a blank wall so I could crop the image better, but I had to strip the metadata before I uploaded it to social media or it gets big flags on the posts saying "MADE WITH AI".

It’s funny, I’ve been photographing since my early youth (dodged a bullet and never went for the career path though), and I feel the complete opposite.

In my opinion, the picture shows what I want it to show. You can never capture reality anyway: a photograph is never a single point in time, but rather a time frame during which the sensor is exposed to light, a short video, all frames overlaid in a single still shot, if you will. This can be so short that the image appears to be what your eyes see, but it is by definition always an approximation. What’s more, an approximation with parameters under the control of the photographer.

Thus I, as the artist, get to decide what I want the image to be. If that means false color, a slow shutter speed with motion blur, or long exposure to light up a scene in the dark—or yes, AI edits—that’s my artistic freedom.

Before I became an engineer and I was doing odd jobs, I got hired by some rich guy (whose name was basically Donald Duck) as an assistant to do some data entry, but really the first task he gave me was to photoshop some photos he took of him and his son after they finished climbing a local mountain. He had me remove people behind them, and had me whiten his teeth.

I think there's a big publicity cycle going on currently due to the AI backlash, but in actuality, no one cares about any of this. People just want nicer photos. They're not sitting around philosophizing about 'what is a photo'. 99.99% of people would say the edited photo in this post is nicer and would prefer it. But if you show it to someone who is all excited about hating AI technology, of course they'll wail that the original was so much better.

Procreate is what more software should aspire to. It's industry defining tech run by people who care deeply about their users, and it costs $13 one time. No predatory bullshit, no multi-tier licensing structure, no subscription. Just some easy to use software that respects its users.

That’s called DRM

Scale and quality are an important distinction. For example, rich people had paintings for thousands of years but the world changed when photography meant anyone could have better images for far lower cost, and then again when they became effectively free and ubiquitous.

I’d say generally they didn’t. The average person doesn’t have or know how to use photoshop. Applying a filter is hardly the same thing and completely changing elements of a photo. This is far more accessible.

That’s a great topic for late night dorm bull sessions but it’s not what we’re talking about here. People know that photographers can be selective about what and how they cover things, but there’s been an understanding that photos are recording something real in a way which is no longer true at all.

Yes, people played dark room and photoshop tricks but those were labor intensive and hard to make pass a detailed examination. What we have just seen is the equivalent of jumping from the age of archery to machine guns without much time for society to adjust and develop safeguards.

That statement is similar to the "everything has been done before", or "everything is art" reductivism.

There's a marked difference between fixing the color shift to better capture the mood and straight up removing people like Stalin's photos.