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Comment by tpmoney | Hacker News Reader

> It's one thing to use masks to edit highlights/shadows/color balance for certain areas (skies, buildings, people, etc) but it's an entirely different thing to completely replace the sky, or remove objects because they aren't "appealing"

Almost as long as we've had photos, we've been removing "unappealing" things from them. Famously Stalin had Nikolai Yezhov removed from a photo after he was "purged", but the Soviet Union in general is full of these instances.

More lightheartedly, Disney supposedly (though this seems to be subject to some debate) has airbrushed a number of photographs of Walt Disney to remove cigarettes from them. And perhaps most famously of all, Han only shot first if you were born before 1997.

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I mean, I get it, it's a whole can of worms. Also, sorry, little late to the reply here!

I think there's like a couple of major areas where it concerns me I guess. The first is when we use these types of technologies to fool people, especially (recently) politically.

The other is when we are talking about photography as art.

For someone's home photos, I really don't much mind. Do as you please I guess, if you want to remember the time and place differently than it was, so be it lol.

But it's really wild that in some cases we have art that starts as a photograph and then becomes something else entirely after editing. It takes all the patience, planning, understanding and in my opinion gratification out of it when you can just say "yea, replace the sky with this fake one so my picture looks incredibly unrealistic"

Those are the two that tend to cause me the most head shaking lately I guess.

> I think there's like a couple of major areas where it concerns me I guess. The first is when we use these types of technologies to fool people, especially (recently) politically.

While I share the concern over the use of tech to fool people, I think my example shows that using it to fool people politically is nearly as old as the tech itself. And realistically, it's the fooling thats the problem. The fraud of claiming this thing represents truth when it does not. But not only is that as old as the tech of photography itself, it can be done even without manipulating the photo. Don't have a massive crowd to your political rally? Just tighten the angles you take the photo from and don't show the empty arena in its entirety. Or maybe you want to convey a sense of wild recklessness and a breakdown of civility, just get a few closeups of a single trash can on fire and imply its representative of the larger scene.

As for the art, I feel like this is just the same discussion about art we always have. What is art? The tech is new so people are throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks, but eventually it will fall into its place as a tool in the tool belt, just like every other technology before. A lot of people I'm sure felt the same way about CGI in movies, but does the fact that you didn't have to shoot everything for real and wire RDJ to a plane 20k feet in the air in an Iron Man suit make the Avengers any less "art" than any other film is? We'll probably see the same sort of people making entire careers out of the skills necessary to get the most out of an AI system just like they do for getting the most out of CGI systems today. Heck, we can probably look forward to the trend of "AI free" art in 20-30 years, just like we're seeing the trend of "CGI free" movies today.

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