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Comment by petralithic | Hacker News Reader

But people have be editing photos like that before AI and even before Photoshop, I don't see the big deal. What I've seen recently is synthesizing whole new pictures with AI, by training a LoRA on their face and body and asking the AI to create themselves with a specific setting or background.

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I value old photographs of my and my family not because they look good or whatever but because they show where we've been and what we've been doing etc. They're documented history. Once you start heavily editing, making them showing things that weren't there, you loose that history. I think that's a loss.

They’re not mutually exclusive though. My wife has our portraits taken about twice a year and sometimes during a vacation or major event. So we have those, we also have tons unedited candid photos we take on a daily basis and never share (or only on a closed platform like a shared Album in iOS Photos), then my wife does a lot of editing and montage stuff for some of the stuff she posts more broadly to SM. I post nothing to SM so can’t speak from personal experiences here, but what I’m saying is there isn’t a single use case anymore. We have the tools at our disposal to just scratch curious itches even when they don’t get posted or shared (which I’d bet is a majority of photos). You’re viewing it as reductive but it’s expansive from what I’ve seen.

Ironically one of our framed photo is my partner and me posing next to an historic building in a pueblo magico in Mexico. A stray dog decided to piss on the wall when my sister in law was taking the picture. She actually realised it and took a second picture but it turned out we like the first one better as it is just much more authentic.

> They’re not mutually exclusive though.

I get what you're saying, but I don't think I entirely agree. If we live in a world where you can't tell if a picture is real or fiction, then it becomes necessary and reasonable to think of all pictures as fiction.

This is only an issue with a single photo or low sample sizes. In the case of family photos, you’d like have a whole bunch of them to reference and could spot inconsistencies more easily. If it becomes so good to be completely indistinguishable from reality, then not sure what the gripe is. You could just as easily think of all pictures as unaltered. It’s a matter of optimism/pessimism or perhaps red pill/blue pill.

Granted, if your grandparents are showing you their vacation pictures from their world travels that never happened, this is a different scenario that is weird and can could happen. It’s a balance of trusting nothing you see while making a few exceptions for your family and whatnot

> If it becomes so good to be completely indistinguishable from reality, then not sure what the gripe is.

Being 100% convincing doesn't make it true. Not being able to tell what's true from what's fake is a self-evident problem. It means you're at risk of forming an invalid view of the world. The only safe approach would be to never believe anything, at which point we've even lost recent history. Madness lies that way.

The motivation behind taking pictures has definitely changed over time. People used to keep them mainly for themselves and their close family. Then they started to share with close and not so close friends. Now they use it to boost their "personal online brand". Yes, it was possible to heavily manipulate pictures with Photoshop, or even in analog photography, but it wouldn't make any sense for most people.

> But people have be editing photos like that before AI and even before Photoshop

Very few people who had the skill, time or money. I think we are now discovering that everybody wants to edit the photos, they just couldn't do it before in what they consider a reasonable amount of effort.

Yes, I agree, but I am specifically looking to understand the above photographer's point. They said the requests they used to get versus what they get today have changed, but I argue that that doesn't make any sense, people have always wanted to edit their photos in the "now" example even back then.

It totally makes sense that people don't request things they don't expect to be possible.

My point is that their "these days" example was already possible 20 to 30 years ago, so if they're just seeing these requests today then they're missing out on what people have wanted even back then.

In other words: this is a complaint about how cheap modified pictures, that look real at first glance, are.

People were pirating before napster, but napster made it easy, accessable, and let people do it with little to no barrier.

It's the same with this.. yes photo editing could always be done, but it's far easier now to get better results. It's accessibility changes the game

I'm specifically responding to their point about how "these days" people want different things and I'm saying that they always wanted those things, nothing new about it.

I disagree. My parents generation took photos on point and shoot cameras. They waited a week or longer to get them developed, never really knowing what they took.

These photos ended up stuck to pages in an album to be brought out occasionally, or they were really good, in a frame placed on display. They have pictures from the 80s still out on their mantle.

Maybe once a decade they would go to a studio like at Sears and get a pro to get the whole family together. These would be edited, but also very rare.

Even the thought that they would be taking pictures for anyone else to ever see would rarely cross their minds, let alone the need to make major edits. Regular people simply didn’t have this vanity or need for approval when taking pics like the smartphone era

My parents' generation also took photos but if something was off, they'd ask our photographer relative to edit them. This was over 20 years ago. At least some part of the population did know what photo editing was and did it, either themselves or with the help of someone else.

On the contrary, there is plenty new about it. People’s perception of how much you can change influences how much they ask. Seeing new possibilities gives you new ideas.

You'll see the big deal when you realize that you don't trust absolutely any photos or videos of current events unless the photos are provided by a news source that you trust. You'll see the big deal when you take a picture of something real and show it to a friend who isn't interested because they don't think the thing in the photo actually exists.

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