I heard this argument 15 years ago when a photographer was making his photos nicer (nothing heavy) and another person objected to it. He said "it was always done just not with digital tools". But it does feel different because the advertised possibilities make it so easy to create on paper a photo of something impressive. I worry about it because it can create unrealistic expectations of what is possible - how does a person wo wants do dunk a basketball, but can't, feel if everyone posts their dunking photos that are fake? On the flip side if everyone does it, it might devalue the whole wow effect, making it less impressive and less important.

Then again, it's always true that the world we'll die in will be different than the world we were born in, and we might not like it. Maybe that's how it goes.

The article refers to an exhibition of early faked photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2012, sponsored by Adobe.[1] But the article doesn't have any of the pictures. There's a book of the exhibition.[1] The free preview shows enough to give a sense of what the article mentions.

[1] https://www.metmuseum.org/press/exhibitions/2012/faking-it

[2] https://books.google.com/books?id=nGvTg_HC32YC

Hmm. By this argument, getting ChatGPT to write your college-course essays for you is also "nothing new", given the abundant opportunities for plagiarism that existed before.

But I think ease of use matters, in part because trivial (in the sense of "easy" / "taking little time") deceptive acts are easier to justify for otherwise-ethical actors. It's also easier to get into murky waters if step 1 isn't "get my fraud on" but rather "oh what's this new feature?" or "hmm, what would ChatGPT say about Descartes?"

Deception is a blurry line, but these are all technological steps that make it easier to approach that line -- and then, perhaps in a thoughtless moment, cross it.

>Due to rights restrictions, this image cannot be enlarged, viewed at full screen, or downloaded.

Rights to a photography done in 1851? Come on!

For a good well funded news desk, proof of provenance for images is part of the process. You dispatch your photo editors to verify and make sure the image is correct. They have always done this. Which is why when things like this: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2004/may/14/pressandpublis... happen, it was an editorial decision rather than a "mistake" (this is the same bloke who lied under about hacking a child's answerphone.)

For journalism thats given away as a side effect, rather than the main business, they don't have the same time and money to verify anything

I find that mentally going from “I know” to “I don’t know” is motion from a less to more truthful understanding.

In the past we assumed photographs were “real” although they never were objective (no pun intended.) Even if not retouched, a photograph shows you a subjectively selected and framed moment and asks you to trust that it’s an accurate representation of a topic.

The picture then evokes an emotional response and you walk around all day or more with a certain feeling based on what you perceive is an objective piece of data that you perceived but in reality was a carefully selected piece of input to trigger the output that it does.

So from that perspective, moving into the world where we recognize that a picture doesn’t mean anything is better.

My view is that painting is the purest form of photography.

Photography with all its perceived technological requirements is wrongly treated as a separate art, one that is more scientific and therefore more objective. These fallacies are what is getting undermined now with the broader availability of powerful AI tools.

I remember some controversy, a number of years ago (can't remember who), when a news magazine (I think TIME, maybe), posted a non-retouched photo of some celebrity, and they got upset about it. I think that there were cries of "discrimination."

You can't win, for losing.

What does the iPhone have in response to these pixel phone image manipulation features?

If you don’t know in advance which app to get, it’s quite daunting trying to find anything useful on the App Store (either directly or via google)

"We all live with a growing sense that everything around us is fraudulent."

I predict that we will eventually only trust the internet as we know it today for fabricated stories (port 443 and 80 anyway), and will value live interactions more as a result.

Ah, the "what constitutes a photo," question. We've already had arguments in a court (can't recall the case) where someone argued that a photo from a phone wasn't legitimate evidence because phones can hallucinate data. The word hallucinate wasn't used; that's just what I thought of because of "AI" text generation and contemporary reporting. Anyway, I expect this will become more of an issue over time and I don't know how we'll square the problem.

Wouldn't care so much if Pixel photo manipulation didn't make everyone look like plasticine dog shit. Amazing how bad photos of people are on its camera and no obvious way to turn it off. You can literally see it in action in the brief moment when you view a photo you've taken before it is algorithmically "fixed" and rendered horrific and unusable.

At the limit, and with dubious meaning “generated by AI or digital tools”; all image media will be dubious shortly. All intellectual pieces around culture will be dubious. All political media will be dubious. I expect this to be in a very short time but could be wrong.

And of course a child will say “and what’s dubious, that’s how it is” and so I become old and don’t understand anything anymore.

> It feels like a death spiral of trust

A death spiral of misplaced trust. Ie - this is actually closer to truth.

Article says Lochness monster and Big foot sightings are on a decline. But now as everyone can easily manipulate images, should we again expect a rise in these and lot more other weird things?

The author doesn't take into account his own familiarity with the Photoshop app. For him it took 10 seconds to remove an object from a photo, but do you really think the average Joe is going to spend hours learning Photoshop just so he can remove an object in his photos? I like Google's approach here: let the average Joe benefit from AI by putting object removal tech literally under his finger tips.