I found myself photographing a tiger the other day, as one does! More on that, and my surprise in a future post. The age old problem of course are the bars between him and me! Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad they were there, or was I? More on that too! The photo was as expected, then a thought crossed my mind – bung it in Ai and ask it to “remove the bars”. I reckon I could do it in photoshop myself, but it would take me ages! Here’s what I got….
First of all, if I just presented this image would you look twice or just accept it as is? I’m not sure I’d know anything was amiss and I was there!! I like the image, it’s a good image of a tiger, but it’s not the tiger I saw. Ai has done more than “remove the bars”. It has obviously been trained on “photo’s of tigers” and found the closest “good one” to use. Compared to mine, it’s markings are different – close, but different. It’s paw is different too. The instruction was to “remove the bars” not create, edit or invent the tiger too!
I guess what “worries” me about this is not so much my playing with my image – image manipulation has being going on pretty much as long as we’ve been able to make images, but that Ai has got to the point where it’s indistinguishable and it’s becoming all about trusting the source.
Ai of course doesn’t just do images, important as they are. Businesses use Ai all time to write, order and correct writing, in order to save the “author” time. Does said author always read the result fully and carefully? If not, why not? If not – who knows what may be in there! If said author does, then how much time has actually been saved? What then, is Ai actually worth?
BBC now has an entire “verify” department. Some of the video I see, I wonder how anybody would think it’s real, but I’m visually “switched on” – many aren’t. Some are very good and less easy to spot. I’m thinking of the “head replacement” of President Obama a couple of years back – if I’d seen it on some you-tube channel I’d have doubted it – if I saw it on BBC would I have questioned it? It’s long been time to question the source. When someone says to me “did you hear about….” the first question I now ask is where did you hear that from? In other words, is it a trusted source.
My photo of a tiger is of no consequence – did you recently watch the coverage of the Artemis II mission? What did you see? What do you think you saw? What did you actually see? Did you even consider what you were watching? I didn’t! For the record I’m not suggesting for one moment that anything is wrong or fake about the Artemis II mission, in fact I’m really excited about it. The point is I sat up (11:30pm here) and watched the launch. Same again for the splashdown (1.07 am! here) – I trusted the BBC and never even thought about what I was watching.
Of course an image in a piece of analogue film is harder to fake or is it?
S.H.O.U.T. 