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jamienkyesterday at 9:19 PM3 repliesview on HN

Hasn't this crossed over into being a philosophical question? You want to attest to reality or provenance. But then you start making lists of "acceptable" changes: file format; compression; color-correction; size; taking "medium" into account... It then slowly slides into "average human perceptibility"; "irrelevant details"; keeping the "spirit" of the image intact; judging the intention or motive of the user or of the viewer; aligning the image with "values"; appropriate/legal use... etc. Not sure what the end-game is?

We are trying to make images in the AI era be as reliable as they were pre-AI? But they were not reliable pre-AI, it was just more difficult to intentionally doctor them.


Replies

afavourtoday at 3:07 AM

I feel like we were already in a weird gray area. Cellphone cameras use all kinds of programmatic tricks to make their output better than the exact information the lens captures. I think people just didn’t realize how much their phones were doing. Is that “fake”?

another-daveyesterday at 10:42 PM

I think for photojournalism it should be original raw image, as captured in camera — zero edits for colour correction/cropping/filesize etc — platforms can link a digital sig from a postprocessed version but you keep the provenance proof tied to a published original.

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iririririrtoday at 12:40 AM

no no no you need to buy a new phone!

/s