Pete, I'll play! I'm a scientist. We used to take photographs. Photomicrographs, photos of gels and blots. Photos of cells. With a camera! Film cameras even. My baby pictures were also true photographs - taken on film!
When digital images came along, we knew they were not photographs. They were still "images", or "pictures" but way more open to manipulation for content, aesthetics, etc. But the colloquial "photograph" stuck. In the same way that you "dial" a cell phone. Different process; similar output.
Photoshop* (unfortunate name), came along and made it easier to manipulate the content of an image. And made us (the general public) way more skeptical of a photograph or image as a reliable source of info. I'll reference the crisis of image manipulation in science as close to home here.
AI image generation does not require a source image. And herein lies the issue. In cognitive space, a de novo created image is not a "photograph" or a manipulated or edited picture, or even a work of Photoshop. It's a de novo creation based upon an amalgamation of salient features of images and concepts, harvested by a computer, and assembled with only vague prompts by a user. That user may have some skill; the computer may have used an element of a photograph or image on the way, but the output is far away from the original concept of a "photograph". No camera, film, digital or otherwise, observed any of the "photos" events or people in this article.
I called out the header: "Photos Richard Belson". I promise that following a standard journalistic convention: "images by" or "AI generated images by" or "digital images by" would not have attracted much attention from me at all. Hopefully you get it? It could be all in my head. :)
*Photoshop has always bothered me as a name, as it never is used to manipulate photographs - it manipulates digital images, sometimes of photogrtaphs. :)
March 22, 2024, 1:21 p.m. - Fat_Tony_NJ
Pete, I'll play! I'm a scientist. We used to take photographs. Photomicrographs, photos of gels and blots. Photos of cells. With a camera! Film cameras even. My baby pictures were also true photographs - taken on film! When digital images came along, we knew they were not photographs. They were still "images", or "pictures" but way more open to manipulation for content, aesthetics, etc. But the colloquial "photograph" stuck. In the same way that you "dial" a cell phone. Different process; similar output. Photoshop* (unfortunate name), came along and made it easier to manipulate the content of an image. And made us (the general public) way more skeptical of a photograph or image as a reliable source of info. I'll reference the crisis of image manipulation in science as close to home here. AI image generation does not require a source image. And herein lies the issue. In cognitive space, a de novo created image is not a "photograph" or a manipulated or edited picture, or even a work of Photoshop. It's a de novo creation based upon an amalgamation of salient features of images and concepts, harvested by a computer, and assembled with only vague prompts by a user. That user may have some skill; the computer may have used an element of a photograph or image on the way, but the output is far away from the original concept of a "photograph". No camera, film, digital or otherwise, observed any of the "photos" events or people in this article. I called out the header: "Photos Richard Belson". I promise that following a standard journalistic convention: "images by" or "AI generated images by" or "digital images by" would not have attracted much attention from me at all. Hopefully you get it? It could be all in my head. :) *Photoshop has always bothered me as a name, as it never is used to manipulate photographs - it manipulates digital images, sometimes of photogrtaphs. :)