Fake

by Jon Sullivan - 2024-07-10 - Photography

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The amount of fake "photos" online is starting to worry me.

I spend a large amount of time editing my photos after trips. So I am no stranger to using various softwares to make a photo look "better" than what the eye saw or camera captured. But more and more I'm seeing "photos" on social media that are obviously AI creations. These are always extremely beautiful and compelling. Food, landscapes, tiny houses, etc. Fake, fake, fake. How do I know they are fake? Because I've been to many of the places and know what is in the supposed photo isn't even there at all. Lots of them in Montana. Fake. And I cook a lot and take photos of my food. I know what processing will and won't do. And it's getting very annoying 1) how these AI photos are more beautiful and engaging than anything I can do, 2) everyone goes on and on about how incredible they look, and 3) they look hyper real and magical. They look incredible because they are fake.

I have no problem with digital art, or even AI art. A digital artist can certainly create some imaginary scene that is completely valid as art. A painter can certainly present a landscape image that is more beautiful than nature. And even if the "photo" is done by an AI with minimal prompts from a human, I think we can still call it art. It seems undeniable that such AI art appeals to our sense of beauty and wonder. We want to go there. We want to eat that. We want to hear the story about these (it turns out) fake people. No matter how fake fake fake I say it is, it still is beautiful.

No. The problem I have is that these are presented as real. The problem is that we're setting a standard of beauty, art, cooking, etc that is so high it can't be attained. I've seen "photos" of the Bitterroot Valley, where I grew up, which are obviously not the Bitterroot valley. Yet they are more artistically beautiful than any photo of the actual place, while being just as realistic looking. I spend a long time trying to create an artistic representation of where I've been and what I've cooked, but I'll always fall short of the fake stuff. Or, take one of my favorite great PNW photographers, Nick Page. Here is someone who travels the world creating some of the most beautiful photographic art I've seen. All real. Most very hard to get. But some kid who has never seen a camera can create something as wondrous in a few minutes sitting at home. The bar for great landscape photography was already pretty high, but now it's impossibly high. Fake stuff is wildly more popular than real stuff.

I'm not saying real is better than fake. I'm not sure how I'd even make such an argument. Is Star Wars inappropriately fake? Are Rembrandt's fake? Is a garden fake? Is makeup, fashion, high heels fake? Is taking a photo of my dinner fake if I do so in the "studio" I have set up in the guestroom, with it's complex lighting, dishes I never actually eat on, ingredients rearranged with tweezers, and it's fake background? I would argue it's a real photo of real food in a fake context, which I don't present as anything else. I tell people it's a studio image. And it's real food. No matter how cheeky I get in the studio, it's still food I cooked and ate. The thing in the photo is real. The thing in the AI photos is just pretty bullshit.

Oh..... One other thing that keeps me up at night..... A lot of these fake AI images are being liked on Facebook by people I know and respect. Do they know they are fake and like them anyway? Or does it even matter? Cool photo is cool? To me the question doesn't matter if the larger context is scammers and corporations training us to prefer fake things to reality. We are training algorithms to lie to us more and more successfully. We are. Has our "post truth" devolution under Trump extended even to beauty?

I'll keep taking photos of my dinner and going on adventures. The machines will keep training us. Hopefully someone will program in mercy.

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