Moral conundrum, modern photography

[feralimal]

Put your hands together for the bride! Or just one hand! Or neither!

A technician named Roger explained to her that an “iPhone is not a camera, it’s a computer.”

“It takes a series of burst images very quickly even though it’s not a panoramic or a burst,” explains Coates.

Roger informed Coates that she moved her arms as the camera took a series of images from left to right and it made a different image on each side of the photo.

“It’s made like an AI decision and it stitched those two photos together," Roger told Coates.

My conundrum is this: if you were the judge in court, and the prosecution wanted to submit this "photo" as evidence for some reason - say to show that the woman really was in the wedding shop - would you accept it? Could someone go to jail on the basis of this photo?

Should this photo be admissible in a court of law?

Further questions I have are: is it still a "photo" if it is edited, or is it now a 'work of art'? Is it an edit if a computer processes a photo automatically? Is the qualitative difference between a small edit and a large one something we can live with, or is any edit flawed? Is it right to have (greater) trust in mechanical photography vs computer photography?

I guess the deeper question relates to how much we can trust modern technology, or even any re-presentations.

Let's not forget Samsung already fakes moon photos:
Samsung caught faking zoom photos of the Moon

(Original photo from 'One in a Million' iPhone Photo Shows Three Versions of the Same Woman)

 

[alltheleaves]

One can set it to burst or not but the average user doesn't know how to use search, torrents, delete cookies, turn location or notifications on or off, or clear the cache.

 

[luckyducky007]

Oddly enough, was considering the same thing the other day. What are the moral implications when it comes to the legal system. Also the implication on human consciousness as stated above they already fake the moon when you zoom in, what else could they falsify? Seems like a you could manipulate a lot of people into schizophrenia that way, by manipulating perception, a lot people only view life through the lens of their phones.

As for the legal implications, i would say no since it is an edited/ai generated image. However the question would be to what degree does the software manipulate. If it has the ability to add people, weapons etc. Then it would be a hard no from me.

Great question.

 

[feralimal]

Seems like a you could manipulate a lot of people

Especially if this is used with some sort of ai, that would have a model of you and a goal to direct you towards. Not that I think think ai is anything more than fancy software - I just think these capabilities can be developed and integrated into techno-governance.

 

[reverendALC]

I do believe that if you can download an app to do something to a picture, then your phone is capable of doing that and more without your request.

with the level of distrust I have for the government and big industry etc… if we can’t trust their food or their news or their history, that doesn’t bode well for their pocket sized photo manipulation devices that you can also call people and surf the web on.

 

[ProfessorHotStuff]

Should this photo be admissible in a court of law?

I think it depends on how it's presented, but most likely yes. In the same way that, if somehow a crime were accidentally captured on camera during a "bullet time" special effects sequence from the old Matrix movie, it would surely be admissible but (if we're talking about a trial) the prosecution would probably need to hire a film specialist as an expert witness to explain it and present its reliability to the court.

It's also worth remembering that "AI" so far is not actually AI, it's just programming sequences or aggregates.

As for faked imagery done using sophisticated models, people are (as your link to the moon scam of Samsung) very clever. Photographers and image editors can sniff out fakes very well. The procedure used by the Reddit poster referred to in that Verge article would, I think, be very persuasive to a jury.

(I'm not a lawyer, but my advice is: always take things to a jury trial! Don't let them cow you into pleading guilty)

 

[freemaster]

View attachment 30749​

Put your hands together for the bride! Or just one hand! Or neither!



My conundrum is this: if you were the judge in court, and the prosecution wanted to submit this "photo" as evidence for some reason - say to show that the woman really was in the wedding shop - would you accept it? Could someone go to jail on the basis of this photo?

Should this photo be admissible in a court of law?

Further questions I have are: is it still a "photo" if it is edited, or is it now a 'work of art'? Is it an edit if a computer processes a photo automatically? Is the qualitative difference between a small edit and a large one something we can live with, or is any edit flawed? Is it right to have (greater) trust in mechanical photography vs computer photography?

I guess the deeper question relates to how much we can trust modern technology, or even any re-presentations.

Let's not forget Samsung already fakes moon photos:
Samsung caught faking zoom photos of the Moon

(Original photo from 'One in a Million' iPhone Photo Shows Three Versions of the Same Woman)

There seemed to be a lengthy discussion and ruling on this idea in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial where it was argued that digital representations are a different type of evidence or something to that effect.

 

[feralimal]

There seemed to be a lengthy discussion and ruling on this idea in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial where it was argued that digital representations are a different type of evidence or something to that effect.

Funny you should mention that case. It had its own 'digital representation' issue, did it not? Where a person's foot disappears in the floor.

Reddit - Dive into anything

I'm not sure that rulings from 'Judge Judy' court rooms are valid!

 

[feralimal]

This was a nice article, that gives more info on fakery in photography
Fake It ’Til You Fake It

As it happens, I took a photo history course when I was in university many years ago. I distinctly remember the instructor showing us an 1851 image shot by Edouard Baldus, and revealing to us that it was not a single photo, but instead a series of exposures cut and merged into a single image in a darkroom. That blew my mind at the time because, until then, I had thought of photo manipulation as a relatively recent thing. I had heard about Joseph Stalin’s propaganda efforts to remove officials who displeased him. But, surely, any manipulation that required precisely cutting negatives or painting over people was quite rare until Photoshop came along, right?

No. Not even close. The legacy of photography is a legacy of lies and liars.

The legacy of photography is a legacy of lies and liars.

This exhibition really was sponsored by Adobe — that was not a joke — and the company’s then-senior director of digital imaging Maria Yap explained why in a statement (sic):2

[…] For more than twenty years — since its first release, in 1990 — Adobe® Photoshop® software has been accused of undermining photographic truthfulness. The implicit assumption has been that photographs shot before 1990 captured the unvarnished truth and that manipulations made possible by Photoshop compromised that truth.

Now, “Faking It” punctures this assumption, presenting two hundred works that demonstrate the many ways photographs have been manipulated since the early days of the medium to serve artistry, novelty, politics, news, advertising, fashion, and other photographic purposes. […]

It was a smart public relations decision for Adobe to remind everyone that it is not responsible for manipulated images no matter how you phrase it.

Neither Adobe, Samsung, Google or Apple are responsible for manipulated images no matter how you phrase it.

So many quotable bits...

I, too, have criticized computational photography. In particular, I questioned the ethics of Samsung’s trained image model, made famous by its Moon zoom feature. Even though I knew there has been a long history of inauthentic images, something does feel different about a world in which cameras are, almost by default, generating more perfect photos for us — images that are based on a real situation, but not accurately reflecting it.

In one sense, we are now fully immersed in an environment where we cannot be certain of the authenticity of anything.

We all live with a growing sense that everything around us is fraudulent. It is striking to me how these tools have been introduced as confidence in institutions has declined. It feels like a death spiral of trust — not only are we expected to separate facts from their potentially misleading context, we increasingly feel doubtful that any experts are able to help us, yet we keep inventing new ways to distort reality.

A death spiral of misplaced trust. Ie closer to truth, in reality.

Even this article cannot escape that spectre, as you cannot be certain I did not generate it with a large language model.

The questions we ask about generative technologies should acknowledge that we already have plenty of ways to lie, and that lots of the information we see is suspect. That does not mean we should not believe anything, but it does mean we ought to be asking questions about what is changed when tools like these become more widespread and easier to use.

We put our trust in people to help us evaluate information. Even people who have no faith in institutions and experts have something they see as reputable, regardless of whether it actually is.

"We put our trust in people to help us evaluate information" My answer: don't. Do verify where possible, don't trust.