– In the past it was very difficult. You must have a certain understanding of how things work. But now you can just select what you want to remove, and then you can just say, remove the person in the photo, and it will do it.
Here’s what photographer David Jensen says about Photoshop’s latest tool, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to add or remove elements in an image.
Photographer David Jensen says he will be using the new AI tool himself.
Photo: Hanne Wilhelms/NRK
Jensen believes the tool can help photographers change mistakes made, for example by removing people you don’t want in the photo.
Obviously, he would use the tool himself, among other things to convert elevation images into landscape images.
– Photoshop has now created a tool that can actually do the job for you in a minute, compared to the fact that you might have spent an hour making an image look really believable.
With the help of the new tool, within a few minutes you can expand the image and add, for example, the northern lights.
NRK Beta editor Marius Arnesen says the new tool differs from regular editing in that it is now the computer that creates the content for us.
It has been waiting for artificial intelligence to be integrated into traditional tools. Until now, artificial intelligence, called AI in English, could only be used by narrower services that required a lot of knowledge from the user.
– Now built into the tools everyone knows. This makes it more accessible to a very large number of people.
It will be important for the media industry to manage the tool in a good way, says NRK Beta editor Marius Arnesen.
Photo: NRK
It may have other consequences
Photo manipulation is nothing new.
During a meeting of the United Nations in 1960, a photo of Nikita Khrushchev was altered to make it look like he was hitting the table with his shoe. In 2016, a well-known photographer was accused of photo fraud. The gray sky in housing advertisements has been replaced by a blue sky. But measures are taken to ensure that you are aware of the image change. In 2022, it was mandatory to label all types of ads with retouched people.
Although Jensen partly disagreed with guidelines released last year, he believes tagging heavily manipulated images with AI could become a topic in the future.
NTNU Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence Inga Strümke considers Photoshop’s newest tool a seamless transition from existing manipulation tools.
– I don’t necessarily see a sharp difference between the change tools we’ve had so far, and something that’s based on machine learning, you say.
Inge Stromke thinks it’s healthy to question what we see.
Photo: Mona Hooglede
But the consequences can be different.
– It could have a completely different effect if it became a lot easier to use or looked more realistic. Then there could be fundamentally different consequences, Stromky says.
– He should be more critical of the photos
Jensen thinks it might be interesting to see what happens in the media in the future, particularly in the context of the news.
– I definitely recommend to follow more, especially if some weird pictures come out. Perhaps one should think twice before drawing conclusions about news images that may not come from the most credible source, says the Tromsø photographer.
The editor at NRK Beta also understands that it will be important for people to critique sources in the future.
– We have to become more critical of sources, both those of us who work with this naturally, and children and young adults, who are about to grow up in a society where you can’t soon trust that something is real.
Marius Arnesen has tried his hand at the new tool. He thinks he’ll use it a lot, but only for photos that won’t be published.
He calls it a paradigm shift.
– We can use it both positively and negatively too. Those of us who operate these tools, Arnesen says, should help decide how to use them.
Media is subject to editor control Be careful posterIt is stated that the images used as documentation must not be altered in such a way as to create a false impression.
Arnesen believes that photographers and media professionals should keep their tongues straight when it comes to ethics and how to use the tool.
– We have been given a very powerful tool. Those of us working with her here have to manage the tool properly, he says.
Strümke believes that tools like this can lead to less confidence in the images you see.
– What we fear most is that people will look at the pictures and think they are real, when they are not, she says.
Stromke understands that it is time to be more critical of sourcing, because it has long been a fact that people cannot tell the difference between real and fake goods.
If we become suspicious of the reliability of what we see, it is only healthy.
With simple keystrokes, photographer David Jensen can now remove and add elements to his photos.
“Web specialist. Lifelong zombie maven. Coffee ninja. Hipster-friendly analyst.”
