I saw this Reddit post linked on Mastodon this morning, and I've gotten a little stuck on it.
The core of the thing is an uneasy feeling at AI being slipped into the taking of photos, and being done so in such a way that the presence of AI isn't apparent. This matters a lot when it's pictures of people's faces - when the selfie you take is hotter than you are, when your camera automatically lightens skin, when blemishes and pores are removed, leaving you to compare yourself against a artificial version of not even celebrities, but your friends posting candid shots.
But this isn't really a post about self-image, it's a post about the moon. The moon! It's such a particular thing. It's a singular object that everyone can see for themselves, it's the singular object we can all see together (ok ok, there's the sun & the planets & the stars, but they're more like points of light, they don't have features in the same way).
My friend Gab runs a Tumblr account where she collects the moon depicted in videogames., and this kind of gets to the same feeling. The moon, the same moon, but shown in all these different ways, in all these different contexts, and in all these sometimes-fictional worlds.
And all of this kind of peaked when I read this article trying to understand if the moon is fake when you take a picture of it with a new Samsung phone. I think the article is kind of... confused? But, like, actually very illuminatingly so? It's full of folk theories about how the software works, little conspiracy-minded rabbitholes of reverse engineering, and a continual redrawing of the lines of what is "fake". It asks people and keeps the score on what side they come down on without ever really examining what those sides are.
Now that we’ve established that the Moon photos from the S21 Ultra are most definitely not fake, how is Samsung pulling off the seemingly impossible? How is the S21 Ultra’s 100x zoom taking a photo that bests even a $4,800 camera setup? Simple: AI.
The line seems to be: if it's compositing in a texture, then it's fake. If it's using AI to "sharpen details" based on identifying the object, then it's real. To which my literal-minded brain cries out: but the AI is just storing the same details, in a form that is less straightforward to access! Just because a process is harder to understand doesn't mean it's not happening. The camera sensor, the optics, they are literally not able to resolve these details, but they must be coming from somewhere. "Scenes and objects that aren’t recognized by the Scene Optimizer will likely look like grainy mush at 100x zoom."
But the really interesting thing that's happening in this article is not really the technology, but seeing culture collectively trying to make sense of it. Trying to decide on the boundary lines, trying to define what a "photograph" is. Photography has never been a neutral process, it has always involved setting up lights & staging & pushing the exposure & dodging & burning & airbrushing & composites & all the fussing called "editing". And at the same time, it's always derived a lot of its power from its uneasy relationship to that promised neutrality, to that idea of the objective flat capture of the world. It's "Photoshop", the software manifestation of the place where photographs are developed, that is the catch-phrase for manipulated images.
There was a very nice video by Marques Brownlee last year on the moon picture. Everyone was like, ‘Is it fake? Is it not fake?’ There was a debate around what constitutes a real picture. And actually, there is no such thing as a real picture. As soon as you have sensors to capture something, you reproduce [what you’re seeing], and it doesn’t mean anything. There is no real picture. You can try to define a real picture by saying, ‘I took that picture’, but if you used AI to optimize the zoom, the autofocus, the scene – is it real? Or is it all filters? There is no real picture, full stop.
(source)
"there is no such thing as a real picture"
