Fremantle
· photography ·
Now that phones alter our photos without us knowing, how do we know what’s real?, by Isabel Brooks, 24 December 2025:
Tech companies are making decisions on our behalf about what our photos, and therefore our lives, look like.
We’re used to being lied to, and for new technologies to encourage an increasingly smoothed and yassified reality.
The above article makes some good points, but it does sort of muddle the different types of processing that come from old-school colour filtering and whatnot with the modern gen-AI approach. The former applies various, sometimes very complicated and clever, changes to a photograph that all work with the existing photo's data. Adding generative AI features on the other hand is about adding data to a photo that never had those pixels before. So clouds will look much more like clouds, and the texture of rivers more like what we see in the best nature photography, and these things make us feel like the phone is doing a good job of capturing the scene.
I'm not arguing for people to avoid these features. But I do think people should be aware of what they're capturing and what the software vendors are enabling by default. And at the very least, save the 'original' shots (and I know that doesn't mean-as-comes-from-the-sensor) and apply further processing to separate files. (Then again, it seems that many people these days have forgotten that photos are individual files anyway… but if I get on to that topic I'll be even more of a solidified scrooge, so I won't, not today….)
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