I felt like I'd opened a can of worms when I asked Samsung about its stance on AI photo editing in Galaxy Unpacked in January. “There is no real picture,” Patrick Chomet, Samsung's chief customer experience officer, told me at the time, a phrase tinged with nihilism that, to be fair, emerged as part of a nuanced and perfectly valid philosophical commentary on reality. . nature of the photograph (in the same interview, Chomet rightly spoke of the importance of validating authenticity).
Marques Brownlee recently included Chomet's quote in an X post highlighting the different opinions of Samsung, Apple and Google on this same topic. Still, ultimately all major phone manufacturers offer similar editing features (Magic Eraser, Clean Up, AI Eraser, etc.).
Qualcomm, for its part, recognizes that AI photo editing is an exciting new frontier, but it's also fraught with uncomfortable ethical implications. During a roundtable interview at the Snapdragon Summit, the company's senior vice president of mobile phones, Chris Patrick, explained why he believes AI photo editing is “not as simple as a real image and a fake image.” .
LOL “What's a photo?” Samsung: “There is actually no real image” Google: “authentic to your memory and overall context, but maybe not authentic at a particular millisecond” Apple: “a personal celebration of something that really happened” https ://t.co/mwy3Yb9KaYSeptember 23, 2024
“It's an interesting question, because the human brain is not digital,” explained the former engineer. “When you perceive the sunset outside, you do not perceive the sunset out of context. You know where you are. You know what you smell. You know what you're hearing, you know what you're feeling. You know what a sunset looks like, right? “That's all part of how you perceive space.”
“So when we capture an image, should it just be the raw response of the sensor? Or is it okay to include context in how that image is created? I'm not an expert. I don't have a PhD on this topic, but I think it's not as simple as a real image and a fake image. “I think context matters and extracting the best we can from the whole situation is an accurate reflection of what the eye and brain do as well.”
When you perceive the sunset outside, you do not perceive the sunset out of context.
cris patricio
“[However]”Patrick continued, “if there is a photo of Rui [Guo, Honor CMO, also in attendance at the roundtable] and me on the moon, it should be very clear that this is not, in fact, a photo of Rui and me on the moon. That is not correct, it is manipulated.
“So for us, it's very clear that there has to be some mechanism to distinguish the other end – those manipulated images – for people. “We are building incredible technology together, but we want to make sure that in the end it doesn't have a destructive impact, where people can no longer distinguish between truth and fiction.”
More AI is on the way
Honor CMO Rui Guo also attended the Snapdragon Summit roundtable and just announced that the Honor Magic 7 Pro, scheduled to launch in Europe next year, will launch with the first generative AI portrait enhancement in the device of the industry. So is the company using AI to make portraits look better than they really are? Or is the goal to mimic real-life details that Honor's hardware can't capture on its own?
“On the one hand,” Guo explained, “we have to make sure that the photography itself is good by modern consumer standards. Everybody knows what [constitutes] a good and a bad photo. But on the other hand, we want to preserve the authenticity of the photo. We're not trying to Photoshop the photo for the consumer, are we? “We should give the authority to the users at the end of the day.”
And that, I think, is the crux of the matter. Tools like Magic Eraser and Clean Up become ethically dubious when users (or, more worryingly, politicians) attempt to pass off manipulated images as real, but as a means to occasionally remove strangers from family vacation photos, the AI photo editing is, for many people. , undeniably useful.
Neither Qualcomm nor Honor are forcing these tools on their consumers; If you want to take a photo the same way you always have, you can still do that. Rather, companies are giving users the freedom to choose how to capture the moments that matter to them. Sure, it's a can of worms, but as Qualcomm's Chris Patrick pointed out, “it's not as simple as a real image and a fake image.”
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