I miss the good honest deception of spending hours trying to make misinformation pieces for fun. Truly, people are too lazy to even hoax authentically anymore, truly a shame.
I’m old enough to remember when Photoshop became a thing and everyone said it was the end of the world as we know it.
That we won’t be able to trust images ever again, that people would use it to mass produce misinformation and it would lead to abuse.
I can’t tell if that was a mad panic or if that’s exactly what happened though.
I remember that too, except it took actual talent to do so in those days. Back in the days, we had like one or two images the far-right made and claimed to be real. Now we have thousands if not millions.
Really annoys me that people look at old shopped images or CGI videos and go “I think this is AI”.
I saw someone reposting this video and people were like “oh that’s got to be AI” but no, it’s a Blender video from 2021, guys.
I’ve been using a borrowed version of Cs6 for so long, I’m honestly afraid what autocorrect/autotune nonsense has been baked into the whole Adobe platform that is just part of the modern creatives work flow.
A co-worker recently asked which AI I used to make some drawings in a presentation. I made them all by hand in Inkscape, so I’m not sure if I should feel good or bad about the question.
My coworkers asked me to make a poster with AI, I made it with LibreOffice Draw instead.
It’s just awful these days. I was presenting the other day with some co-workers. One made a nice looking edit to a slide, but had some typos. I asked for the original since the slide was just a rendered image. The response I got was the prompt they used to generate the slide in copilot “give me an engaging slide using this information…”
I re-drew the damn thing in like 5 minutes myself, but jebus, this is what counts as work these days?
You should’ve kept the original slide and made sure to give them credit when presenting it: “and before we go to the next slide, I wanted to give a huge thank you to so-and-so for their contribution to this presentation!” *everybody claps*
It was someone in a higher position than I, and I’m 4 months in to the role. So…
“My own.”
From shopped to slop
Slopped*
Time to go back to commissioning portraits from painters who forage to make their own pigments.
“It was GIMPed”
Went from Photoshop: I can tell by the pixels. To AI: I can tell by the fingers.
They seemed to have figured out fingers for the most part, but it’s the empty eyes that freak me out. I can’t express it very well but they all see to have no “focus,” as if they’re staring into the void even though they almost always depict people who are taking part in some sort of activity.
The shadows on this post are all wrong.
Always preferred Micrographics Picture Publisher.
It’s fucking sad and funny thinking about the (subscription) versions of Photoshop released in the last couple of years, ones where Adobe added AI-based tools.
Will CGI be the next to go?
Verb
retouch (third-person singular simple present retouches, present participle retouching, simple past and past participle retouched)
- (transitive) To improve something (especially a photograph), by adding or correcting details, or by removing flaws.
a. 1701 (date written), John Dryden, “Epistle the Fourteenth. To Sir Godfrey Kneller, Principal Painter to His Majesty.”, in The Miscellaneous Works of John Dryden, […], volume II, London: […] J[acob] and R[ichard] Tonson, […], published 1760, →OCLC, page 201:
For time ſhall with his ready pencil ſtand;
Retouch your figures with his ripening hand;
Mellow your colors, and imbrown the teint;
Add every grace, which time alone can grant;
To future ages ſhall your fame convey,
And give more beauties than he takes away.
I remember an article from the 90s that first mentioned ‘computer doctoring’ in terms of photo manipulation. Before Photoshop become well known, the practice was called doctoring.
Photos were ‘Airbrushed’ before that, more for removing blemishes or making models thinner.
So people don’t know how to use language anymore?
Or is tech literacy so low that people don’t even understand the difference between an edited image, and some absurd slop generated bt a trash machine?
