Tech bros coded a complicated machine learning feature to insert people into photos just so they wouldn't have to ask a stranger for help with a photo - Pixel 9's Add Me
With Pixel’s new “Add Me” feature, you can get the whole group in your photos. Merge 2 photos with the power of AI and augmented reality. Available on Pixel 9 devices.
Photmanipulation, airbrushing, retouching, goofy edits, creative double exposures, they're all as old as photography. There are all kinds of neat in-camera tricks you can do with old timey chemical film. This bazinga ai thing is more or less fancy double exposure - exposing the same piece of film towice to, say, make your friends look like ghosts, or blend a picture of a dog with the colors of the sky.
Apparently when photography first moved out of the lab in to the hands of enthusiasts there was a great deal of debate about whether photography could be called art. The machine was doing all the work, after all, where was the artist's hand? Apparently it went back and forth for quite a while until most people agreed that photography constitutes art in it's own right.
I see your point, though in practical application, the social poison that has been Instagram-style one-upmanship is only going to accelerate with this, simultaneously pressuring people to make their vacations "enhanced" to keep up and also dilute the actual lived experiences that were ostensibly being shared.
Photography tricks have been used for generations to do cool stuff like "movie magic," but they've also been used to promote bullshit conspiracy theories, defame people, and the like. This new technology makes it harder to avoid worse applications of it, like deepfaked revenge porn and the like. Sure, that might get normalized enough to have less immediate stigma, but people will suffer in the meantime and it doesn't seem like that great of a trade.
This really makes me ask "with all this bazinga shit to make fake photos, why even bother to take pictures on site at all?"
My own answer to that is to take pictures without any bazinga shit editing them and appreciating the flaws and imperfections. This entire dubious service is bleak and will only get bleaker.
I'm fine with this. I was just back east visiting family and it would have been useful. I was already transporting a walker and a wheelchair everywhere, I'm not going to carry a tripod and camera and I'm not going to wander around a cemetery or go house to house in nowhere, PA at 9pm on a Tuesday to get someone to take a picture of the family.
I could see this as a way to make fun collage photos of yourself (i.e. you in multiple different poses in a wide shot of you in front of some cool mural/object)
But I feel like this then takes the meaning out of being there in the photo when you directly edit your entire presence into the photo.
I can understand tweaking eyes to remove red-eye, or replacing the background with a slightly better lit one from a different photo in the same shot, because that still captures the original essence of the shot, but when half the people in a photo quite literally weren't even next to the others, it doesn't feel like one side of the photo recognizes the presence of the other side, because they weren't really there.