IS THIS REAL?
In the age of social media, where the statistical probability of looking at an untouched photo has diminished considerably, isn’t that going to make it even harder to determine what’s real?
Not at all, according to Google’s Rick Osterloh, who took charge of Google’s Android platform earlier this year. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, he said Google was simply allowing people to edit their real-life moments, and “store the memory how they want” – no different than Photoshop, he added.
It is in fact, very different. The vast majority of people who take photos with their phones don’t pay US$23 a month to use Adobe Photoshop. But millions of people who are likely to buy new AI-enabled phones from Apple, Samsung Electronics and Google will be able to manipulate photos with a few taps.
Apple’s forthcoming iPhones will have a Clean Up tool to remove objects and people from photos. Samsung will let you move someone in a photo so it looks like they’re facing someone else.
These features are marketed as conveniences, but they’ll also make us more likely to question the accuracy and reality of photos far more than we do now.
In his interview, Osterloh also defended a TV ad promoting Google’s AI tool Gemini during the Olympics, in which a father encourages his young daughter to use AI to write a letter to an athlete to tell her “how inspiring she is”.
Google was criticised for being tone deaf to the real reason parents help their kids write fan mail: The process of expressing gratitude. But according to Osterloh, this is just like the transition people made from sending hand-written thank you notes to emails. “This is a way to touch more people,” he said.
Of course, the flip side of connecting with more people is that those people won’t know if they’re being “touched” by a human being at all.
#Commentary #phones #Google #Apple #erode #trust