The Pixel 6 And The New Land Of Fictional Images

21 Oct 2021 - aman

Mid-October is deep Fall, and is a time where we are all enraptured by the changing of tree colours into warm hues of yellow, orange, and red. Family and friends transform into seasonal photography enthusiasts and share their photos of nature with others.

“The maple tree in our back looks beautiful,” exclaimed a close family member on Signal, while sharing the photo of the tree. “Another one” he repeated, while sending another picture. “Although the electrical poles mar the picture.”

This second photo was filled with a beautiful variation of warm colours of several trees, and there were indeed some electrical poles and wires visible behind the trees in the photo.

Another family member chimed in, “[The Google] Pixel 6 lets you magic eraser things like this from a picture!”.

Computational photography algorithms in smartphones have been rapidly developing over the past few years. A “magic eraser” tool such as this sounded cool and useful, but I found something unsettling about it.

While erasing the electrical poles from the picture would indeed produce a more “pure” landscape photo, it would also signal a significant departure from the reality the photo was originally depicting.

The progress in computational photography has provided a breadth of capabilities in today’s smartphones that allow users to manipulate photos in creative ways, ranging from the benign (e.g. colour filters) to the deceptive (beauty filters, “magic” erasers). The just-released Google Pixel 6 smartphone contains a chip (“Tensor”) specifically geared for AI-intensive tasks, lending itself to further improved computational photography.

Photo editing software has been around for a long time, but historically it has only been available to and used by a very small minority of users. When a photo was found to be significantly altered, it was considered to be “Photoshopped” (a reference to the Adobe Photoshop editing software).

However, the sophistication of photo filters and powerful image editing tools in smartphone applications, combined with the ubiquity of smartphone ownership, has resulted in manipulated photos to become commonplace.

Of course, there is actually no such thing as a “true” photo, in that all photos are a function of ambient lighting at the time, as well as a myriad of camera settings related to exposure. How the colours turn out in a photo of autumn leaves is dependent on all of the above, and so human perceptions of the photo will also correspondingly vary. For example, high colour saturation may result in a more impressive Fall photo.

However, we would still generally perceive such photos to be true. Now, with manipulated photos becoming more prevalent, and with the knowledge by people that such manipulation is common, we would expect to become increasingly skeptical that photos in fact represent the reality to which they purport. Posting manipulated images allows people to make themselves look better, and can garner them more attention ostensibly by impressing people that they have taken an enviable photo of a particular setting, situation, or event – the psychological incentives are quite strong!

But can we even become skeptical of all the images we encounter? Malcolm Gladwell speaks about how humans must “default to truth” in order to allow civil society to function. If we no longer assume that most images we consume depict reality, then we cannot carry on conversations based on these images (or at least, truthful conversations). This, in turn, would lead to societal breakdown – an outcome that most of us would rather avoid.

Rather, it is likely that we would continue to assume images depict the truth that they illustrate to the viewer, rather than any original reality prior to manipulation. How this affects our consumption of media and our daily interactions – well, we will know soon enough.