AI-driven tools on real photos

Oh I hate this so much.

Not the article, it’s fine. It’s the photos. Mostly the top one.

It looks fake.

There’s a credited photographer: Ann Hermes. She’s 100% real, a working professional, she’s done a lot of work for a lot of clients, she’s easy to find.

And I don’t know what happened – what tool caused it or what – but the lead photo shouts AI PHOTOGRAPHY at me.

There are a few reasons for it – the central figure’s facial and head hair is a big one, something about the antique touchtone telephone on the left really bugs me (proportions? size? I can’t tell?), the lighting just feels odd, and some letters are kinda fucked up) – but the details aren’t important. That’s not what bothers me.

What bothers me is that this is a most-likely real photo that’s making me think it’s an AI-generated fake. And it bothers me because…

…see…

if people are going to start using tools on real photos that make them look a little fake, particularly if the ways they look a little fake are the same way that AI-generated actual fakes look fake, then that’s incredibly bad.

So far we’ve been lucky enough in ’24 not to have to deal with really good fakes. We’ve mostly had trash fakes. But if the real photographers start to use tools that make their real photos look fake in the same way as AI renderings, then these AI renderings not being really good fakes stops mattering very much – if at all. We lose that little bit of edge we had against AI-driven disinformation.

I mean, maybe that’s not what happened here. Maybe his hair really is that kinda weirdly defined and she did some HDR tricks to bump up the definition and contrast not even using AI tools. Maybe she corrected some lens distortion and that’s why the phone looks funny. Maybe she boosted the black level a little to de-emphasise some dark areas – it’s tempting, I’ve done it, but you have to be careful with it or it looks weird. Maybe the light just was a little odd, and/or she set up some reflectors to make it that way because the scene was too high contrast otherwise. Or maybe she did it afterwards using ordinary levelling tools.

But however it happened – and whoever did it, be it the photographer, the layout artist, the web designer – it still came out setting off my AI alarms.

And that’s incredibly bad.

Fuck.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

a status page/account for murkworks.net?

Now that we have substantially more users than just ourselves again – this was a thing back in the day, we had a peak of like 40 users – we kind of need a status page so we can warn people about nontrivial shit or that we’re going offline for some reason like losing power.

So:

1. Our mail server already has web services on it for list management
2. Add a local wordpress instance there, which means it’s not on the main web or mastodon servers
3. Federate that with an address something like at status at status dot murkworks dot net)
4. Have the mastodon.murkworks.net librarian account follow it
5. Have posts to it also go to the various mailing lists we host so they know directly

Which means:

1. If our mastodon server goes down, people could check status dot murkworks dot net and see the wordpress version
2. If the main web server goes down that wouldn’t affect status
3. If status itself needs to go down, since it’ll be federated and followed (by the librarian) on mastodon.murkworks.net, people can check the status account there to see what was last posted, which – if we take it down in a controlled manner for things like a major upgrade – they would still be able see, and therefore, they could read the last status message
4. If anyone not on our instance follows the status user (and I would ask someone to do that for this purpose) then people would be able to do the same thing checking on that system’s server. I think. (As would anyone following it themselves of course.)

This is me using caching to bridge downtime to keep status information available under as many circumstances as possible, basically.

(Well, without having to hire some sort of off-site hosting which we can’t afford right now anyway or using some rando account someplace which is kind of what we’ve been doing and which I’d prefer not to do.)

It’s the “federated wordpress blog” part that makes this viable.

Am I missing anything important?

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.