Faking it: Samsung phones and other AIs generate realistic-looking photos that can fool us, but don’t worry – it’s not the death of photography
- Samsung phones’ ‘space zoom‘ feature appears to show the moon in incredible resolution, but in reality it uses a database of images to add the detail
- AI programs such as Midjourney can create amazingly realistic images from simple text instructions, including lifelike portraits
An amateur photographer who goes by the name “ibreakphotos” decided to try an experiment on his Samsung phone last month to find out how a feature called “space zoom” actually works.
The feature, released in 2020, claims a 100x zoom, and Samsung used sparkling clear images of the moon in its marketing.
So ibreakphotos took his own pictures of the moon – blurry and without detail – and watched as his phone added craters and other details. The phone’s artificial intelligence software was using data from its “training” on many other pictures of the moon to do so.
“The Moon pictures from Samsung are fake,” he wrote, leading many to wonder whether the shots people take are really theirs any more – or if they can even be described as photographs.
It is a something that Jos Avery, who has a lifelong fascination with photography, knows only too well. Last September he found a new creative outlet, one that led him to deceive thousands of people: the artificial intelligence program Midjourney, which generates wild and wonderful images from brief text instructions.