For the first time in a long while I've wished I had a blog I could dump a whole heap of thoughts on the Georgie Purcell/Nine News/Adobe/Guardian photoshopping business. It's at the intersection of some of my biggest interests and strongest skills.
I've been having very PEOPLE ARE WRONG ON THE INTERNET emotions this last day and a half and ... haha yeah as if a blog would fix me here.
@NanoRaptor it’s one of those cases where they deserve a heap of criticism, but not for the reason most people think. “You sexist bastards gave her a crop top!” They can easily bar that off because it’s not quite true.
The real criticism should be for what they’ve revealed about how they operate.
@NanoRaptor I’d be genuinely interested to read your take.
I haven’t used Photoshop in years and years, and I don’t know how plausible any of the story is. My first reaction was cynical “it did it itself? Suuure…” but the statement I saw from Adobe was a really weak “the modification would have to be manually approved!” and, I dunno, people’s tendency to click OK without reading the message and if they weren’t expecting the photo to change? I could see it maybe not being noticed.
@shadowphiar that’s the bit most folk are underestimating. Nine without a doubt fucked up publishing what they did. But adobe’s generative fill when expanding crop is really that bad. It’s more than plausible they were caught out by it and just didn’t notice - which is a sexist bias on their part on top of photoshop’s AI bias. It also adjusts part of the original image to fit the newly generated area more smoothly - unexpected behaviour that, you’d think the original would be sacred.
@shadowphiar This example says all I think. After expanding the crop I hit enter - the default Generative Fill fills in the blank area with an empty prompt, based only on the original image. The only interaction is performing an expanded crop and hitting enter.http://www.danamania.com/tmp/sandy.mp4
@shadowphiar@NanoRaptor So you're hypothesising that someone first cropped the original, then expanded it using generative fill? Seems plausible, though it strikes me as sloppy work.
@mansr@shadowphiar The photo on the Guardian page is inadvertently misleading. It's a good demo of what Georgie wore on the day, but it wasn't the same image Nine used - it's a different image from the same photo shoot (it's very close, but overlaying them shows a difference in natural human motion on Georgie's part).
Nine pulled the other pic from a Bendigo Advertiser article which was already cropped (or a tighter shot to begin with) and matches identically.
@NanoRaptor@shadowphiar That makes a little more sense. The photos in the Guardian are so close that I thought one was merely rotated slightly, but I didn't actually overlay them to check.
@NanoRaptor And now I’m looking up how to run a blog on gopher (the fact that almost nobody will be able to read it, and no one will be able to link to it or comment on it, is mostly the point).
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