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‘There is no such thing as a real picture’: Samsung defends AI photo editing on Galaxy S24
(www.techradar.com)
this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2024
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FWIW, The Samsung Boss said:
I understand this as talking about a definitive original, as you get with trad analog photography. With a photographic film, you have a thin coat (a film) of a light sensitive substance on top of a strip of plastic. Taking an analog picture means exposing this substance to light. The film is developed, meaning that the substance is chemically altered to no longer be light sensitive. This gives you a physical object that is, by definition, the original. It is the real picture. Anything that happens afterward is manipulation.
An electronic sensor gives you numbers; 1s and 0s that can be copied at will. These numbers are used to control little lights in a display.
As far as I understand him, he is not being philosophical but literal. There is no (physically) real picture, just data.
I would consider the negatives to be "the original" over the first photo that was printed using them.
I agree. The negatives are the developed film. They were physically present at the scene and were physically altered by the conditions at the scene. Digital photography has nothing quite like it.
Are the raw photos manipulated or are they just the original 1s and 0s unedited?
Not sure if there's any preprocessing before the processing.
Edit: I'm imagining a digital camera that cryptographicly signs each raw frame before any processing with a timestamp and GPS location. Would be the best you could probably do. Could upload it's hash to a block chain for proof of existence as well.
Edit: I guess the GPS system would need some sort of ceyptographic handshake with the camera to prove the location was legitimately provided by the satellite as well.
I think your issue starts there, you already have to decide how to build your sensor:
All of these choices will lead to different original 1s and 0s, even before any post-processing.
I think your average camera does not have the option to save RAW files. It seems somewhat common even outside professional equipment, though.
Yes, exactly. However, this would only prove that the image (and metadata like GPS coordinates) existed at that particular point in time. That would add a lot of credibility to, say, dashcam footage after a collision. It's curious that misinformation has become a major issue in the public consciousness, at a time when we have far better means of credibly documenting facts, than ever before.
But it would do little to add weight to images from, say, war zones. Knowing that a particular image or video existed at a particular point in time would rarely allow the conclusion if it was real or misinformation. In some cases, one may be able to cross-references with independent, trustworthy sources, like reporters from neutral countries or satellite imagery.
Creating a tamper-proof camera is a fool's errand. The best you can do is tamper-resistant. That may be enough if the camera can be checked by a trustworthy organization and does not leave its control for long. But in such a scenario you would rarely need that, and it's not the usual scenario. The price would be very high. Fakes that do pass muster will be given more credibility.