It is an interesting point [the hope that values will adapt to reflect typical mischievous patterns of social dynamics within various clusters].. I used to marvel during the dotcom era at the salivating delight of "the internet never forgets" of college students caught smoking a bong and the subsequent impact on their career (virtue signalling?).. I saw hope that society could then adapt about ridiculous FUD biases. There is a strange relationship of scarcity & opportunity and these windows into souls painting a distorted picture of the darker side of our ambitions. It is a cancer. Also, humans are always testing boundary conditions - curiosity, discontent, security,insecurity. Some inherent desperation of people jockeying for the next path from frying pan to fire in the search for greener pasture breeds opportunism that seems certain to favor desperation and negativity.
If I take your photo and photoshop (very well) different surroundings. Is it a real photo if you?
If I photoshop your face (very well) onto a different body. Is that real?
If I feed your photos into a model that can create realistic versions of those photos in different poses or with different facial expressions. Is that real?
They all start with something that is very definitely a real photo. You can’t (yet? ever?) generate a realistic photo of a specific person from a textual description. The machinery needs a source.
Simple: a "real" photo is one in which a light field from the real world impinges on a photosensitive media (CCD, film), and directly encodes that information, with some allowance for global light levels, gain, ISO, and speed. Anything else is a modification therein. HDR, multi-exposure compositing, etc, aren't truly "real". They may be 99% real, but aren't 100% real. If you crop it, it's 99.9% real (we have models which can detect cropping and even from which region it originated, obviously it can't reconstruct the missing data).
Yes, by that definition, most photographs already aren't real.
Sure, I'd say that's a real photo - you could easily pull it off with a single exposure of film.
Just because the photo is real, doesn't mean it's free from deception. I could take a "real video" of gorilla suit^W^W bigfoot and it'd still be deceptive.
You’ll be surprised to learn that doesn’t work without some amazing tech to process the photons. Different settings will produce a different photo.
Hell, just changing focal length makes a bigg difference to what your face looks like: https://imgur.io/gallery/ZKTWi no digital manipulation required.
Which of those faces is “real”? They’re all just recording photons hitting the camera, but look very different.
It gets even worse when we start talking about colors. For example: it took cameras decades before they could accurately capture black faces. Where accurately means “an average person would say it looks right”
