> don’t falsify events […] Cameras that outright lie […] AI generated monstrosity of what apple thinks

Oh the irony of framing things (pun intended) so hyperbolically. Somehow it never seems to dawn on people that like to throw around the word ‘lie’ that they’re doing exactly what they’re complaining about, except intentionally, which seems way worse. Nobody sat down to say bwahahah let’s make the iphone create fake photos, the intent obviously is to use automated methods to capture the highest quality image while trying to be relatively faithful to the scene, which might mean capturing moving subjects at very slightly different times, in order to avoid photo-wrecking smudges. When you blatantly ignore the stated intent and project your own negative assumptions of other people’s motivations, that becomes consciously falsifying the situation.

Photographs are not and never have been anything but an unrepresentative slice of a likeness of a moment in time, framed by the photographer to leave almost everything out, distorted by a lens, recolored during the process, and displayed in a completely different medium that adds more distortion and recoloring. There is no truth to a photograph in the first place, automatic or not, it’s an image, not reality. Photos have often implied the wrong thing, ever since the medium was invented. The greatest photos are especially prone to being unrealistic depictions. Having an auto stitch of a few people a few milliseconds apart is no different in its truthiness from a rolling shutter or a pano that takes time to sweep, no different from an auto shutter that waits for less camera shake, no different from a time-lapse, no different from any automatic feature, and no different from manual features too. Adjusting my f-stop and focus is really just as much distorting reality as auto-stitching is.

Anyway, she did get a clear memory that was quite faithful to within a second, it just has a slightly funny surprise.

> Photographs are not and never have been anything but an unrepresentative slice of a likeness of a moment in time,

This is a complete absurdity

Photos are used daily to find suspects of crimes

to convict people to prison

to establish the level of devastation in a war

To find launch site for rocket attacks

To make scientific measurements of distance,size, etc. in architecture and war

By scientists to determine position of things in the sky, meteors, etc.

You are like a guy that collects knifes and swords and has no idea what they are actually for

It seems like you completely misunderstood what I said and decided to take it out of context and throw in a jab on top because none of that contradicts my point. What kind of guy does that make you? ;) You are failing to account for how many photos have been used to implicate someone of a crime they did not commit, how many photos have been used to exaggerate or mislead the effects of war (a couple of the most famous photos in all of history were staged war photos), and how many photos suggested measurements and scientific outcomes that turned out to be wrong. Scientists, unlike the general public, are generally aware of all the distortions in time, space, color, etc., and they still misinterpret the results all the time.

The context here is what the parent was talking about, about the meaning and truth in casual photography, and your comment has made incorrect assumptions and ignored that context. I wasn’t referring at all to the physical process, I was referring to the interpretation of a photo, because that’s what the parent comment was referring to. Interpretation is not contained in the photo, it’s a process of making assumptions about the image, just like the assumptions you made. Sometimes those assumptions are wrong, even when the photo is nothing more than captured photons.

And some of those use cases require special cameras in the first place. Photography is basically just a measurement of light at different positions - there are endless priorities to make. You don’t need stacking multiple photos for scientific measurement of distance, as you would be having proper illumination in the first place.

A smartphone camera works in a vastly different environment, and has to adapt to any kind of illumination, scene etc.

> And some of those use cases require special cameras in the first place.

Yes same as with tools like ChatGPT, it is OK for some uses, but you can not use it for something where you need to have trust in the output.

Problem is that people are not making this distinction, in cases like when they are posting pictures as evidence. This was also the case with manual post-process. However, now it is by default.

Without the iPhone’s computational camera, she wouldn’t have this photo at all because she wouldn’t have a camera in her pocket that could get a good picture in this situation.

A 10 year old smartphone would have taken a perfectly good photo in that scenario. There's nothing challenging about it.

On the contrary, she would have a perfectly good phone with a perfectly good camera making perfectly good pictures that don't fake reality and turn her into a vampire.