This story is both icky and weird. Icky, because the “Photoshopped” images somehow “slipped through the cracks” to appear on the bulletin. Weird because of the phrase “sexism fury” in the headline. It just sounds awkward and stilted to me.
This disgraceful lie was released as an “explanation” of the “accident”.
“As is common practice, the image was resized to fit our specs. During that process, the automation by Photoshop created an image that was not consistent with the original,” he said in a statement on Tuesday, referring to a tool which uses AI to expand pictures.
“This did not meet the high editorial standards we have.”
This quick rebuttal from Adobe.
But in a statement, a spokesperson for Adobe - the firm which produces Photoshop - told the BBC: “Any changes to this image would have required human intervention and approval.”
My God, what a disgrace.
I fixed the title: it said “PM” but presumably meant “MP”, which is what the headline says.
Thank you for the change, I should have looked more closely.
Edit: Not to make light of this, BTW. It is indeed disgraceful, doubly so because they won’t own it.
Edit: Oh man. TRIPLY so, because there’s a clear agenda at play - I only just got to the foot of the linked article - yeah. They did it on purpose (and I don’t see any reason to give them the benefit of the doubt, given the specifics).
Here’s another article about the images that have the two pictures side-by-side for comparison.
I have a friend who works in publishing, and uses Photoshop’s generative ai all the time. I was appalled that he used it in a bird guide, and it generated more feathers. In a BIRD GUIDE.
Anyway, yes, a human had to turn on the feature and approve the result. It’s also possible that the human didn’t have the full image and didn’t know what she was wearing below the part they had, and just said, “okay”. That doesn’t explain the bigger boobs, though.
And no, of course that wouldn’t have happened to a guy.
I wonder if the person making the excuse thought that “Photoshop” and “AI” were the same sort of thing and therefore no one was at fault (even though apparently Photoshop needs a person’s input)?
Photoshop does have a lot of generative AI stuff built right into it these days; it’s conceivable that someone could accidentally misapply some minor ‘beautify’ type of filter that might, for example, smooth out skin blemishes or soften reflections or something, but this wasn’t just a filter.
At the absolute minimum, someone is at fault for being careless and clicking through a dialog without thinking, but this really doesn’t smell like simple carelessness.
I could buy a “beautify” filter that makes boobs bigger, but not a midriff generator.
Look at the original image. Is that even a separate top and bottom? It looks like a dress. Even if it is a top and a skirt, in the original image they are touching all the way around. Someone had to manually add in a line of skin and thicken the top of the bottom half of the garment so it looks like it plausibly has a waistband and can be worn separately from a top (since again, it looks like the original photo is of a one piece dress, not a seaparate top and bottom).
There’s no way an AI did that alone. Maybe if you highlighted her midriff and used some kind of “inpainting” tool, you could get this effect, but not through any kind of automated “beautify” filter I am aware of. This took thought and effort.
Paging @Darren_Garrison who knows a lot more than I do about AI art.
It does look like maybe the image they had was already cropped just below the bust and they used a generative fill for everything below that point - the skirt part of the altered picture is not the same as the lower part of the original dress - the whole thing is different from about the line of the crease below the bust.
It might be that the person composing the photo collage was the same person who did the crop, then decided to use generative fill rather than reverting to an uncropped version. If that blue swoosh wasn’t there in the bottom right of the picture, I bet we’d see auto-generated tattoos too.
But it’s still bullshit because it doesn’t explain how the parts above that crop were altered, and anyway, using generative fill on someone’s body is at the very best, a woefully stupid, shitty idea. If you need a fuller length photo, it’s not like it would have been hard to find one, for a public figure.
Yes, i bet they did exactly that. And some doofus looked at the result and clicked “okay”.
As i maybe implied with my comment about the bird book, i really don’t like that use of Photoshop, but suspect it’s pretty common.
Are you sure? It looks to me like the TOP of the skirt is different, because they photoshopped in a waistband to make it look like a skirt and not the lower half of a dress. But after the waistband, it seems identical.
I tried to match up the pleats and although they look similar, they don’t seem to be the same - I think they are auto-generated, with the AI taking inspiration from the look of the fabric in general
It doesn’t take much effort. I don’t have Photoshop with Firefly, but I put the original in at Playground.com, masked a narrow strip of the waist, and typed “woman with crop top and skirt” and got this.
The extremely subtle change to the bust size would actually be harder to change in AI than the waistline.
Correct. I mean, they took out part of her dress to expose her midriff. This wasn’t done by an automated process. A human had to select that area. It’s possible they just wanted to, I dunno, get rid of some wrinkles, applied generative fill, and just didn’t pay any attention or care about the fact that the space was filled in with her bare midriff, but a selection had to have been made by a human.
That’s precisely the sort of intentionality I mean. You had to hide her waist and tell the AI you want a crop top.
A generic “beautify” filter run against the whole image wouldn’t do that.
Or, someone gave you a photo that had already been cropped, and you wanted it larger, and had Photoshop create the lower bits. I’m pretty sure that’s what happened.
It is too bad that her lower arm is covered by graphic elements, so you can’t see if the bottom of the tattoo was changed too.
Maybe it really WAS extended by AI, and the logo is covering up a six fingered hand 