Even so, wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) alarm bells ring? Using generative fill on a lawn or a bit of street background is one thing; using it on a person just seems like it should cause a graphic artist to just pause for a moment and think ‘is this a good idea?’
Especially when there are alternatives, like choosing a different stock photo, composing the picture differently, covering up the missing part with a banner or graphic, etc
Or, as they did in the lower left of the picture, allowing the image of the person to fade behind a background with a duck in it.
Are we forgetting that they also made her boobs bigger? I’m not buying the accidental midriff explanation because someone was editing the photos specifically to enlarge her breasts.
I think most of the effect comes from the fact that they auto-generated a slimmer-looking waist - on the original image, there’s a little pucker in the fabric on the left hand side - I think that was the point of the crop - so it’s likely the AI extended that inward-sloping line; everything from that part down appears to have no exactly matching counterpart in the original image
The fact that this MP worked as a stripper earlier in her career makes the changed photo “Photoshop” excuse much shakier in my book, in that they perhaps thought they could get away with a “sexier” picture and no one would notice.
Yeah, that’s why I think they don’t really deserve the benefit of the doubt, and my feeling on that is only reinforced by their weak-ass passive voice non-apology.
I feel like the subject’s own view on that trumps any assessment I could make. I’m sure there are ways to measure such things but ultimately, they altered a picture of her body, which is unacceptable, and in the context, suspicious.
This ought to be something that is drummed into people on day 1 in the industry:
In the better news sources: “we don’t alter people’s appearance because our highest goal is to uphold good journalistic standards”
In the middle: “we don’t alter people’s appearance because we want people to think we uphold good journalistic standards”
At the bottom of the barrel: “we don’t alter people’s appearance because it makes us look bad when we get caught, and that always costs money”
Out of curiosity I tried testing this with Clipdrop’s Uncrop, which expands images without the user inputting a text prompt, immediately after you posted this. The site has very high traffic at the moment, though, and my job was put at the back of a 9999 job queue. I left the tab running in the background and checked on it just now and these are the four results it gave.
Clipdrop is based on the Stable Diffusion AI engine and Photoshop uses their own home-grown one, but both probably have the same bias (gained from the training data) to sexyfy female faces and bodies to the point that it takes great effort with text prompts to make them look more average.
Using generative fill in either of those cases is 100% unethical for a journalistic publication. I used to work as a photojournalist and adding or removing anything in a photo was strictly forbidden. Even Time magazine got into a shit ton of trouble for their OJ Simpson cover back in the day for making him look more dramatic and menacing by darkening the photo and adding contrast. And just in general for making him look more “black” in the process. Same with National Geographic and moving a pyramid in the background so a photo could fit the cover better. This is such a no-brainer no-no, but I suspect we may be living in times where some journalists and editors longer give a damn.
If you look at the folds and shadow of the dress just under her bust, you can see they are different, so there has been manipulation there. I don’t really think it makes her look more chesty, but work has been done there.
