I have been playing with Photoshop Beta, a version of Photoshop with a range of AI-powered tools that let you add, extend, or remove content from your images using simple text prompts. This is similar to Adobe Firefly, a web-based image manipulation / generation tool, just that these functionalities are now integrated into the world’s most powerful imaging editing software program. (Incidentally, I have been using Firefly for a while now mainly because it has been trained on openly licensed work, public domain content and stock imagery that Adobe owns, rather than the grabbing stuff from the Internet without caring for where these images came from.)

Here are a few experiments with Adobe Photoshop’s Beta version – with Omi, our Aussie Doodle,. as the main character. Each of these images took less than a minute to generate, though, to be fair, it often took multiple rounds of playing with prompts to get it to look right. And yes, I have no Photoshop skills to speak of. Here we go!

One of the things that Omi loves to do is play fetch with his ring-toy—though we are still, 2 and a half-years in, working on figuring out that part of the game which involves dropping the ring once you have fetched it. More often than not, it becomes a tug-of-war, which is a frustrating (to me, though clearly fascinating to him) game. Be that as it may, it is clear from the second photograph below, that this game will continue, even if the world if falling apart around us.

All these examples are cute and fun – but these are obvious fakes, generated by digital artifice. And that brings me to the last photo in this sequence, the most natural of the lot, with no obvious signs of manipulation, and yet it was the easiest to generate.

The entire background of the panoramic image below is made up, by AI, NO prompt required. All I had to do was enlarge the canvas and ask it to “generate fill.” The AI did the rest.

Let me reiterate, the original photo was taken in our backyard – and our backyard looks nothing like this. Not at all! In fact, that background does not exist anywhere in the world. What is amazing how well the AI algorithm worked, factoring in the direction of the sunlight, seamlessly creating a world that looks perfectly real but is wholly imaginary.

And THAT is what is worrisome about these technologies. Not the obvious fakes but the one’s that look so real that we would never question their veracity. What this means for us as a society, sociologically, politically and more is left as an exercise for the reader.

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And just for the heck of it two more of friend’s dog, Lucy. One with Lucy as SuperDog and the other when Lucy decided to explore India, of course by sitting at the top of a bus!

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Postscript: Just came across this video from Nerdwriter: Will AI change our memories. Worth a watch