Let’s compare Apple, Google, and Samsung’s definitions of ‘a photo’
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
We’ve been tracking the slow redefinition of photography for years now here at The Verge — I am pretty sure we kicked off the “what is a photo” debate as it relates to smartphone photography on The Vergecast sometime in 2018, with a live show on the topic in 2019. But things started changing fast this year, as more and more companies roll out AI tools that totally redefine how images are made at every step of the photography process, from composition to capture to editing. We’ve written about some of those tools and what they can do, and we’ve published pieces explaining how the the widespread availability of these tools makes their impact meaningfully different — and more dangerous — than tools like Photoshop.
But as it happens, executives from all three major smartphone makers in the US have offered specific definitions of what they’re trying to accomplish with their cameras in the past year, and we can also just compare and contrast them to see where we are.
Here’s Samsung EVP of customer experience Patrick Chomet offering an almost refreshingly confident embrace of pure nihilism to TechRadar in January:
Actually, there is no such thing as a real picture. As soon as you have sensors to capture something, you reproduce [what you’re seeing], and it doesn’t mean anything. There is no real picture. You can try to define a real picture by saying, ‘I took that picture’, but if you used AI to optimize the zoom, the autofocus, the scene — is it real? Or is it all filters? There is no real picture, full stop.
Here’s Google’s Isaac Reynolds, the group product manager for the Pixel Camera, explaining to Wired in August that the Pixel team is focused on “memories,” not “photos”:
It’s about what you’re remembering,” he says. “When you define a memory as that there is a fallibility to it: You could have a true and perfect representation of a moment that felt completely fake and completely wrong. What some of these edits do is help you create the moment that is the way you remember it, that’s authentic to your memory and to the greater context, but maybe isn’t authentic to a particular millisecond.
And here’s Apple VP of camera software engineering Jon McCormack saying that Apple intends to build on photographic tradition to me last week:
Here’s our view of what a photograph is. The way we like to think of it is that it’s a personal celebration of something that really, actually happened.
Whether that’s a simple thing like a fancy cup of coffee that’s got some cool design on it, all the way through to my kid’s first steps, or my parents’ last breath, It’s something that really happened. It’s something that is a marker in my life, and it’s something that deserves to be celebrated.
That’s a pretty wide spectrum of definitions — it feels like the industry has no actual consensus on what a photo is, making attempts to label real and fake photos on social platforms perhaps even more challenging and / or doomed than they already seemed. And the competitive pressures to deliver flashy AI gimmicks are real; Apple will ship an AI-powered background removal tool called Clean Up with Apple Intelligence, which obviously pushes the boundary on “something that really, actually happened.”
I don’t know how this will resolve itself — a lot of companies and organizations are interested in making photos more trustworthy in various ways — but the one thing I do know is that our understanding of photography is going to get a lot more confusing before it gets any better.
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
We’ve been tracking the slow redefinition of photography for years now here at The Verge — I am pretty sure we kicked off the “what is a photo” debate as it relates to smartphone photography on The Vergecast sometime in 2018, with a live show on the topic in 2019. But things started changing fast this year, as more and more companies roll out AI tools that totally redefine how images are made at every step of the photography process, from composition to capture to editing. We’ve written about some of those tools and what they can do, and we’ve published pieces explaining how the the widespread availability of these tools makes their impact meaningfully different — and more dangerous — than tools like Photoshop.
But as it happens, executives from all three major smartphone makers in the US have offered specific definitions of what they’re trying to accomplish with their cameras in the past year, and we can also just compare and contrast them to see where we are.
Here’s Samsung EVP of customer experience Patrick Chomet offering an almost refreshingly confident embrace of pure nihilism to TechRadar in January:
Actually, there is no such thing as a real picture. As soon as you have sensors to capture something, you reproduce [what you’re seeing], and it doesn’t mean anything. There is no real picture. You can try to define a real picture by saying, ‘I took that picture’, but if you used AI to optimize the zoom, the autofocus, the scene — is it real? Or is it all filters? There is no real picture, full stop.
Here’s Google’s Isaac Reynolds, the group product manager for the Pixel Camera, explaining to Wired in August that the Pixel team is focused on “memories,” not “photos”:
It’s about what you’re remembering,” he says. “When you define a memory as that there is a fallibility to it: You could have a true and perfect representation of a moment that felt completely fake and completely wrong. What some of these edits do is help you create the moment that is the way you remember it, that’s authentic to your memory and to the greater context, but maybe isn’t authentic to a particular millisecond.
And here’s Apple VP of camera software engineering Jon McCormack saying that Apple intends to build on photographic tradition to me last week:
Here’s our view of what a photograph is. The way we like to think of it is that it’s a personal celebration of something that really, actually happened.
Whether that’s a simple thing like a fancy cup of coffee that’s got some cool design on it, all the way through to my kid’s first steps, or my parents’ last breath, It’s something that really happened. It’s something that is a marker in my life, and it’s something that deserves to be celebrated.
That’s a pretty wide spectrum of definitions — it feels like the industry has no actual consensus on what a photo is, making attempts to label real and fake photos on social platforms perhaps even more challenging and / or doomed than they already seemed. And the competitive pressures to deliver flashy AI gimmicks are real; Apple will ship an AI-powered background removal tool called Clean Up with Apple Intelligence, which obviously pushes the boundary on “something that really, actually happened.”
I don’t know how this will resolve itself — a lot of companies and organizations are interested in making photos more trustworthy in various ways — but the one thing I do know is that our understanding of photography is going to get a lot more confusing before it gets any better.