I Love Ai

This morning I noticed a new “Made with Ai” label under my instagram post on @248am and I thought that was really interesting and worth talking about. The image was labeled “Made with Ai” because it was in fact made using the help of Ai. Although a bit too dramatic a label for this specific case, I do think this is a really helpful feature since so much digitally generated content looks real nowadays.

Throughout the years I’ve enhanced photos published on the blog, sometimes it’s minor stuff like increasing saturation, playing with contrast, or removing blemishes. Other times it’s more drastic like removing garbage from photos, or recently with instagram, adding more image to an existing image.

Before Ai, removing things such as garbage required the use of a Photoshop tool called the clone brush. It wasn’t too difficult to do, but depending on the scene, it sometimes required some skill to make it look natural.

But, over a year ago, Adobe introduced a new feature into Photoshop called generative Ai. This changed everything. I could now select all the garbage in a scene for example, and with a click of a button, Photoshop will remove it all. The Ai is so good you wouldn’t even be able to tell the image was manipulated.

With Instagram, I use Ai in a slightly different manner. Most images are shot in landscape, but all my posts are square. So, to get wide images to fit into my square without having to crop into the image, I sometimes add more image. For example, my lions post from today. I was limited with the number of photos available of the lions, so I had to use a screen grab from a video. The video was wide and so I could either crop into the image and lose some of the background, or keep the full image and just add more sky and more grass below. I chose the later. Because the video was only 1080p, cropping into it would reduce the resolution, but even if resolution wasn’t an issue, cropping into the photo would make the final image feel claustrophobic after adding my headline.

So let me take you through the different stages to better illustrate this. First one above is the actual screen grab from the video.

The photo above is after converting it to a square. Can you spot the difference? First thing you’ll notice is the extra sky and grass below the image. Then if you look carefully you’ll also notice a slightly increase in saturation and a visually more interesting sky with a cloud formation.

Finally, here is a side by side image of how my post have looked like without Ai on the left, and the final result with Ai on the right.

Not sure I like this specific photo being labeled as “Made with Ai”, since that’s not true, it wasn’t made with Ai. The main subject matter wasn’t changed, I didn’t for example generate fake lions or manipulate the story the image is telling, so I don’t feel it deserves that label. Maybe an “Enhanced with Ai” label would have been more appropriate here.

I think the “Made with Ai” label is meant to prevent the negative use of Ai, like in fake news, but in this case, Instagram is making it look like my image is fake news and not real when it is. But since Instagram is labeling all images that used some sort of Ai as “Made with Ai”, this label is going to be the new norm I guess.