> I think a better analogy is airbrushing photos to remove people; it changes the facts of the photo in a way people care about. I was thinking about this a lo

> I think a better analogy is airbrushing photos to remove people; it changes the facts of the photo in a way people care about. I was thinking about this a lot recently with the announcement of the Pixel 8. One of the big announced features was "Magic Editor", where you could edit all your photos to automatically put smiles on people who were frowning, remove people altogether like that inconvenient homeless person or garbage truck: https://blog.google/products/pixel/google-pixel-8-pro/ https://blog.google/products/pixel/google-pixel-8-pro/ This may be a bit "get off my lawn", but honestly I was disgusted. Why do people feel their everyday family photos need to match some Insta-bullshit ideal? Some of my favorite old family pics are where something "wrong" or unexpected happens. I don't fault Google for this, and I think it's natural to want to touch up photos when you're taking an important picture. But I feel like we're careening towards a future where we're starting to forget what reality actually is. When TikTok came out with their extremely realistic "makeup filters", I remember seeing a video where a photographer commented that she would take pictures of women who were shocked at how "ugly" they were because they weren't used to seeing "un-Facetuned" photos of themselves. Sorry for the semi-rant, just feels like a situation where any individual, small technological improvement makes sense, but in totality we end up at a place that is overall worse than where we started.