We’ve been able to manipulate photos since the early days of film cameras. While technology has made them easier to mess with, they’ve never been truly trustworthy.

A vast majority of photos are already staged and have been for a very long time, before phone cameras were a decent replacement. In th cases where accuracy is required phone cameras are rarely used. I don’t see an issue here.

Well it depends.

Just from the subject: are mobile photos real

(to simplify this and avoid a definitive no, well not talk about photos beeing real or not in numeric form).

Photography is a complicated topic on mobile phones, with plenty of algorithms enhancing what a tiny sensor can deliver.

• But let’s assume there is a phone and algorithm, which manages to represent a photograph as close as possible to what I see.

Are my photos real because they represent what I see at one precise point in time? Because it is what I remember something was?

Or are they not real because of the algorithms interpreting the results to make it look like I see it?

• Now let’s assume I have another phone, like a Samsung or whatever. Such phone may take a picture, but that picture is modified, there is maybe more saturation for the sky and grass, while combining multiple pictures to do HDR… And plenty of other things.

Now are these photos real?

They change what I see, but would that make them less real for you/me? How do you see your pictures?

about the article : When ai/photography manipulation is brought in the question, in order to change the first result :

• It could slightly change colors, then I guess we could maybe comme back to above, is this interpretation real or not? More or less real?

• It could be a modification of what and how elements appear in that picture. Here, for me, there isn’t any question. The reality of the pictures are completely broken as they do not represent anymore what I could see.