I know sometimes AI can be very helpful. For example, when sending an email, I don’t mind a prompt asking if I forgot to attach a document, or include a link. This is based on key words in my email message mentioning something about an attachment, link, or reference to a specific document. If Outlook doesn’t sense the attachment, or link, is there, I’ll get a popup message asking if I forgot it.
I also appreciate the generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT or CoPilot. These can both be useful for generating meeting minutes and action tasks, providing feedback, or creating custom images. All of these are magical and huge time savers. However, I find the automatically-applied AI fixes to be intrusive and frankly, kind of annoying.
In June I posted “Seeing isn’t Believing” to highlight how AI has been undermining the credibility and trustworthiness of images and videos. This blog was mainly about how others use AI to artificially generate new content or manipulate existing content. Mainly the changes happen because of a human hand taking part in the process. I had noticed some built-in AI features doing some minor enhancements to my photos automatically, but nothing really overt. At least not until I tried to photograph a nice looking sunset the other day.
One evening the sky looked quite pretty with a dappling of blues and oranges in the reddening sky. We ran outside to take a photo where the view was clearer. However, each time I tried to take the photo, some kind of AI something or other interfered. Instead of reflecting the actual scenery, it insisted on making the portion of sky closer to the sun a weird smudgy, fiery red that didn’t even match the other colors. It was horrid.
Instead of the cool blue and organe-ish pattern continuing, as it was in real life, the camera altered the scene. No matter what I tried to adjust, the camera kept enhancing. I finally gave up. I decided to blog about it instead of missing the sunset trying to get a real picture of it. Previously I had tried to disable the automatic AI enhancements in the camera. After this experience, I searched again to see if there was more I could do in the settings.
I did find a few more things to disable. Let’s hope my camera won’t auto-enhance future pics.