Adobe casts doubt on claim ‘automation by Photoshop’ was to blame as network apologises for image shown during bulletin
The Victorian upper house MP Georgie Purcell has lashed Nine News in Melbourne for using an image edited to make her breasts look bigger and expose her midriff, which the network blamed on “automation by Photoshop”.
But Adobe has cast doubt on Nine News’s claim about its software, after the network broadcast the image during Monday night’s bulletin.
The program’s news director, Hugh Nailon, apologised to the upper house Animal Justice Party MP on Tuesday for the “graphic error”, and blamed “automation by Photoshop”.
“Our graphics department sourced an online image of Georgie to use in our story on duck hunting. As is common practice, the image was resized to fit our specs,” he said.
“During that process, the automation by Photoshop created an image that was not consistent with the original. This did not meet the high editorial standards we have and for that we apologise to Ms Purcell unreservedly.”
But in a statement on Tuesday afternoon, a spokesperson for Adobe said use of its generative AI features would have required “human intervention”.
It’s a known problem with ai image resizing that automagically de-pixelates images. They add details not in the original based on their training data. Do you think that the training data may have included women with large breasts and exposed midriffs? It seems plausible. Still a bad editor not to catch that immediately.
AI is not neutral. It only amplifies our society’s existing biases. Garbage in, garbage out and we have a lot of garbage culture.
Photoshop doesn’t do that when you resize images. I think if this was indeed a mistake, they ran it through something like Midjourney which does go off script sometimes.
More than likely they did this intentionally to be sexier or something. Typical trashy news behavior.
According to another comment, Photoshop has a feature called Generative-Expand, which uses AI to fill in the area around a cropped section. So they probably cropped a portrait shot of her from another photo and then used that to fill in the rest of her figure. Basically the same issue, but it’s actually Photoshop that went off script, if it was indeed a mistake.
That wouldn’t explain it giving her larger breasts as that part of the image wouldn’t have been cropped out. I use Photoshop all the time and generative expand doesn’t just go rogue on objects inside the crop like this.
I don’t have PS, but I’m surprised that they don’t have an AI unblur/depixelate tool which necessarily adds new details. I wonder if anyone here can recreate these conditions?
In either case, someone saw and approved the photo, so whether they are blaming Photoshop® or “photoshopping” it doesn’t matter. Humans are still responsible for the things that humans do with the tools they use.