Why AI image editing is not “just like Photoshop”

But the debate about photo editing and the inherent truth of photos is nothing new, of course. It’s been around for as long as photography has existed, and it’s been raging since digital photo editing tools became widely available. You know this argument; you’ve heard it a million times. It’s about when people say, “It’s just like Photoshop,” where “Photoshop” stands for the concept of photo editing in general.

Today, we’ll explore that argument and try to understand exactly what it means and why our new world of AI imaging tools is different—and in some cases the same. edge Reporter Jess Weatherbed recently looked into this question for us, and I asked her to walk me through the debate and arguments one by one to help me understand.

Because of course, in many ways AI image editing is just a faster, simpler version of Photoshop – even Adobe has now integrated AI technology like the Firefly image generator directly into Photoshop. But making powerful tools instantly accessible to everyone has side effects, and we’re seeing that right now.

Say you want to create an image of Donald Trump pointing a gun at Kamala Harris. Just ask Elon Musk’s Grok, the AI ​​chatbot built right into X. It’ll do it just fine, as it has very few of the filters that prevent competing AI products from depicting politicians or overt violence. How about a deepfake nude photo of a classmate? That’s more trivial now than ever, thanks to so-called “nude-making” apps that manipulate existing photos, and it’s quickly becoming a national crisis.

These are perhaps old problems – Photoshop made it possible to manipulate celebrity photos in all sorts of horrible ways, and even in the days before computers, you could create convincing fake images to mislead people. But generative AI tools are testing whether the scale and sophistication of the technology, and the speed of its adoption, have led us into uncharted territory without much oversight.

I’ll be very direct: I think people say “it’s like Photoshop” to downplay these new problems that AI tools are causing, to make them seem like they’ve already been solved or are no longer worth mentioning. But I’d like to remind you that we hardly solved any of these problems when it was really just Photoshop – and any proposed solution that requires everyone to fundamentally understand that every image they see is edited is no solution at all.