Your phone edits all your photos with AI – does it change your view of reality?

You can see that positively. If you were skilled and patient, you could do most of these edits by hand. “Instead of fiddling with all these different parameters, we now have automation,” says Lev Manovich, a professor of digital culture and media at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. “Certain capacities that were previously only available to professionals are now also available to amateurs.”

But at the same time, your phone often makes creative or even artistic decisions about the memories you capture. Users may have no idea what’s happening – and on some phones, the AI ​​does a lot more than just tweaking parameters.

“I think smartphone manufacturers really want photos to reproduce what people take. They’re not trying to create fake images,” says Rafał Mantiuk, a professor of graphics and displays at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. “But there’s a lot of creative control over how you render an image. Every phone has a style, you know. Pixel phones have a…