Facebook: Great. I'd be happy to. Any more detail you'd like to add?
Me: Make us look attractive. Show that we're a having a great time. Also, we went to see the Chatham Lighthouse.
Facebook: OK, done!
...
Facebook: You've received 48 likes. Your mother would like to know if you had any salt water taffy.
Me: Yes, and please create a picture of my oldest daughter having trouble chewing it.
Facebook: Done.
Facebook: I'd be happy to. Are there any more details you'd like to include?
me: Please show how he didn't understand me at first, but then he looks at me and starts crying with love and regret.
Facebook: Done. Your relationship with your father must have been deeply fulfilling.
We expect images that look like photographs — at least when taken by amateurs — to be the result of a documentary process, rather than an artistic one. They might be slightly filtered or airbrushed, but they won't be put together from whole cloth.
But amateur photography is actually the outlier, in the history of "capturing memories"!
If you imagine yourself before the invention of photography, describing your vacation to an illustrator you're commissioning to create a some woodblock-print artwork for a set of christmas cards you're having made up, the conversation you've laid out here is exactly how things would go. They'd ask you to recount what you saw, do a sketch, and then you'd give feedback and iterate together with them, to get a final visual down that reflects things the way you remember them, rather than the way they were, per se.
...that, and other thoughts I have while baked.
Indeed, people viewing photographs have always been able to be manipulated by presentation as fact something that is not true -- you dress up smart, in borrowed clothes, when you're really poor; you stand with a person you don't know to indicate association; you get photographed with a dead person as if they're alive; you use a back drop or set; et cetera.
FB AI, make a series of posts about me climbing mount everest, meeting dalai lama, curing cancer, bringing peace to ukraine, changing my name to Melon Tusk, announcing running for president and adopting a dog named Molly
You got to shoot for something just attainable enough to sound credible, while still being at the "enviable" end of the spectrum.
"FB AI, make a series of pictures of my first 3 months at Goldman Sachs in 2021. Include me shaking hands with the VP of software as I receive a productivity award for making them $1m in a week. Include a group photo of me and 12 other people (all C execs and my VP must be there). Crosspost all to LinkedIn, with notifications muted."
"Ok done"
"ChatGPT, take my existing CV and replace entries from 2021 onwards with a job as Head of Performance Monitoring at Goldman Sachs, reporting to VP of software. Include several projects with direct CEO and CFO involvement. Crosspost changes to LinkedIn."
"Ok done"
... and now I can go job-hunting.
I think a use case for AI image manipulation could be more like if I need a picture where I'm poor but wearing smart borrowed clothes, standing with an unassociated associate and a dead alive, with a backdrop, with the only source image beimg selfie of someone else that incidentally caught half of me way in the background
The intent or use cases for these two (lacking a better term) manipulators aren't orthogonal here. The purpose of AI image generation is, well, images generated by AI. It could technically generate images that misrepresent info, but that's more of a side effect reached in a totally different way than staging a scene in an actual photo. It seems like using manipulation to stage misleading photos would be used primarily for the purpose of deceptive activities or subversive fuckery.