Really cuts to the quick of what photography is. Is it art? Documentation? A representation of something real, or just a sketch?
Photmanipulation, airbrushing, retouching, goofy edits, creative double exposures, they’re all as old as photography. There are all kinds of neat in-camera tricks you can do with old timey chemical film. This bazinga ai thing is more or less fancy double exposure - exposing the same piece of film towice to, say, make your friends look like ghosts, or blend a picture of a dog with the colors of the sky.
Apparently when photography first moved out of the lab in to the hands of enthusiasts there was a great deal of debate about whether photography could be called art. The machine was doing all the work, after all, where was the artist’s hand? Apparently it went back and forth for quite a while until most people agreed that photography constitutes art in it’s own right.
I see your point, though in practical application, the social poison that has been Instagram-style one-upmanship is only going to accelerate with this, simultaneously pressuring people to make their vacations “enhanced” to keep up and also dilute the actual lived experiences that were ostensibly being shared.
Photography tricks have been used for generations to do cool stuff like “movie magic,” but they’ve also been used to promote bullshit conspiracy theories, defame people, and the like. This new technology makes it harder to avoid worse applications of it, like deepfaked revenge porn and the like. Sure, that might get normalized enough to have less immediate stigma, but people will suffer in the meantime and it doesn’t seem like that great of a trade.
