I’ve been experimenting with the new-ish Photoshop Remove tool. And no, I didn’t completely quit Adobe like I hoped/promised, but I did deeply downgrade from the all apps pla to the Photography 20GB plan, and bought the Affinity suite of 3 apps at half price on Black Friday in order to fill in any other potential gaps of functionality as I work on other projects.
But I just wanted to share this one interesting early result where I ran the Photoshop Remove tool on a photo of a painting of mine:
For this I selected most of the original painting in the middle with the Remove tool, waited a few seconds and it spit that out, which I actually think is a very interesting piece in its own right, but also when paired like this with the original source material, to explore these sort of parallel latent versions of a given work, or even a historical moment. Reality isn’t going to be the same anymore.
Here’s a historical riff, removing the flag and pole from the famous Iwo Jima photo:
Outside comic or ironic uses though, the possibilities here get quite dark quite quickly. Consider this flung together xample from the famous Tianamen Square standoff moment – Tankman? What Tankman?
Similarly dark, but in a different direction: shooter, what shooter?
Nowadays, you don’t have to hire an army of re-touch artists to toss your old comrades turned enemies out of your pics anymore, you can do it yourself in a few clicks.
At the same time, I could see this tool and its deep hyperreality effects as being a potent tool for iconoclastic political critique in a world gone completely mad… Don’t like current political situation? Here’s a filter you can use to live in a parallel reality where that person/party/place/thing never even reaches your digital eyes or ears…
Plus, I think it would be pointless to try to regulate this. Where would you even start? To ask for that would be to invite tech companies to implement ever greater filtering and restrictions, and put more and more content decisions into the hands of AIs tied to corporate profit-engines. I mean, that’s going to happen anyway, but at least let’s not go begging for it. At least not until we’ve had a chance to kick the tires a bit before it gets nerfed.