Why Comparing AI Image Editing to Photoshop Underestimates the Risk

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

Today, we’ll take a closer look at this argument, trying to understand what exactly it means and why our modern world of AI imaging tools is different — and in some cases, the same. Edge Recently, reporter Jess Weatherbed delved into this issue, and I asked her to join me in breaking down the debate and arguments one by one to support us understand it.

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

Say you want to generate an image of Donald Trump pointing a gun at Kamala Harris. Just ask Elon Musk’s Grok, the AI ​​chatbot built into X. It can do it without a hitch because it has very few of the same filters that prevent competing AI products from depicting politicians or overt violence. How about a deepfake of your classmate’s nudity? This has become more negligible than ever before, thanks to so-called “nudity” apps that manipulate existing photos, and that is quickly becoming a national crisis.

These may be aged problems—Photoshop allowed for all sorts of awful celebrity photo manipulations, and even in the days before computers, convincing imitation images could be created to mislead people. But generative AI tools are testing whether the scale and sophistication of the technology, and the speed at which it can be deployed with little oversight, haven’t taken us into uncharted territory.

I’ll be blunt: I think people say “it’s like Photoshop” to downplay the modern problems that AI tools cause, and make them seem like they’ve already been solved or aren’t worth considering. But I’d like to remind you that we haven’t solved almost 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 not a solution at all.