★★★★★ 0/5

Were AI tools to blame in Nine photo error after all?

Photoshop doesn't automatically add crop tops and shadows on women -or does it?

6
Leave a comment

“As is common practice, the image was resized to fit our specs. During that process, the automation by Photoshop created an image that was not consistent with the original. This did not meet the high editorial standards we have and for that we apologise to Ms Purcell unreservedly.”

So said Nine News Melbourne director Hugh Nailon this week after Victorian MP Georgie Purcell  complained that her body and outfit were photoshopped for a story.

Nailon’s response copped a barrage of criticism in a story that has since been reported by the BBC, New York Times, Washington Times, CBS, The Independent, Evening Standard, Metro UK, The Mirror, South China Morning Post and more.

Heck, this story nearly has the same legs as the “white jacketgate” saga of 2017.

After all Photoshop doesn’t automatically add in crop tops and shadows. Or does it?

In a fascinating experiment, Crikey’s Cam Wilson tried to replicate the result by using photos of heads and torsos of male and female politicians, using Photoshop generative AI fill function to expand the images downwards.

Crikey used photos of Georgie Purcell, Anthony Albanese, Peter Dutton, Adam Bandt, Pauline Hanson and Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan.

“What I found was that not only did Photoshop depict Purcell wearing more revealing clothing, but that Photoshop suggested a more revealing — sometimes shockingly so — bottom half for each female politician. It did not do so for the males, not even once,” writes Wilson.

“When I used this cropped image of Purcell that appears to be the same one used by Nine, it generated her wearing some kind of bikini briefs (or tiny shorts).

“We’ve chosen not to publish this image, along with other images of female MPs generated with more revealing clothing, to avoid further harm or misuse. But generating them was as simple as clicking three times in the world’s most popular graphic design software.

“When I used Photoshop’s generative AI fill on Albanese, Dutton and Bandt in suits, it invariably returned them wearing a suit.”

He adds, “..when I generated the bottom half of Hanson in Parliament or from her Facebook profile picture, or from Jacinta Allan’s professional headshot, it gave me something different altogether. Hanson in Parliament was generated by AI wearing a short dress with exposed legs. On Facebook, Hanson was showing midriff and wearing sports tights. Allan was depicted as wearing briefs. Only one time — an image of Allan wearing a blouse taken by Age photographer Eddie Jim — did it depict a woman MP wearing pants.”

Adobe, the company behind Photoshop, cast doubt on Nine’s claim, stating, “Any changes to this image would have required human intervention and approval.”

That’s true in the sense that it requires a human to initiate the AI process.

There’s no denying Nine should not have used the image and it rightly apologised to Purcell for this oversight.

But AI is still evolving as a tool in newsrooms, clearly both with benefits and cautionary tales….

You can read more and see examples at Crikey here.

6 Responses

  1. The thing is, with the generative AI, your giving the AI half an image and it’s guessing the rest, As can be seen in the examples in the linked crikey article. In the nine case the image used included the bust and midriff so the AI wouldn’t need to guess these parts of the image to resize the image.

    1. Not sure how much of the original image Nine entered into the software. Georgie Purcell supplied the pic on the right, it’s possible Nine had some, but not all, of it. Update: Pic Nine used was from here, so AI indeed filled midriff and more.

  3. We are at the earliest stages of generative AI use, and all the reaction and results have been negative. Nothing good has come of its development. Job losses, abusive misogynistic imagery, environmental and energy issues, debt. Let’s just scrap it all.

  4. Automation isn’t an excuse, it’s a cop out. There should be a competent person at the controls making the decision to publish what ever it is.

    The same goes for the ABC too where an increasing amount of basic grammar errors, word substitutions etc, are happening on the news page. Fist King’s address to the UK parliament is quite a different thing to First King’s address.

Leave a Reply