In Praise of Distracting Objects
We humans have a special magic between us that AI can’t erase.
August 20, 2024
It was near the end of Apple’s developer conference this year that something caught my attention.
An Apple employee was demonstrating on screen how the company’s new ‘Apple Intelligence’ can manipulate image backgrounds on an iPhone.
“Now the new Clean Up tool will identify distracting objects in the background so you can make them disappear,” the employee explains.
Then Apple’s AI hovers over two humans and erases them.
Removing humans from photos isn’t anything new; software has been removing blemishes, tightening waists, and erasing humans in photos for years. The surprise is that humans, according to Apple, are now distracting objects.
Objects have been central to software development for a half century, with object-oriented programming languages underpinning the operating systems and software we use everyday. Oxford’s ‘Dictionary of Computer Science’ includes 15-object related entries, making it one of the more prominent computing concepts in its index.
In Apple’s defense, it’s not the only technology company linguistically confusing humans with code. A quick search for “photo editing” in the App Store highlights all the ways humans are being transformed into objects that artificial intelligence can magically erase.
Maybe we should have seen this coming. Jaron Lanier warned 15 years ago that we humans shouldn’t think of ourselves as software or technology. But what if software starts thinking of us as nothing more than an object in its own language? What do we do then?
Language matters as much as code itself.
This is the challenge humanity faces today: allowing software companies to call humans objects normalizes humans to see each other as objects, as unwanted code to erase. This concern might not matter when removing strangers from a family photo’s background. But AI will soon be capable of taking actions beyond what we can imagine today. Where will we draw the line between what parts of humanity remain and which are erased? That’s the question we humans will soon confront together.
Apple’s use of distracting before objects is unfortunate but also part of a larger trend. In May I downloaded Adobe Lightroom on my iPad to remove dust spots from the film photos I was taking while living in Paris. Adobe’s App Store screen showcases its new AI features. The first AI promotion promises to ‘remove distractions with generative AI.’
Humans, according to Adobe, are now distractions.
The accompanying graphic shows a solitary man at Paris’s Trocadero, the people behind him magically removed with Adobe’s AI. The distractions are now replaced with new greenish elements in the background. But there’s a problem: trees and hedges don’t grow that tall around the Eiffel Tower. Adobe seems to believe that hallucinations are better than humans when it comes to AI.
The Trocadero is a ten-minute walk from where I lived in Paris’s 16th arrondissement most of this year, a tourist attraction I passed through almost everyday to reach the Seine. I can say from experience that Adobe’s graphic isn’t only hallucinating fictitious landscaping, but it’s also false: the Trocadero is never empty. There are always real people there.
Software companies like Adobe have been selling us an idea for years that the perfect photo doesn’t include anyone else, a misrepresentation of reality that exacerbates humanity’s growing alienation and loneliness from one another. It’s a crisis that doesn’t prepare us well for the future; we’ll need other people more, not less, as AI soon questions what it means to be human. We shouldn’t allow software try to sell us otherwise.
What’s comical (or ironic) about Adobe’s marketing is that the Trocadero might be the worst place to demonstrate the “alone with AI” photo vibe. To me, the Trocadero’s value isn’t emptiness. It’s the experience of seeing the Eiffel Tower with other people.
The Trocadero is always filled with families taking selfies, strangers singing with one another at impromptu concerts, tourists laughing across languages in the cool Parisian night. Watching the Eiffel Tower’s evening light show with hundreds of real people is mesmerizing. Humans aren’t distractions or distracting objects in that moment. They’re a reason to be there. It’s easy to feel the human energy in the air.
My own experience at the Trocadero is what gives me hope for humanity’s future: even if AI becomes powerful enough to transform us all into distracting objects, we humans still have a special magic between us that AI can’t erase.
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