Walking into your local fast food restaurant, you peer at the colorful menu options, brightly lit above the cashiers’ muted faces. The burgers, each a sculpted Technicolor masterpiece, are oddly perfect in appearance — a lie made evident by what is shortly passed to you on a plastic tray.
But you weren’t duped by the menu imagery. No, you knew what you were in for. You knew the dream sold to you of the burger was “for illustration purposes only.”
In this latest wave of digital development, the art of photography is now met by a new challenger: Images generated by artificial intelligence.