Georgia Institute of Technology

Featuring Walter Scheirer, University of Notre Dame

Abstract: The possibility of an altered photo revising history in a convincing way highlights a salient threat of imaging technology. After all, seeing is believing. Or is it? The examples history has preserved make it clear that the observer is more often than not meant to understand that something has changed. Surprisingly, the objectives of photographic manipulation have remained largely the same since the camera first appeared in the 19th century. The old battleworn techniques have simply evolved to keep pace with technological developments. In this talk, we will learn about the history of photographic manipulation, from the invention of the camera to the advent of generative AI. Importantly, we will consider the reception of photo editing and its relationship to the notion of reality, which is more significant than the technologies themselves. Surprisingly, we will discover that creative myth making has found a new medium to embed itself in. This talk is based on Prof. Scheirer's new book A History of Fake Things on the Internet (Stanford University Press 2023).

Bio: Walter J. Scheirer is the Dennis O. Doughty Collegiate Professor of Engineering at the University of Notre Dame. He is a global AI leader, serving as the Chair of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Community on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and as a board member of the Computer Vision Foundation. Prof. Scheirer is also a cultural critic and historian, commenting on the social context of emerging technologies from the realistic perspective of a technologist.