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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   3469 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 10, 2024

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She had some kind of surgery and they released some bad photo manipulation of her to dismiss conspiracy theories. Epic incompetence or they're using this to distract from something.

It's a pretty weird image -- aspects of it look like something an imagegen would do, while other parts look like incompetent photoshoppe work. (and why do the kids all have their fingers crossed?)

But even assuming nefarious grand conspiracy, I struggle to think of realistic potential motivations -- incompetence is always the best bet, but this does seem extraordinarily (and publicly) incompetent. Shit is weird.

She might be literally dying. It’s not uncommon for relatively young people to get a metastatic cancer diagnosis and try to hide it from the world. Maybe it’s embarrassment, maybe it’s some deeply-felt sense of regal responsibility.

While the palace is being coy as to exactly what's going on, they have specifically said "not cancer" -- which would make everyone involved look pretty bad if it turned out to be a lie. "Fatal infection" is a possible complication of abdominal surgery though -- but I still don't see the point in covering it up, you're gonna have to come clean eventually.

@DradisPing like I said incompetence is always a good bet -- but this doesn't really explain the things that look more 'AI' than 'PS'; like, parts of the kids. Are there any AI compositing tools that some harried photographer might have been tempted to just throw a couple of photos into? (and would produce a fairly high-res piece of output, and be easy enough to be worth some harried photographer's time?)

more 'AI' than 'PS'

Photoshop has AI generative fill nowadays. I can easily imagine someone not particularly competent with it just circling those areas and hitting generate.

Yeah, but it seems to have been applied to weird areas like the kid's sweater and one of Kate's (?) boots. I could see it happening if you handed an AI two images and said 'put the head from image A into image B', but I didn't think the tech was quite there yet?

Adobe has been working on integrating their own AI tools for a few years now. Plus I'm sure there are plenty of plugins with exiting support.

eg https://youtube.com/watch?v=c1Z-449UIBg https://youtube.com/watch?v=pLRLJbvVUiA

I haven't found an exact video on Frankensteining people together and smoothing it out, but it seems like something AI tools should be able to do a this point.

"Does Kate Middleton have cancer? No. A spokesperson for the palace confirmed to NBC News that the condition that prompted the abdominal surgery is not cancerous."

I notice that the palace statement is oddly specific and does not explicitly preclude the original question. It would be quite odd for cancer unrelated to the presenting condition to be discovered during surgery, but not unheard of.

If it was an infection she would be in the hospital on IV antibiotics. That doesn't make sense either.

She's probably looking tired and bloated at the moment and wanted a photo where she looks pretty and all of the kids are smiling.

She likely has her own staff, but it's a few people not some huge department. They probably hired an outside photographer who they usually work with.

So the photographer sent over the photos he took. She didn't like any of them. One of her staffers said "I know photoshop!" and did an unprofessional job comping things together.

There used to be a blog called "Photoshop Disasters" that showed bad photoshops that had actually made it into print ads. So it could have been a bad job by someone who was allegedly a pro.

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