I really like this query from Youtuber Marques Brownlee, who goes by MKBHD. He asks: “What is a photo?” It’s a deep query.

Just take into consideration how early black-and-white movie cameras labored. You pointed the digicam at, say, a tree and pressed a button. This opened the shutter in order that gentle may cross via a lens (or multiple lens) to undertaking a picture of the tree onto the movie. Once this movie was developed, it displayed a picture—a photograph. But that photograph is only a illustration of what was actually there, and even what the photographer noticed with their very own eyes. The colour is lacking. The photographer has adjusted settings just like the digicam’s focus, depth of area, or shutter velocity and chosen movie that impacts issues just like the brightness or sharpness of the picture. Adjusting the parameters of the digicam and movie is the job of the photographer; that is what makes images a type of artwork.

Now soar forward in time. We are utilizing digital smartphone cameras as a substitute of movie, and these telephones have made large enhancements: higher sensors, multiple lens, and options similar to picture stabilization, longer publicity instances, and excessive dynamic vary, during which the telephone takes a number of pictures with completely different exposures and combines them for a extra superior picture.

But they’ll additionally do one thing that was once the job of the photographer: Their software program can edit the picture. In this video, Brownlee used the digicam in a Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra to take a photo of the moon. He used a 100X zoom to get a brilliant good—and steady—moon picture. Maybe too good.

The video—and others prefer it—sparked a reply on Reddit from a consumer who goes by “ibreakphotos.” In a check, they used the digicam to take a photograph of a blurry picture of the moon on a pc monitor—and nonetheless produced a crisp, detailed picture. What was happening?

Brownlee adopted up with another video, saying that he’d replicated the check with related outcomes. The element, he concluded, is a product of the digicam’s AI software program, not simply its optics. The digicam’s processes “basically AI sharpen what you see in the viewfinder towards what it knows the moon is supposed to look like,” he says within the video. In the tip, he says, “the stuff that comes out of a smartphone camera isn’t so much reality as much as it’s this computer’s interpretation of what it thinks you’d like reality to look like.”

(When WIRED’s Gear Team coated the moon shot dustup, a Samsung spokesperson informed them, “When a user takes a photo of the moon, the AI-based scene optimization technology recognizes the moon as the main object and takes multiple shots for multi-frame composition, after which AI enhances the details of the image quality and colours.” Samsung posted an explanation of how its Scene Optimizer perform works when taking pictures of the moon, in addition to find out how to flip it off. You can learn extra from the Gear Team on computational photography here, and see extra from Brownlee on the topic here.)