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Friday Slide Show: The Kitchen
8 November 2024
We were inspired yesterday by Paul Melcher's piece on Biases in Photography: What We Capture and What We Share. Particularly this paragraph:
Let's take kitchens as an example. The kitchens you find online are always clean, empty, fresh and modern -- often Western European in design. You won't find images of your kitchen or mine or those of everyday people in Asia, India, Africa or South America. We might take photos of our kitchens for practical reasons, but we rarely post them online. Instead, what you see are the sleek kitchens of the celebrity class, straight from Architectural Digest or property listings. Always spotless, newly renovated, with high-end appliances, these kitchens define what we think of as "worthy" of sharing. And when you ask an AI to generate a kitchen image based on "publicly available content," guess what you get?
You get ideal not real.
Which always looks as if no one has ever prepared a meal in them because, well, no food seems to be anywhere at hand (except, maybe, realtor pears*).
One reason most people don't share photos of their kitchen is because they inhabit real, not ideal, kitchens. In other words, they're a mess. To illustrate that in some small measure, we didn't indulge in any unnecessary cleanup for these shots.
Here where we do all the cooking and cleaning, we've found it wise to clean as we go. So when we sit down to eat, the only things left to clean are what we're using.
Still there are various levels of maintenance. Some things you clean every meal, others once a week, some once a month, others (looking at you, windows) more rarely. So something is always a bit more "real" than we might like in a photo.
Hence the inspiration. Can we walk into the kitchen unannounced and walk out with a slide show? And can we do it with three brain bleeds and double vision?
We probably only managed to dilute the "publicly available content" for AI. But you be the judge.
