I have mixed feelings about this. Of course, it will be of great use to many photogs, portraitists especially. If its use was limited to hiding the occasional blemish on a girl's face and similar cosmetic applications, I would be in favour of it. But it will no doubt be used in ways far beyond that - to change fundamentally a landscape, a city street, the interior of a house, a pretty face - and present the image as being real. Unscrupulous people will use it to scam and cheat; it opens new doors to crime.
One of the fundamental things about photography used to be that IT DID represent reality or something very close to it; and so people believed what they were seeing. But with the coming of digital, all that changed. It became childishly easy to make quite major changes to any image, in post-production. The public know this and the effect has been that people are now very suspicious of photographs and tend to believe that every - or nearly every - photograph has been faked in some way. I have exhibitions fairly regularly and the following conversation or a version of it is common -
Member of the public - "This is lovely, but what did it really look like?"
Me - "It looked exactly as you see it."
MOTP - "Really? I'm sorry but I find that hard to believe - at least you took the sky from somewhere different?"
Me - "I don't do that".
MOTP (winks) - "Sure - don't worry - I won't tell anyone else."
There is already a popular style in modern photography, often called photo-art, in which idealised images are constructed from elements gathered not just from the "background" location but from anywhere and any time, or season, the photo-artist chooses. This means that you may find yourself examining something which looks like a photograph, but is actually a work of the imagination with bits of it harvested from all around the globe. This is fine as long as the image is correctly described as "photo-art" or "photo-based illustration" but the problem is th at it is often just called photography; which it isn't.
