[TorqueDog]

Photo restoration, touch-ups, removals, or even heavy-handed Photoshop work still start from a real moment that actually happened. There is an underlying truth being preserved, even if it's cosmetically altered. The edits serve as an aid to a memory, not a replacement. That's fundamentally different from fabricating the moment itself.

The mother is asking for her real son to be taken out of an unbearably traumatic context and placed into a gentler one, so she can remember him without the hospital and what followed dominating the memory. There's still an anchor in reality, no one is pretending the grassy field or the sweater photo literally happened. The value comes from seeing her real son represented in a way that reflects how she wants to hold him in her memory, not how he was lost. That's also a really specific context given that the child barely got to live and she got so little time with him. If my dad passed away and someone gave me a photo of me as an adult with him at a Winnipeg Jets game -- something I have never done with him as an adult -- I'd feel no connection to it, no reason to value it. I have real moments and real memories, I don't need to invent ones.

Nobody mistakes historical portraits for photographs. They were symbolic representations, totally a different expectation.

And yes, people like flattering photos of themselves, of course they do (and it's an entirely separate debate on how healthy that is when it goes as far as it does on social media). But I'm talking about photos of others, and liking polish is not the same thing as preferring fiction. There's a reason people still keep blurry, awkward, poorly lit photos of loved ones long after better-looking alternatives exist. My mom has this f-cking awful picture of me as a teenager that I wish she would set on fire, but she adores it.

This isn't about 'AI bad'. It's about whether the thing you're valuing is a memory of something that actually occurred, and why people get uneasy when they realize something is synthetic after the fact. Airbrushing one's cheekbones is very different to reinventing the entire scene.

Look, you keep AI out of my funny animal videos and I'm happy.