Now and again, I’ll see an advert for the latest mobile phone going through all its shiny new features, but one in particular, probably irrationally, bothers me a lot.

They advertise a genuinely impressive camera with detailed zoom, stabilisation and clever editing features.

That’s when my eyes shift from normal to suspicious.

The advert shows a group of people, with an unrelated person standing in the background. Someone puts their finger over them, circles them, and suddenly they disappear. The phone fills in the space as though they were never there.

But that’s not what happened.

That person was there in the moment and the camera captured them. Anything beyond that is no longer a record of what was seen at the time.

I appreciate that there are cases where this might be useful. Someone might deliberately photobomb a special moment and spoil an otherwise lovely picture. Even then, though, you have to accept that the finished photo no longer matches real life.

I can give cropping, brightness and colour adjustments a pass. Potentially even style filters, because they usually serve the purpose of presenting the moment in a certain way. The style itself can be part of the charm. Even those can be a slight stretch, but the underlying photograph is still there.

Replacing entire parts of a photo with generated pixels?

No.

Because that’s not what happened.