Adobe Lightroom's AI Remove feature added a Bitcoin to bird in flight photo

Clipped highlights in digital photography are simply impossible to eliminate in post-processing without conjuring nonexistent information. Even if you shoot raw. Different raw processors use different tricks, color propagation and such, but naturally they are best used when highlights are really small. I would not be surprised if tools like Lightroom invoke ML at the first hint of clipping (because why not, if you all you have is a hammer…).

Pro tip: Digital sensors are much less forgiving than negative film when it comes to exposing highlights. With a bit of foresight they are best tackled at shooting time. Highlights from water/glass reflections are tamed by a fairly cheap polarizing filter, and if you shoot raw you should do the opposite of negative film and always underexpose a scene with bright highlights (especially if highlights are large or are in your subject of interest). Let it be dark, you will have more noise, but noise is manageable without having to invent what doesn’t exist in the parts that are the most noticeable to human eye.

Oh, yeah, compression of the dynamic range combined with increase brightness makes sense. It's not exactly just stable diffusion that produces that look, but also things like ML filters, etc.

A truly bizarre effect. One of the first times in my life I was ever thinking "wait, this looks TOO smooth. it's weird". As if my eyes just instinctively knew there were fake frames (before I understood the concept of "frames").

And this is the closest thing the professional imaging world has to a broadly-available tool designed for high-end professional use cases. It's barely consistently good enough for throwaway blog headers in its current state for large edits, and for small edits it's exactly 0 percent better than the removal tools they added 20 years ago. Adobe better start giving some love to its professional users because the alternatives are getting better, and their ecosystem is getting worse. It's like they're trying to put themselves in a position where they're competing with Canva and Instagram rather than Affinity, Procreate, Rebelle, etc. If it's not clear to them yet that they're not right-around-the-corner from having their AI tools be a drop-in replacement for their regular stuff, they're gonna have a bad time.

Is it actively worse, though? My impression is that all of the other, classical-based in-painting methods are still alive and well in Adobe products. And I think their in-painting works well, when it does work. To me, this honestly sounds like an improvement, especially in a creative tool like Lightroom or Photoshop --- the artist has more options to achieve their vision; it's usually understood to be up to the artist to use the tools appropriately.

I mean, having the model behave this way looks too easy and I guess that adobe does qc on the features it releases, so I'm not sure to see an alternative explanation - or adobe's qc is poor/inexistent.

By compromised I mean something like someone having access to adobe's servers where this is running and uploading troll models or toying with the model's responses

Plus even if it could be done locally, doing it server-side has the side benefit (for Adobe) of making it trivial to prevent pirates from ever being able to use those features.

that seems like too many

All of them AI slop of course. They train on this? I guess it's garbage in, garbage out.

That's the bit that puzzles me the most though: you want that bit gone, so why would it fill in what that shimmer looks like? If there's an airplane in the sky that you want gone from a medieval movie frame, so you select the airplane and select "remove", surely it doesn't fill in an airplane because that's the closest match for what's being selected?

I must be missing something obvious but I don't see it mentioned in the submission or comments, or perhaps I'm not making the connection