The Impact of GenAI on Representational Agency in Personal Photography

Abstract

Smartphones are now the primary tool for documenting everyday life, with generative AI (genAI) increasingly used to enhance personal photographs. This paper explores how genAI enhancement impacts representational agency, defined as a means of expressing who we are and what we have experienced. We conducted a formative study to formalize representational agency as an operational framework for assessing enhanced photographs. A subsequent mixed-methods empirical study used this framework to examine the impacts of genAI enhancements to everyday photographs on representational agency. Participants identified five types of genAI-induced alterations, ranging from aesthetic changes to interpretive shifts in a photograph’s subject and perspective. These alterations affect representational agency positively or negatively, depending on the alignment between the participants’ intent and the model’s interpretation, as well as the clarity of their memory of the event. We then discuss how the taxonomy and framework serve as tools for assessing the interpretive nature of genAI.

With Baptiste Caramiaux and Sarah Fdili Alaoui