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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2738 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 10, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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What's the deal with Kate Middleton? I can't make heads or tails of it, I think because of the culture gap. Feels like there is a subtle difference between the Bounded Distrust rules in America and the rules in Britain. Give it to me in freedom-speak.

I'm also a non-royals understander, and what I've gathered is that Kate Middleton has a long history of being extremely consistent with and open about her public role and the paparazzi, to the extent of standing for pictures less than a full day after giving birth to each of her children. It's now been several months since her last public appearance, which is apparently extremely not-normal. To add to the confusion, the only explanation has been a vague "abdominal surgery", despite the King Himself openly talking about his enlarged prostate. What could she have undergone that she and the family would want to keep it more under wraps than the state of the King's prostate? And now this strange seemingly AI-genned image purporting to be a recent photo. It makes it look like they have tried and failed to make things look normal when they're not, which just further fuels the rumor mill that she's dying or getting divorced.

There are sometimes details that the foreign (typically French or American) gossip press reports that the British don’t, not because the royals might sue but because it might compromise their access to future pictures/interviews/photo calls set up by their press office. This extends to the general agreement not to print paparazzi pictures of their children, in exchange for photo calls at specific times (first day of school, graduation, family vacations).

In this case, though, neither the foreign nor domestic press has any idea what’s actually happening, which means that speculation has entered a kind of mania.

It's all part of the game at this point. The recent "leak" of the "Royal racist" in Dutch translations right when Omid Scobie's book was coming out was basically PR while maintaining the illusion of respecting the rules.

She had some kind of surgery and they released some bad photo manipulation of her to dismiss conspiracy theories. Epic incompetence or they're using this to distract from something.

It's a pretty weird image -- aspects of it look like something an imagegen would do, while other parts look like incompetent photoshoppe work. (and why do the kids all have their fingers crossed?)

But even assuming nefarious grand conspiracy, I struggle to think of realistic potential motivations -- incompetence is always the best bet, but this does seem extraordinarily (and publicly) incompetent. Shit is weird.

She might be literally dying. It’s not uncommon for relatively young people to get a metastatic cancer diagnosis and try to hide it from the world. Maybe it’s embarrassment, maybe it’s some deeply-felt sense of regal responsibility.

While the palace is being coy as to exactly what's going on, they have specifically said "not cancer" -- which would make everyone involved look pretty bad if it turned out to be a lie. "Fatal infection" is a possible complication of abdominal surgery though -- but I still don't see the point in covering it up, you're gonna have to come clean eventually.

@DradisPing like I said incompetence is always a good bet -- but this doesn't really explain the things that look more 'AI' than 'PS'; like, parts of the kids. Are there any AI compositing tools that some harried photographer might have been tempted to just throw a couple of photos into? (and would produce a fairly high-res piece of output, and be easy enough to be worth some harried photographer's time?)

more 'AI' than 'PS'

Photoshop has AI generative fill nowadays. I can easily imagine someone not particularly competent with it just circling those areas and hitting generate.

Yeah, but it seems to have been applied to weird areas like the kid's sweater and one of Kate's (?) boots. I could see it happening if you handed an AI two images and said 'put the head from image A into image B', but I didn't think the tech was quite there yet?

Adobe has been working on integrating their own AI tools for a few years now. Plus I'm sure there are plenty of plugins with exiting support.

eg https://youtube.com/watch?v=c1Z-449UIBg https://youtube.com/watch?v=pLRLJbvVUiA

I haven't found an exact video on Frankensteining people together and smoothing it out, but it seems like something AI tools should be able to do a this point.

"Does Kate Middleton have cancer? No. A spokesperson for the palace confirmed to NBC News that the condition that prompted the abdominal surgery is not cancerous."

I notice that the palace statement is oddly specific and does not explicitly preclude the original question. It would be quite odd for cancer unrelated to the presenting condition to be discovered during surgery, but not unheard of.

If it was an infection she would be in the hospital on IV antibiotics. That doesn't make sense either.

She's probably looking tired and bloated at the moment and wanted a photo where she looks pretty and all of the kids are smiling.

She likely has her own staff, but it's a few people not some huge department. They probably hired an outside photographer who they usually work with.

So the photographer sent over the photos he took. She didn't like any of them. One of her staffers said "I know photoshop!" and did an unprofessional job comping things together.

There used to be a blog called "Photoshop Disasters" that showed bad photoshops that had actually made it into print ads. So it could have been a bad job by someone who was allegedly a pro.

The UK has very strict libel laws, but royals don't sue because shitting on the royals is an established press freedom.

So a big chunk of what would be celebrity gossip columns in the US gets shifted to royal gossip.

There are many celeb gossip columns in the UK. Peculiarities around the UK’s libel laws just create an underground economy of gossip-trading in which the implicit threat for anyone suing is that more damaging secrets will be published next. The libel laws are also what encouraged the obsession with undercover filming, phone voicemail hacking etc so that the claims can be ‘proven’; you never know before you sue what the paper actually has on you, for example. The actual payouts are considered the cost of doing business, and most celebrity publicists prefer to deal with the tabloids than to make them their enemy anyway.

The other thing to note about the UK libel laws is that truth remains an absolute defense (apart from certain technicalities about old minor criminal convictions), and having the libel proved true in open court is absolutely catastrophic for a plaintiff. Everyone in British public life knows that Oscar Wilde, Jonathan Aitken, and Jeffrey Archer ended up with long jail terms after suing for libel over true allegations, but the utter public humiliation of Gillian Taylforth is even funnier.

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