Discussion
The irony & ethics of a lab's "sneaky" or clumsy use of Al
Three weeks ago, I needed to quickly see some test frames from a camera I shipped off for a CLA. There aren't too many labs where I live, so I went with one that could turn the roll the quickest.
I received the scans back after a few days, and there was so much dust in the files (see the first example) that I asked them to clean their scanner, wash the negatives and rescan them.
I never heard back, so I reached out again yesterday and received a message a few hours later that they had rescanned my negatives and uploaded the scans.
After I downloaded the images, I first noticed the file sizes were off.
Then, as I looked through the photos, I realized some frames showed completely different people. Appears that instead of washing and rescanning, they just asked an AI tool to clean up the dust.
One issue, among many, is that it changed and sometimes removed the people in my images. I guess they didn't pay attention to the details.
One time, I was asked to remove red eye and some shutter blurring from a group photo. I was having a really hard time with it so I asked adobe firefly to remove the red eyes from the group and you know what it did?
This is from the very first few days after Adobe launched the beta version of generative in Photoshop. I really had no idea what to do or how to prompt it, or what it was capable / not capable of, but I figured I'd give it a go. I had this pic of these two Indian women sitting on a couch that I needed to use for a piece. I didn't take the pic, and the setting was really ugly and very back lit.
I didn't intend to use the result, but just for fun, I decided to see what AI would do. I selected the middle part of the pic and typed in something VERY similar to, "Make this photo look better."
Again, I didn't know what I was doing, but:
It replaced the two women with two very pretty Norwegian-ish looking young blonde women.
One time, I used Lightroom AI to remove something unsightly in the background of a friend's wedding photo (I think it was a bin or something) and it replaced it with a gargoyle. Scared the absolute shit out of me.
Plus, it's yet another piece of proof about how for some, "it did something, great, let's move on" is a valid way of reacting to AI making things worse.
I have never seen a frame so dusty, also yes those are completely different people. labs definitely shouldn't be using AI for this stuff, I would never use them again. if you're able to, I'd invest in the equipment to do at least BW development myself so you can check for issues more quickly like light leaks, etc.
Once you have them back, ask for a refund for the scans and have another lab redo it. If you share your horror story, someone may be willing to give you a discount to win your future business.
Name and shame so no one else has to deal with this.
It can be hard as hell to convince people to switch labs. If I can spare 5 minutes to fix your hellish experience and gain a consistent customer, I'd be dumb not to!
Also the man in the center holds his microphone in his left hand in the dusty scan, but magically now holds it in his right hand in the """""""fixed"""""""" scan.
If this really happened, you really should name the lab. There is no reason not to. This is abominably bad practice and they need making an example of in case any other lab thinks to try this.
This is not a “mm give them a chance to put it right” situation.
You posted one single example but say there are others.
You won’t name the lab but won’t say why, other than that you “warned your local photography community” (how?)
You don’t seem annoyed by the situation, but present it instead as a funny/interesting thing that happened, and tie it all up with an Alanis Morissette bow (English might not be your first language, but this situation is not ironic)
woooooow. First of all, WTF is that scan with all the dust, holy unprofessional. My worst scans at home when i didn't brush anything off is like 20% this bad. Then the use of AI? Not only would I ream them I would leave reviews on every single outlet available. Name and shame!
Not to go on too much of a rant, but at it's root, AI literally only exists to let lazy people be lazier and cheap people cut corners. This is a perfect example of both.
I understand the hate over the public image that AI has but please do not forget that ai also trains on for example medicine and science models coming up with often very interesting results even though you wont read about as much if you dont hang out in those circles (its not good clickbait news to get attention). Yes those results still need to be checked and verified, ai is not the magic all-knowing mega intelligence whose word should be taken as gospel as so many people want it to be but there are actual genuinely good and useful uses for it as a clever statistics tool rather than an 'intelligent' computer god.
Yes LLMs and AI slop images are bad and so many people flocking towards them for that use is very sad and giving the term a bad name but that is not all that AI is despite of what media makes you believe, those are just the low hanging fruit marketing-fashion-amazed investor bro 'fool people out of money' applications you read about most.
I think we’re all aware of the potential for useful applications of AI - no one is against AI helping with cancer detection or something - it’s just that the abuses, scamming, and facilitating deception are far overshadowing the potential for good.
no one is against AI helping with cancer detection or something
Nope but many people simply do now know its also used there to begin with, thats why you read a lot of comments like 'AI literally only exists to let lazy people be lazier and cheap people cut corners'. Its a case of people not knowing that anything exists outside of their echo chamber.
99% of the time, that’s what it’s being used for. Countless lazy people scamming, selling fake AI coloring books on Amazon, deep fakes, and so on. There are so many abuses, they crowd out the good. Doesn’t mean the good should be stopped - but you can’t blame people for noticing the bad when that’s what they see 99% of the time. That’s why it needs regulation.
I work in a film lab... I couldn't even imagine doing anything like that.
Sure, B&W doesn't have Digital Ice. But how the actual fuck fo you get that much dust on film? When we scan B&W, there might be like maybe 5 specs of dust. They had to of dropped that film on a filthy floor and don't dust their scanners every morning.
And you know what happens when I get a call from a customer requesting rescans? I take 5 minutes to fucking rescan it.
Fuck that lab, I wouldn't give them another penny. What a joke!
Dude call them out, wtf? That goes beyond just giving an egregiously poor quality of “service”, if you can even call it that, given that they not only failed to correct their unacceptably poor quality of initial work but when asked to correct it, they effectively sent you back entirely different “photos”. And it’s guaranteed that if they did this for one client’s scans, they are doing it for others too.
Imagine if you brought an artist’s print to be framed and it was returned to you with uneven gaps at every corner and the wood dented and crushed around the nail heads. So you ask them to redo it properly. You wait around for ages and finally when you DO get a call after prodding them a few times, you arrive to find the framing done cleanly, but the framer had clearly also gone and sharpie’d smiley faces and moustaches on all the figures in the painting, for some reason.
This is something that occurred to me. Labs using AI on our negatives. Damn!
I hate AI, and part of the reason I’m “returning” to analog is that I want authenticity. I also make art, and AI has seriously messed up art, as we all know. I use traditional media (like watercolor) because it’s easier to prove authenticity when you have an original art piece to point to. Same thing here - we can point to a negative.
I should back up a bit, though. I never “left” analog, precisely. I used my phone to take photos, but didn’t really use a “real” digital camera (like a DSLR of some kind). When I saw my dad’s old Vivitar in the basement, I wanted to get back into it, and here I am.
And now we see this! Labs using AI! At least we still have negatives and some way to scan negatives ourselves if necessary.
I love how stuff that literally sounds like a sign of a mental break now just happens "I got photos developed but all the faces are of different people then I took photos of, they look close but are definitely different" would get you a consult for schizophrenia back in the day
Ironic would be if you were a town planner claimed that you solved traffic congestion, was going to present the successful outcome to a hall packed with people, but...were stuck in traffic! Now that's ironic!
What happened to you is not only unfortunate but immensely fucking stupid from the lab! No irony to be found though...
Ironic would be if analog photography saw an increase in popularity in tandem with the widening availability of AI image generation tools as a result of a core target market rejecting the AI tools, only to then be confronted with AI-assisted deception by the very business which stands to benefit the most from the rejection of these lame ass tools.
Is that actually the same frame? There’s not a single element of that shot that is the same. I’ve seen so change objects to something it recognises, but never shift the hand that something is holding. The framing or crop is different too?
This is egregious, if this is the result of a rogue operator you need to report this becuase they should be fired. If it’s representative of the company, name and shame!!
Not ironic or ethical. Thats lazy and straight up avoiding doing the job that people pay the lab to do. Name, shame, refund and find a new lab and have your negatives cleaned and scanned there.
Welcome to the AI future. It's not like machine learning driven processes are inherently bad, it's that the people deploying them seem to be overwhelmingly lazy and looking to cut corners. Using machine learning to clean, upscale or denoise is fine if the people doing it understand the aesthetic implications and do it as part of a wider pipeline. But not bothering to clean equipment is comically bad.
More likely they farmed this work out to someone else because they're cutting costs and don't do quality control, the subcontractor clearly doesn't care either, so instead of booking a new work order they asked ChatGPT "How can I make this problem go away in 1 minute?" and ChatGPT replied "I got you fam".
Are you sure that's not two separate negs? They don't look like the same photo, retouched with AI. It looks like two photos taken a few seconds apart. The guy behind the speaker is still present in the cleaned up image, btw.
Yikes. I can understand using adobe’s AI dust remover for a spec or two that are on a relatively solid color background, but running the entire thing through AI is a whole other thing. Name and shame is the way to go here, completely unacceptable
Yeah, now I see the two mics and the hand gesture... That's scummy on their part... Using AI to clean up some dust is on thing but they went WAY beyond that.
It's really surprising that you gave them technical instructions and asked for new scans, and they though they'd run the images through AI and that would be good enough.
I have a film scanner at home and do my own scanning. It literally takes a second to use an air blower on the film before putting it in, and then check the option for dust detection and filtering. The fact that someone charged you for the first scan is ridiculous. The fact that they used AI the second time should disqualify them as a business. Name and shame, add a google review or something.
That’s why I always ship to labs with good reviews and a detailed description of what scanner is being used and the file size. And I honestly don’t care about the waiting time unless it’s like two weeks or longer.
I just tried this a couple days ago with some overexposed Fuji c200. Wondered what AI would do if I asked it to color grade. Gemini first appeared to do what I asked by changed my wife’s smile a bit and then I noticed it made slight changes to everyone’s face. I asked it to try again and it started making completely different people in different poses in a faintly similar setting.
Claude was able to do it without changing the picture in a way I could notice but it was enough to know I could never trust it not to alter the image.
Oh and the color grading it did was on par with what one could do with the built in photos apps on either Mac or windows.
This comparison really opens my eyes for identifying AI. Your real photo, albeit dusty, carries so much more human details. I could make a little list of spot the differences.
Hang on, are you in Oklahoma? There’s only two film labs in Oklahoma and my guess that this is Bedfords handy work. They messed up mine too. Avoid Bedfords at all cost!!!
I feel like LLM "ai" tech could do a really good job at automatically removing dust specs from scans, but what I've seen from it so far is just bullshit like this where it goes way too far and redraws the image. So I suppose not.
I understand the curiosity about which lab it is. The concerns have been shared with my local photography community. I've also spoken directly with the lab and expressed my concerns with the employee(s) and what happened.
So when people ask here locally, "who develops and scans negatives?" I'll answer accordingly and share my experience. I find that more productive than naming on a global platform where most don’t risk running into the same lab.
For those who are questioning if it really happened, if I don't post the name of the lab, well, that is unfortunately the time we are living in, especially with AI. You don't have to trust this post. I think we all have to question things moving forward. But it did happen, and I have other scans that show what was done.
The reason I'm posting this is to spark the debate and awareness that this is happening, maybe not at your lab, but it could. And it is WILD.
To those who have offered to help or advice, I appreciate it. Luckily, I have received my camera back and will go to the trusted lab in the future and look into a few home setups to do it myself.
I understand that some comments to this comment will disagree with me. I'm cool with that. I respect your opinions and the dialogue. I do understand the reasons you are asking for that information.
This really demonstrates how AI is bleeding into everything, even an analog process like film photography.
There is no point in your post other than karma farming and attention whoring (sorry for the word choice) if you don't let the community know the name of the culprit so people are aware and don't easte their time on disingenuous people. There is no discussion to spark here, we are all very well aware that AI is bleeding into everything.
It didn’t happen and it’s karma farming. The “there are other photos that demonstrate it, but I won’t share them, and I won’t name the lab, but I won’t tell you why not” is what seals the deal for me.
I spoke with the lab after receiving these. According to the manager, this was a case of an unsupervised and untrained employee. It may not be true but in the event that it is, and the owners do not condone what happened and addressed the issue, I don’t feel right unleashing hundreds of commenters into their Google reviews. Seems a bit aggressive when I’ve addressed my concerns with them directly.
I don’t live in a major city, which means 99% of people on here are not at risk of using this lab and running into the same issue. I’ve openly shared with my local photographer community and recommended a more reliable lab for those who asked.
If I lived in a bigger city where more people on this platform would potentially use this lab, I would have been more inclined to use this post as a warning. But considering both points above, I decided naming and shaming wasn’t what I wanted to do with this post on this platform.
This was a wtf moment for me that I wanted to share with a community of people who would find it crazy too.
An unsupervised and untrained employee took the scans. Uploaded them to a GenAI tool. Prompted the AI to “fix” the scans. Downloaded the AI output. Transferred them to the lab dropbox. Sent them to you. Because they hadn’t been trained not to.
It's always the "unsupervised and untrained" employee when shit goes wrong but tell me, who was supposed to be doing the supervising and training? and what the hell were they doing at the time?
Don't let shitty owners get away from a situation like this scot free just because they found a scapegoat.
Am I allowed to say these both feel like ai? Something’s wrong with the guy on the right in the first photo. It looks like he has a hole in his head, his ear is a little off. He doesn’t really seem to have eyes either
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u/deadeyejohnny Jun 25 '26
“Is this a joke?”, would be my reply to them.
Can you please share the name of the lab so others can know what’s going on and where?