The Foreign Post - FPI

Banerjee's audience includes women from as far afield as the Middle East and United States who also have a deeper complexion but have historically been overlooked by the cosmetics industry.

"I actually have a lot of followers who are outside India, and I feel like it's probably because our skin tones match," Banerjee told AFP.

"They can see how the product looks like on my skin tone, how the lipstick applies on my skin tone, and just have that sense of belongingness."

Banerjee, 34, began experimenting with make-up videos in her spare time a decade ago, after graduating from university and moving to Mumbai to work in sales.

She is now a full-time beauty and lifestyle influencer, teaching more than half a million followers how to beautify themselves on Instagram and YouTube.

Early inspirations included British beauty content creators Tanya Burr and Fleur De Force -- both white and with millions of followers between them.

But Banerjee said she had found no role models who resembled her.

She credits Rihanna for the seismic shift towards greater inclusiveness in the cosmetics industry.

In 2017, the pop superstar launched her make-up line Fenty Beauty, which offered 40 shades of foundation and turned her into a billionaire.

"Fenty Beauty really, really changed the game," Banerjee said. "I think that's when people knew that this is important."

While other international brands have tried to keep up, many still have "miles and miles to go" before they can be considered truly inclusive, she added.

"I still see products being launched in three shades, in four shades, calling them 'universal'. And it's just ridiculous," Banerjee said.

"In India, everywhere you go... you see our features changing, our language changing, our skin colour changing. So it's very, very important to have more inclusive make-up."

- 'Learning to love ourselves' -

Cheap internet data, rising income levels and the world's largest population of young people have fuelled an explosion in India's beauty and personal care market.

The industry is now worth $15 billion nationally each year, with Euromonitor projecting that figure will double by 2030.

Homegrown e-commerce platform Nykaa -- which helped make global cosmetic brands easily available to Indians for the first time -- was one of India's most-anticipated IPOs in 2021.

"People thought brown skin is not pretty," Faby, another beauty influencer living in Mumbai, told AFP. "But now we've started learning to love ourselves."

Faby has nearly 900,000 Instagram followers and has established herself as one of India's top cosmetic stylists, recently teaming up with top Bollywood actress Deepika Padukone to promote a skincare line.

Almost her entire apartment has been refashioned into a studio with professional lights, camera equipment and retractable backdrops to stylise her regular online tutorials.

The work can be taxing, with some daylong shoots lasting until well after midnight, but the money Faby makes from brand collaborations is enough to comfortably support both herself and her mother.

"It has been difficult, but now I can have my own Dior bag, I can have whatever I want," said Faby. "It's all because of the followers who are watching."

- 'Look more beautiful' -

India's government belatedly recognised the explosive growth of online content creation last year, announcing a 10 percent tax on promotional gifts worth over 20,000 rupees ($244).

That move brought part of the country's $120 million influencer market under the tax net -- chiefly those advertising products beyond the purchasing power of the vast majority of Indians.

A single lipstick by a prominent international brand can cost around 2,000 rupees ($24) locally -- more than what half of India's households pay for their weekly groceries, according to British market research firm Kantar.

But the gap between material desires and means has proven to be fertile ground for other Indian influencers showing their audiences how to keep on-trend without breaking the bank.

"There are many people who cannot afford expensive products, so my DIY shows them how to look more beautiful," Kavita Jadon, 34, told AFP.

From her home a couple of hours' drive from the capital New Delhi, the housewife and mother-of-two makes videos showing how to make ersatz concealers out of moisturiser and coffee grinds, at a fraction of the cost of name-brand products.

Despite filming from a cheap phone, editing with free software, and lacking Banerjee and Faby's elaborate studio setups, Jadon has amassed more than 169,000 followers on Facebook.

Many of her homemade product ideas are the result of painstaking trial and error, with her audience eagerly sharing their own ideas or petitioning her with requests.

"Using products from big brands is not essential -- it's possible to use local products and create beauty products at home too," she said.

"That's why my page has grown so significantly."

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The feature, first released in 2020, claims a 100x zoom rate, and Samsung used sparkling clear images of the Moon in its marketing.

Ibreakphotos took his own pictures of the Moon -- blurry and without detail -- and watched as his phone added craters and other details.

The phone's artificial intelligence software was using data from its "training" on many other pictures of the Moon to add detail where there was none.

"The Moon pictures from Samsung are fake," he wrote, leading many to wonder whether the shots people take are really theirs anymore -- or if they can even be described as photographs.

Samsung has defended the technology, saying it does not "overlay" images, and pointed out that users can switch off the function.

The firm is not alone in the race to pack its smartphone cameras with AI -- Google's Pixel devices and Apple's iPhone have been marketing such features since 2016.

The AI can do all the things photographers used to labour over -- tweaking the lighting, blurring backgrounds, sharpening eyes -- without the user ever knowing.

But it can also transform backgrounds or simply wipe away people from the image entirely.

And the debate over AI is not limited to hobbyists on message boards -- professional bodies are raising the alarm too.

- Sidestepping the tech -

The industry is awash with AI, from cameras to software like Photoshop, said Michael Pritchard of the Royal Photographic Society of Britain.

"This automation is increasingly blurring boundaries between a photograph and a piece of artwork," he told AFP.

The nature of AI is different to previous innovations, he said, because the technology can learn and bring new elements beyond those recorded by film or sensor.

This brings opportunities but also "fundamental challenges around redefining what photography is, and how 'real' a photograph is", Pritchard said.

Nick Dunmur of the Britain-based Association of Photographers said professionals most often use "RAW" files on their digital cameras, which capture images with as little processing as possible.

But sidestepping the tech is less easy for a casual smartphone shooter.

Ibreakphotos, who posted his finding on Reddit, pointed out that technical jargon around AI is not always easy to understand -- perhaps deliberately so.

"I wouldn't say that I am happy with the use of AI in cameras, but I am OK with it as long as it is communicated clearly what each processing pipeline actually does," he told AFP, asking not to use his real name.

- Not 'human-authored' -

What professional photographers are most concerned about, though, is the rise of AI tools that generate completely new images.

In the past year, DALL-E 2, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion have exploded in popularity thanks to their ability to create images in hundreds of styles with just a short text prompt.

"This is not human-authored work," Dunmur said, "and in many cases is based on the use of training datasets of unlicensed work."

These issues have already led to court cases in the United States and Europe.

According to Pritchard, the tools risk disrupting the work of anyone "from photographers, to models, to retouchers and art directors".

But Jos Avery, an American amateur photographer who recently tricked thousands on Instagram by filling his feed with stunning portraits he had created with Midjourney, disagreed.

He said the lines drawn between "our work" and "the tool's work" were arbitrary, pointing out that his Midjourney images often took many hours to create.

But there is broad agreement on one fundamental aspect of the debate -- the risk for photography is not existential.

"AI will not be the death of photography," Avery said.

Pritchard agreed, noting that photography had endured from the daguerreotype to the digital era, and photographers had always risen to technical challenges.

That process would continue even in a world awash with AI-generated images, he said.

"The photographer will bring a deeper understanding to the resulting image even if they haven't directly photographed it," he said.

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