Today is October 7, 2025. About 10 years ago, in September 2015, the Adobe Photoshop application capable of running on the iPad was introduced at the iPad Pro launch, and on stage, a new Adobe Photoshop tool was used to make a woman smile in a photograph previously taken with an expressionless face.
Below on the left is the original, and on the right, you see the version with a very, very slight smile added.
We can say that a small apocalypse broke out for both Apple and Adobe after this incident. You can read many more examples of it from this link, but briefly, the components of mainstream media, from all news sites big and small to Twitter accounts with many followers, hyped each other up and argued that what was done was highly sexist. The Guardian tweeted THEY PHOTOSHOPPED A WOMAN’s FACE. The Wall Street Journal shared a news story saying Apple and Adobe “fixed” a woman’s smile at the iPad Pro introduction. Mashable shared a news story saying Apple, please don’t force women to smile at your events. Here, I see a very strange kind of Narrative Dissonance. I think that even before the point we have reached today, there was no logical explanation for this situation even back then.
A studio has given a job to a woman with her consent. For this job, the woman’s body comes under the domination of the studio in certain proportions. If the photographer wants, the woman can sit, stand, put her hands on her head, or wait on one foot. If the photographer wants, they can change her makeup or use different facial expressions. For example, she can get angry or smile. It’s a hundred-year-old story that a model comes under such comprehensive control for short periods of time due to her job, and I guess no one has said this is unethical until today. Ultimately, every job basically consists of a person renting out their body and skills to fulfill certain conditions. Don’t the journalists at The Wall Street Journal know that the industry is like this? Isn’t their own job like this too? To continue their jobs, they have to go somewhere at certain times, put their butts on a chair chosen for them by someone else, and touch a keyboard and mouse chosen by someone else with their hands. Even if they chose it themselves, they have to do it because someone else told them to do these things.
So, even if we were in 2015 right now, the post-editing of a model’s photo to make her smile shouldn’t be an ethical problem in any way. But let’s come to 2025. Last month, Google released the Nano Banana image generation model, and look, Mashable, in its news about this, used an image of a woman to show that the model could dress a woman in different outfits. One of these outfits is a volleyball uniform set with short shorts. In another example - hold tight - they made a woman smile.
The thing I want to draw attention to here is that this incident is not a simple shift in perception. Something related to the human body cannot go from being absolutely unacceptable to being considered very normal within 10 years. Media is an environment managed by forces we cannot see. One of the best examples showing that this is equally true for both traditional media and social media is this issue of making women smile.
First of all, my opinion regarding the reason for the reaction in 2015 is that some focal individuals sensitive about sexism were triggered by the extensions of rival companies (or it could be an international, completely unpredictable different issue), and the snowball they first rolled grew depending on people’s behavior. The thing we need to pay attention to in this matter is that if such a project makes us feel something we wouldn’t normally feel, we become a used party here and serve the purpose of a power we do not know. Take this possibility from the subject of technology and apply it to every subject; it is always a real and valid threat in any field where media exists. To protect yourself from this, it is very important to avoid receiving commentary while receiving information. The information itself is also a risk factor, but that’s another topic.
Now, as I close this topic, I decided to make the woman mentioned at the beginning of the topic smile thoroughly using Nano Banana. I provided the photo above without cropping and used this prompt: “she is laughing. photo should be a closeup to her face. make sure her face, make up and hair color are exactly identical.”.
