AI, or a “minute part of reality”?
One of these images is a real photograph of a phone and one is a very quick AI creation. (Although it’s fairly easy to tell which is which, I think for a stock photo of a generic phone it would be quicker and easier to get AI to do it - with caveats, as below! Is that cheating? Maybe. )
Apparently, Skynet AI is going to destroy us all in the next couple of years. Or at least make us all redundant. But before I welcome our AI overlords, I want to expand on a presentation I gave last week about how I don’t think AI is taking my place just yet. (Although I could probably get it to write this blog post so I can go off and have a nice cup of tea…)
If you’ve paid any attention to the media over the last couple of months, you can’t help but notice that AI is vying with climate change as the next disaster in waiting. And before AI does take over, it’s going to steal our jobs. AI-generated images are easily accessible, everywhere and even fooling the experts. The results of a well-designed prompt are incredible and may well affect many photographers.
Having said that, it comes back to the question of ‘what is photography?’ If it is just the end product - an image, abstracted from its source - then yes, AI might render the actual taking of a photograph irrelevant. Stock photography? Why go through the bother of setting up lights, models and camera if you can type a prompt and get the generic image of two office workers talking by a whiteboard? Or if your goal is a perfect fine art image, does it need to be a real person or place? Maybe not.
When AI gets it wrong, it gets it spectacularly wrong 😂 (Prompt: An old style mobile phone with number buttons on a white table in a stock photography style)
But what if you want what Henri Cartier-Bresson stated as his goal: “I want only to capture a minute part of reality.“ The use of AI in news, documentary or sports photography would be unethical (how you identify fake images is a different issue, which has been around for as long as photography). And I might be old-fashioned, but I want my photographs (and videos) to be an expression of what happened at the ‘decisive moment’ (Cartier-Bresson, again). An AI-generated headshot or placing a person somewhere they weren’t is not photography. (It might be valid artistically, but not as documentary…)
When we attend events, we offer our clients images they can trust. Of course, we use our judgement to choose the best photographs (having planned and selected the shot beforehand) - and we are not averse to a little Photoshop to remove minor distractions or (on our subjects) temporary blemishes - but we show the best of what happened. There’s value in this.
So we think we’ll have a job for a little while longer. We’ll still recommend stock (or AI) images to our clients for those things that don’t need to be real. And we’ll still play with Generative AI in Photoshop because it’s fun. But it’s not photography and it’s not what our clients need.
To finish with yet another Cartier-Bresson quote, “It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera… they are made with the eye, heart and head.“