AI Photography

Taking it "ad absurdum", I suppose a laser print of anything is a photograph - a laser is light and the product is drawn/written by it.
 
Phil V said:
It took an hour to write that? ;)
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I failed to post it somehow (often happens) and came back and saw it unposted without noticing Dave’s above :LOL:
Phil V said:
The ‘proper’ definition of editing? Not sure how it’s relevant tbh.

Each of those images is a photograph whether the photographer chooses to show them to anyone or not, because they are images created by capturing the light reflected off a subject.
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I actually think everybody in this thread actually agrees what a photograph is! It’s just that nailing down precise definitions of almost anything is a bügger … or a minefield :LOL: . And mostly a waste of time unless, for example, one is drawing up rules for a completion -- look at sport currently!
 
My 2p

While photographers are busy debating what is and what is not a photograph, I suspect we will find that the markets for photography are rapidly usurped by AI-generated images.

@Raymond Lin observed that it depends which field you are in, but there are a lot of fields where photography is susceptible to being replaced by AI,.

As a rough guide, that is everywhere that photography replaced hand-drawn illustration in the last hundred years or so. The first areas to go will be the more generic stock photography where web sites are looking for 'man confused by computer' or 'Euros left on a table to pay for lunch'.

Amongst the attractions for image-buyers will be that they don't have to negotiate licensing for each image, just come up with an appropriate prompt.

If you're looking for an image to illustrate 'Liverpool waterfront' and you can summon up several convincing images synthesised by an AI service in a few seconds that can be freely used for little or no money, or spend hours trawling through Shutterstock or Getty, then have to pay a significant fee and carefully observe the licensing terms, which option is more attractive?

It's easy enough to foresee that advertising agencies will move to combining 3D CGI models of products with AI -generated environments and cut out the messy business of paying a photographer to photograph real things in real places, then have them retouched to meet the original brief. Think of 1930s adverts for clothes; nobody cared much that the pictures were drawn rather than photographed.

Grimes is licensing an AI version of her voice for a 50% cut of the sales on any tracks it's used on. It's not difficult to imagine a scenario where magazine needing a 'photo shoot' with a busy celebrity negotiates to using an AI imagery with the artist's agent instead of taking time out of their schedule.

Celebrities will want proper control of the use of their likeness in AI generated images and that may have a knock on effect the legal position for real photography. There's plenty of precedent in places like Germany and with the estates of Albert Einstein and Marilyn Monroe. Less likely perhaps, is that there will be some recognition of the rights of photographers whose images are used to train generative AI systems in the same way that the rights of musical artist whose work was sampled were recognised in the 80s and 90s.

Raymond is right - fields like wedding photographers will probably be the last redoubt of 'real' professional photography, where there is a desire to capture a moment. The big question is whether limited markets like that are sufficient to sustain the photographic industry that we know today.
 
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I wonder whether we may see a resurgence in some areas of professional photography, with photographers almost becoming "trusted"celebrities.

For example news outlets advertising that all the photos with a news story were taken by their "trusted" photographer "Billy Snapper". Billy being well known as a photographer with integrity and someone the public "know and trust" to provide photographs that show things as they really were (within the bounds that no photograph ever fully tells the truth).

Even stock photography of things like holiday destinations, may change from using cheap stock images to using photographs by named, and trusted, photographers. With travel agents, travel magazines etc promoting all the photographs used in their marketing were taken by "trusted" photographer Billy Snapper's sister.

Or maybe product photographs. e.g will potential customers want to know that the images of a "unsinkable boat" are really from a stormy sea with a real person actually in the boat taking photographs and not simply an AI generated image.

I'm not arguing this will be a massive market, but I also think that some industries will feel the need to counteract the idea that "everything" is probably fake and can't be trusted.

It may even be, long term, good for photography, even if fewer people make a living from it, just as photography was arguably good for painting,
 
Well, that's an interesting thought. I'm still waiting for my rock star status though. :D
 
Photography will carry on for people selling unique items. Be that handmade jewellery or pedigree livestock because potential customers want to see the actual thing they are interested in buying. There might not be a business model to be built around all these niche markets, but the photography will continue.
 
If I am correct in my thinking, currently AI (or preferably Machine Learning) images are generated from bits and pieces accumulated from the web and are not actually 'imagined' by a computer. If human photographers are side-lined by AI altogether then the only images that it can generate will be from images generated by AI itself. Could that not mean that eventually any apparent 'creation' of images will become samey, monotonous and largely predictable? Like an inbred population of people, everything will start to look the same apart from occasional horrifying mutations which no one will want. Without a creative input from a very unpredictable human, AI 'photography must surely, given time, disappear up its own a.s.hole. Just a thought.
 
ShinySideUp said:
If I am correct in my thinking, currently AI (or preferably Machine Learning) images are generated from bits and pieces accumulated from the web and are not actually 'imagined' by a computer. If human photographers are side-lined by AI altogether then the only images that it can generate will be from images generated by AI itself. Could that not mean that eventually any apparent 'creation' of images will become samey, monotonous and largely predictable? Like an inbred population of people, everything will start to look the same apart from occasional horrifying mutations which no one will want. Without a creative input from a very unpredictable human, AI 'photography must surely, given time, disappear up its own a.s.hole. Just a thought.
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I think that is essentially correct. I think it will evolve to much of a sameness. But will anyone care? That will be the crux of the matter. By then it will just be so much content designed to fill the void of media. On a more positive note it may arrive at a state whereby it can create it's own, original work, shortly before it wipes us out. :eek:
 
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