Is AI the end of photography?

For generic pictures I can see it dominating. But it can never be a source of spectacular records of real events.
 
"is always going to be"
I've learned to distrust that phrase.

There's less than twenty years between the adoption of the last biplane by the British armed forces and the adoption of the Jet Provost as the RAF's main trainer. I've seen so many changes over the last 70 years that I've come to the conclusion that the only thing you can be sure of is change!

Strikemaster and Biplane over Dawlish 7947.JPG
 
I dont think it'll be the end of photography in that sense. It's going to affect commercial photography and stock photography a lot I suspect. As someone already said why buy a stock image when you just get AI to make what you want.
Commercial photography will also be hit IMHO. Firms will simply upload a rough image of their product and get AI to do the clever stuff and add a background/sunset /whatever, why pay a photographer £500 for a morning work when Joe in the packing dept can do it for a few pennies.
I dont thnk it'll affect the hobby as such, most of the fun is taking the pictures.
Competitions.... Oh, dear! It's getting hard to tel real from fakel, and a lot of the companies running the competition dont have a clue or care I suspect. Glad the only ones I enter are for fun here.
 
AI is always going to be behind the curve on whatever is fashionable because it relies on imagery that already exists.

Rather like we've seen popular music change from something organic to something that feels constrained and digital, I expect AI imagery to start setting fashions, with people following (real or synthetic) fashion icons showing AI-designed products.
 
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AI Images will certainly have an important role to play in the decorative and graphic and movie world.
It will not replace photography but will undoubtedly feed on it.

There will no doubt also be a hybrid version of photography that uses AI to enhance images.

Even relative purists will call on AI to help with retouching.and lesser enhancements.

At times it will be difficult for viewers to differentiate between straight photography and AI enhanced work.
But in most instances people will cease to care.
Only in cases where it could been a case of disguising the truth or passing off, will the law intervene.
 
Rather like we've seen popular music change from something organic to something that feels constrained and digital, I expect AI imagery to start setting fashions, with people following (real or synthetic) fashion icons showing AI-deigned products.
Could be. With an evil AI driving next years fashion as a poor impression of what has happened before.
 
I would be interested to know how closely the images apparently created actually matched the source images that the software was trained on. It would not surprise me if you could actually identify parts on the generated pictures that came directly from the source material. And if that were the case, the whole area of copying, plagiarism and copyright should start to apply a strong magnifying glass to generated images, with royalties being paid to copyright owners.

I wonder if the software would tell you which pictures it used as source material.

A real world example - you be the judge

 
A real world example - you be the judge


There was a mild irony that the 'original' was photoshopped, but I appreciate that was also a product of human creativity.
 
It could be argued that the AI isn't "generating" a picture of a seal, deer, or squirrel, but copying an existing one, and just putting a different background on it.

AI only knows what a seal looks like by seeing a previous photograph of one. And memorising/storing it.

So it could be argued that all it's actually doing is searching the internet (or its memory bank that it's been trained with), finding an existing photo of a seal, finding an existing photo of some nice background including a sunset, and putting them together. It hasn't actually created anything from scratch at all.
 
If every time someone sees a sunset, the moon or the milky way they think fake photo, those are going to become less cool pretty quickly.
 
No, it ended when photographers were able to buy their glass plates instead of having to cut them out of a sheet of glass, mix the chemicals and coat the plates just before taking the photo - it completely de-skilled photography :)

As others have said, AI is just another developmental step, and whether we embrace it or oppose it, it's what it is.

Incidentally, I tried using the same prompts as the OP to get AI-generated photos, using chat GPT yesterday, and the results were far from realistic - maybe I used the wrong source.
OK thanks for your opinion.
However
You go out with your camera be it film or digital , Take your images with either a cheap camera or one costing a kings ransom , You get home and look at the images and don't like what you see ? so now you go and buy image manipulation package and sit for maybe hours trying to get the image you want ? Why can your camera not do this after spending what could be £1000's , Surely as a photographer it is your skill when taking the images to make sure you get it right at the time of exposure , Same goes for film and digital , Again my opinion .
 
Gamekeepers hire poachers. Remaining poachers aware of gamekeepers new knowledge, change tactics.
Revolving doors.
The drive to try to detect AI generated images comes from the organisations running competitions or distinctions in the amateur world at least. Those trying to defeat this will be individuals so unlikely to have the skills or resources to do so. There may be other issues in the professional world of which I am not a member.

We already have the problem that some of the more creative images in competitions are failing because of suspicion that they might be AI generated. So it is already interfering with competitions even though it is unlikely that many entries are actually AI generated at this time.

Dave
 
Rather like we've seen popular music change from something organic to something that feels constrained and digital, I expect AI imagery to start setting fashions, with people following (real or synthetic) fashion icons showing AI-designed products.

Ah, but will they physically wear the designs? Or will they just be paraded in a virtual world?
 
Less worried about A.I impacting on photography than I am about it creating machines and using them to kill of the human race tbh.
Yeah, should just let the human race do that on its own; it is doing pretty well.
 
Isn't it already in use for things like 'content aware fill'?
Yes and has been for a few years. However AI has come on a longway since then, and now often uses samples from other images entirely. Rather than just the one you are editing.
In portraiture it uce a Frankenstein mix of other eyes, noses ears and hairlines, to solve problems, as it sees them. The result is often quite unlike the person photographed.
Such changes can be virtually invisible in objects and vegetation, but not in people.
 
Yeah, should just let the human race do that on its own; it is doing pretty well.
I can see it culling the population to sustainable levels. Though the algorithms it might use could have freakish results.
It might decide that virile young men are a bigger threat to the population level than older men. And have them randomly castrated.
Or have them sent to the long pig meat factory for processing.

(Or those that don't know long pig is the euphemism for human meat)
 
All reports suggest pork hence the long pig name given by the south sea natives.
So far as I can discover, the term was invented in the 1840s. I haven't been able to find any convincing evidence that it was ever used by cannibals in their own languages, but perhaps someone knows better?
 
I would be interested to know how closely the images apparently created actually matched the source images that the software was trained on. It would not surprise me if you could actually identify parts on the generated pictures that came directly from the source material. And if that were the case, the whole area of copying, plagiarism and copyright should start to apply a strong magnifying glass to generated images, with royalties being paid to copyright owners.

I wonder if the software would tell you which pictures it used as source material.
This is really an important point and it highlights the fundamental flaws in genAI systems. People don't realise these systems are nowhere near as intelligent as they appear instead they're just sophisticated auto predict models, they can only function by stealing data from other sources and presenting it as their own. Absurdly, openAI have admitted as much in response to the lawsuit against them for stealing data claiming they can't function without copyrighted data:


This reveals the flaw in these systems, if they can steal data for free, present it to a user for a cost without any reference to the source then they're starving that source of money. Since these AI models cannot function without continually stealing data by killing off their own sources, they're killing off the data they need.

What concerns me is that a lot of people just don't realise how much these AI models are just outright stealing data from other sites. Someone on an exercise forum was crediting ChatGPT for creating a workout they were going to follow except of course, ChatGPT didn't. It stole it off another website but we don't know which because it won't tell us and better yet, it may well have errors in it that are not easy to spot, sorry 'hallucinations' (one of the best pieces of marketing there has ever been). It's ok for people to use other websites as sources as long as they're correctly credited and it can be beneficial to the source since people may go there and find more information they like, similarly this person looking for a workout could have found a useful site with other services they'd want to use. But these genAI systems prevent all that.
 
All reports suggest pork hence the long pig name given by the south sea natives.
That's such a typical tp once again. Never stay on topic for too long... :exit:
 
I used to get a decent amount of work shooting products, and food for restaurants. Both of these areas have netted me nothing these past six months, and AI is definitely to blame. Same as my stock photography. I suspect AI is using my old work to generate free crap for businesses.

Some areas will always want real photos of the actual product.

Events and weddings will never want AI.

Humans will always want to create their own art.

I'm quietly hopeful that AI will come to an end once people realise how many resources are being used to generate bad plagiarised art. but I think we're a long way from that point.

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I used to get a decent amount of work shooting products, and food for restaurants. Both of these areas have netted me nothing these past six months, and AI is definitely to blame. Same as my stock photography. I suspect AI is using my old work to generate free crap for businesses.

Some areas will always want real photos of the actual product.

Events and weddings will never want AI.

Humans will always want to create their own art.

I'm quietly hopeful that AI will come to an end once people realise how many resources are being used to generate bad plagiarised art. but I think we're a long way from that point.

| Website | Instagram |
The emissions point is very important. I doubt it will bring AI to and end, but it may slow it down. We're in the Wild West stage - tech businesses are cashing in without paying for the content they are "learning" from, nor their carbon footprint.
 
I am reasonably confident that we will have some AI software which will readily recognise AI generated images soon.

Dave
I hope so. Imagine the situation if we had AI in the days of the footballer Maradona and the 'Hand of God' It would have been so easy to reconstruct the image to show he never touched the ball with his hand
 
Wasn't it one of the great oil painters in the 19th C who declared that photography would kill off oil painting? Well it is still with us! What goes around comes around!
 
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If every time someone sees a sunset, the moon or the milky way they think fake photo, those are going to become less cool pretty quickly.
Allegedly, on some phones, if you take a picture that includes the moon, it recognises the moon, and downloads a stock hi-res version and replaces it with that. Criminal, I know. And might well be a myth or toggleable setting, but I have heard it.

iPhones definitely have the fake bokeh option, but it’s off by default (or you have to apply it as a specific process)
 
I hope so. Imagine the situation if we had AI in the days of the footballer Maradona and the 'Hand of God' It would have been so easy to reconstruct the image to show he never touched the ball with his hand
Did you know, in spot the ball competitions, the “correct “ answer isn’t where the ball actually was, but where some ‘expert’ decides it should have been (using an image with it already cloned out, ie playing the game themselves). Why? Because apparently the gambling commission forbids betting on an event that’s already taken place.
 
Allegedly, on some phones, if you take a picture that includes the moon, it recognises the moon, and downloads a stock hi-res version and replaces it with that. Criminal, I know. And might well be a myth or toggleable setting, but I have heard it.

Samsung IIRC.
 
Devil's advocate kinda thing here.

How much of the generative AI is actually that? Half the thing with "AI" is that it's harvesting the Internet for information. How much if the photo stuff is not generated photos, but just a new form of Google image search with maybe a slight tweak to counter a copyright claim? All of these companies have already been found to not give a hoot about how or where they get the information to "train" their software. So that photo you took and uploaded to the forum may just get a tweak by a computer and served to someone in Vietnam as a computer generated picture of a Welsh castle in the mist, and that company gets the profits. I've seen the truly computer generated photos, and they look like crap..
 
This machine learning is pretty good at generating images of things that there are pictures of all over the internet - famous people, places and things. But ask it to make a picture of something niche, such as a rare breed of sheep, and it's f***ed.

AI Lonk sheep:

472639745_1217745139922380_2785519367761645320_n.jpg

Actual Lonk sheep:

457363191_1125404392489789_5981685604175602012_n.jpg
 
Because apparently the gambling commission forbids betting on an event that’s already taken place.
I should hope so, too.

Mind you, how will they handle time travel? I've long made the assumption that the Doctor runs his TARDIS on the proceeds of making bets on things, which are to him, a certainty. :coat:
 
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