Is A.I. bad for photography?

“Today everything exists to end in a photograph” - Susan Sontag

Writer and critic Susan Sontag argued that photographs, no matter their initial merit or quality, will eventually become history, and that "Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality... "

But with the rise of AI creation, including in my professional work, we're entering a challenging new chapter of the digital age, where the old ideas on photography are becoming increasingly blurred as our understanding of reality, truth, context and authenticity disintegrate with each new iteration of the technology.

If you can artificially create a photo-realistic image using AI, derived from an archive of learned data from our real world, then is that image an amalgamation of reality? Does it have the same visual merit as a photograph?

TLDR: Our society will go through an initial phase of AI being everywhere, but the desire for authenticity combined with increased scepticism, legislation and misinformation, will lead to a resurgence of human input.

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I'm primarily a photographer, so I have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo and the 'art' of photography. That said, technology always evolves, and 150 years ago sketch artists would have looked at cameras with the same suspicion as we are viewing AI tools. But, as with cameras in the 1860s, AI isn't going anywhere, so it's important to explore how it will change whole industries and our society very rapidly. 

The prompt for this image was "a picture of AI creating an AI image" - so I guess this is how it sees itself

Most people have already been exposed to AI photographs. Many won't have realised. As a society, we have to learn, and very quickly accept, that nothing we see can be believed. You could argue this has been true for a long time; that photo-doctoring is as old as the medium. But I believe AI is different: generating photorealistic visual content through neural networks, forming a simulation of our reality and a grey area between reality and fiction at a level and scale we haven't experienced before. Our brains simply aren't evolved enough to cope with the level of computerisation we are now living with.

However, I almost certainly think that 99% of AI visuals created will be mundane, ultimately created to sell products. Brands will no longer be willing to spend millions physically creating a static ad campaign when they can generate, tailor, target and subsequently evolve one at a fraction of the time and cost. We're already in this world and jobs are going to disappear rapidly across industries, especially creative ones like advertising, marketing, TV, film, VFX, editing, design, fashion and food. The social ramifications will be profound. You don't need to be a Luddite to question if this is sensible.

"I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes" - Joanna Maciejewska

At the same time, malicious use, whether state sponsored, criminal, terrorist or other, will lead governments to introduce controls on AI, or lead to it being banned entirely. This is inevitable - all it takes is one deepfake distorting an election or causing civil unrest, even collapsing a government, and we'll see a Geneva-style convention on the use of AI. The seeds of this are already germinating online as the UK, USA and other countries enter election phases. I'm not sure current policy makers really understand the true ramifications of this tech, let alone being able to act quickly enough, but even if they do, has it already developed and proliferated too far to be controlled?

Ultimately, we'll quickly grow accustomed to AI visuals and most will accept them as part of our lives, barely even noticing. But as with the digitisation of books and music before, I think we'll eventually crave human-generated content; we'll want the 'soul' that comes from real, human creative input. AI will be a supporting tool, but, I hope, we'll embrace our own creativity even more as a result of it.

Within a few months, let alone years, we'll have tools creating visuals indistinguishable from reality. On a philosophical level, how do you know something is real? Does it even matter? How do you prove it? Ultimately I think the key to photography is connection - we want our imagery to make us feel something, to be able to relate to the subject, or have an emotional response to what we are viewing. AI is merely an aggregator, a blender of things it has crawled through in datasets. It can only ever be a simulation at best. Whether this impacts how we relate to the images is a matter of personal, subjective preference; as with 'real' photography now. So in many ways, it doesn't matter if AI or a human creates the image.

But I'd argue we have an innate human essence that AI will always struggle to capture. It will always lack that extra something which comes from a human's emotional, (conscious or subconscious) decision to do something. It was also lack the serendipity, the chance and randomness which comes from human creativity and reality. The imperfections of human existence.

What do you think?

This post was written by ChatGPT (just kidding, I wasted my own afternoon on it).