I keep getting asked the AI question: "do I use AI?" Or sometimes "do I think AI will render photography meaningless?"
My answers are "yes" and "no" respectively. And in those answers lies the headline: I sometimes use AI tools to assist in my conversion and processing, but I'm not into generating completely new scenes. (There's also a "middle area" between the two, such as generative expand, where you use an AI tool to mimic an area to extend a scene, which isn't so much making up something new as using what's known to project further.)
But let's examine that second question a bit. The implication behind it is that our Insta and Tok doom scrolls will become full of deep fake landscapes, selfies, portraits, and more. That instead of capturing the news—e.g. photojournalism and broadcast journalism—we'll be illustrating someone's opinion of the news. Real Estate listings would be 100% fake. Food ads will go from their current highly manipulated to totally fake. You wouldn't need to buy new fashion from a clothing store, as you could just swipe it in on your selfies from the Generative Fashion store. Heck, you could probably skin your Kia with some sort of system that allows it to chameleon into a Porsche.
That's not a real world. That's living in a fantasy world. As much as Hollywood seems to want to have us live in fantasy worlds two hours at a time, I don't believe such a universe is livable 24/7. Way back in 1978 I wrote a screenplay called Labor Day where I envisioned such a existence that was so reversed from reality, that Labor Day was celebrated by actually doing some (unnecessary) labor. The realm the characters lived in, however, was antiseptic and monolithic because ultimately, you can't change the fantasy on everyone every day. That would not only be exhausting, but counterproductive.
I'll remind everyone that painting went through this same crisis (caution: I'm going to extremely oversimplify). Cave art slowly evolved from absolutely crude, symbolic, and mostly unrecognizable to us to something that we do recognize, though still crude. Over time the notion of realism became mainstream. Then in the 1800's we started to see the rapid creative branching that led to impressionism, cubism, and all the other isms. Realism, though, is still clearly present in painting, though (e.g. social realism, new realism, and particularly photorealism).
Ultimately, the visual arts are all about "made you look." Preferably: "made you look, pause, and study." There's no doubt that Generative Photography will make you look, especially as it gets more and more extreme. However, Real Photography done well and right has always been in the "made you look, pause, and study" category, particularly because it relates a story/place/event that existed and is meaningful, not a fantasy that will never exist. Thus, I believe we'll continue to see high practitioner photographers who understand this and continue to do the Sontag thing ("stand on the shoulders of those that came before...").
And those photographers very well may use AI assists to try to ferret out things that mask the underlying reality, such as noise (and particularly color noise). They'll use AI-based autofocusing for times when they can't manually follow a subject fast enough. They may even use generative remove to take something out of a scene as they would have done had they had the ability (e.g. that white RV parked way out there in your otherwise natural scene). I'm all for those helpful uses of AI.
But just typing words into a browser to get back an fantasy image? No, not for me, and not a photograph.
