My Thoughts on AI in Photography
This is a hot button topic. As an IT instructor, yes that is the job I hope to be leaving behind for YouTube, I can tell you that there is a lot of concern out there as to what jobs will disappear because of AI. Should you be concerned? Yes. AI is a very powerful tool but, it is also flawed.
The Tuscany countryside with mountain generate by AI and fields in evening light
In my IT classes I easily prove that AI still suffers from an “emerging property” called “hallucination”. In short, the AI makes stuff up and presents it as fact. Case in point, more often than not if you have an AI render an image of a human, they are going to have a few extra digits on each hand. Will AI get better? Yes. But there are still things that an AI cannot do. For example, be somewhere.
An AI can only piece together and image based on samples that it has been given. It cannot be at a wedding. It cannot capture the wonders of nature as they are happening. An AI cannot capture what is happening in the real world in real time. It cannot be there when a whale gives birth or as a polar bear walks across the ice. It is impossible for it to photography an un-contacted tribe in the amazon or thrill of riding a train through the alps. There is no way that AI can walk across the Antarctic ice cap. It can only piece together what it has been told.
There is quit a bit of discussion about the use of AI in photography. Let me be clear, we have been manipulating photos for decades. I learned how to do masking, burning and dodging in high school photography with film. We have been doing it with photoshop since the 90s. AI is just another tool. It is how that tool is being used is the question.
This last week in a cloud computing class, there was a participant who was also a photographer. He asked me for my opinion about the use of AI in photography. It was very simple for me to respond. I use AI denoise so I can take photos under darker conditions when I need to use a high ISO. I use it to help me remove objects that I do not like from my photos. For those of you that have seen my landscape photos, you know that I do not like powerlines or any tower objects in my photos. One thing that I do not do is add objects using AI.
Let’s say I feel that a photo would be more balanced if a large flower vase was on a table. For me, using an AI to add that element is just not something that I am interested in. Creating the inspiring photo that grabs the viewers attention is part of the fun and challenge of capturing that movement. I don’t want to snap a picture and then have an AI make it look interesting. That is my job. I need to be there to assess the scene. Work to find the composition. Leverage the light that has been given to me. Do I still make adjustments in lightroom, yes. I do but I do the work myself.
