SPITTING BACK THE CANDY
A straght-out-of-the-iPhone shot. Not remarkable, but not bad, and all my own.
By MICHAEL PERKINS
IT HAS TAKEN ME SOME TIME TO SORT OUT MY FEELINGS about the onrushing tsunami of interaction between photography and artificial intelligence. I have tried to see this tech wave as a bounty of new, useful tools, or a step toward greater efficiency. I really have tried. But I can’t get there, and now I fully understand why.
Creativity is often a collaboration, but it is a human function, and so, even collaborators in any creative act should be aligned in their common humanity. Humans have a distinct way of viewing problems, assessing results, and making executive decisions about where a given piece of art is born and where it arrives. Any process in which humans delegate this authority to non-human entities ceases to be creativity, since it surrenders the agency of the creator.
The same image, fed through a faux-painting A.I. generator app called Oilbrush.
And then there is the problem of authorship, which is called into question the very instant that a photographer makes use of an A.I. generator. In the image above, my original photo from the top of the page has been fed into an app called Oilbrush, which, as its name suggests, simulates the tonal and textural feel of a painting. In an instant, it samples billions of pictures from millions of artists, simulating their approach, technique, and, yes, even the type of brushstroke they used in an endless random mix of elements. When I click a tab in the app, I have no idea whose ideas I am compromising, or stealing outright, to enhance my own. I have traded any pretense at originality or honesty for instant gratification. Efficient as hell, and soulless.
I love playing with all these toys, but having spent some time in the their strange playroom. I do not wish to present work as “mine” when I can’t even have a conversation with my “collaborators”. I am not obligated by career pressures to fold this revolution into my own photography, and so I am free to make pictures in the way that I trust….that is, of myself, by myself. The tech treats offered these days are indeed tasty. However, after the first flavorful burst of sweetness, some of us will choose to spit back the candy.
OPEN THE POD BAY DOORS, HAL
By MICHAEL PERKINS
“ASK THE MAN WHO OWNS ONE”, suggested an ad for Packard automobiles in 1949, the idea being, I guess, that only someone who’d had the personal experience of driving said car could convey the utter delight of it. That slogan ran through my mind the other day when I saw the first image made by a photographer friend using artificial intelligence, an image that prompted me to ask this truly creative artist not what the process felt like, but only the single word, “why?”
Legal disclaimer dept: I guess if you have to insist that you aren’t a luddite you may at least have worried that you might actually be one, so let’s openly stipulate that I am not yet sold or unsold on A.I. as a tool for myself. Instead, let’s try to lay the thing out logistically. Making an A.I. picture entails dictating your terms, i.e., the elements and style for the image you want, into a computer program, then allowing it to sample examples of those features across every photograph it can access to assemble a composite result that satisfies those terms. For example, you could make a list that included instructions, like sunset, red skies, light clouds, rustic barn, scattered sheep on wooded hillside, etc., then view the results within an amazingly short period of time. That’s greatly oversimplified, but, in a nutshell, that’s the gig.
This image is manipulated, for sure. But I’m the one who did the manipulating. Of my own shot.
And so my initial question is, why would I regard this as a creative exercise, any more than I would feel a pride of a sandwich’s “authorship” after shouting my ingredients through the McDonald’s take-out window. Making a photograph is about as personal a thing as I have ever attempted, and the fact that I, myself direct how much ketchup, pickle or lettuce goes into the thing is what makes it mine. A.I. already makes some amazing images, and, for editors or marketers who can now order up anything they can imagine, on budget and on deadline, I see endless applications in the commercial world. But merely envisioning the end product and then submitting your order seems, to me, to be taking one’s hand off the creative steering wheel too completely and way, way too early. It’s like hiring a birth surrogate and then telling your friends that you “had” a baby. Well, no, you didn’t.
The move from photography to A.I. imagery is not like the shift from analog to digital. That was merely a change from one light recording medium to another. And it’s not the same as standard image manipulation, either, because, again, the artist is directly involved in every stage of post-processing. We’re in new territory here. A.I. can’t even be compared to assembly arts like photomontage, because while the final work is pieced together from disparate elements, the combining and arranging are all accomplished by a direct, personal act of assembly. And we don’t even have space here to discuss what A.I. will mean to the idea of “authorship”, which the internet has already shredded into swiss cheese. Right now (the end of 2023, in case you read this later in an archive), it’s an amazing process that generates images. And, as time goes by, the artist will be no doubt be more directly involved in making those images closer, in nature, to actual photographs. But we’re not there yet. Not by a long shot.
thenormaleye 