EDEN OR ABYSS?
By MICHAEL PERKINS
WHY IS IT ALWAYS THIS WAY?
Why do we always unleash new technologies before we bother to determine whether we need them at all, or whether, used wrongly, they can spell disaster for us?
And yes, I am talking about A.I.’s potential impact on photography. More precisely, I’m expressing a bit of panic, echoed by many, as to what it means for the future of the creative process overall.
Let me confess that, prior to this year, I have not experimented much with A.I. as a post-processing tool. Even now, I have only tried a small handful of “for fun” experiments on my own images. Like many. I am really wrestling with what it means to hand any decisions over on my original work to an entity that largely cannot think by itself, even when acting upon my own directives. The images you see in this post constitute the most dramatic “before” and “after” comparisons I’ve yet mustered, and I must admit that I’m a little, well, frightened.
My apprehension comes from finally seeing one of my images changed, in an instant, from one vision of a subject to a believably rendered version of the opposite of that vision. Beyond novelty, it shows the ability to convincingly re-interpret reality, making the ingredients of my original into a secret “recipe” concocted largely by a non-human that’s learned how to sift through gazillions of actual human works and spit out a reasonable fascimile of what I might have intended myself. That should surely inspire awe as a technical breakthrough, but it also poses an essential creative conundrum; where is the role of the individual in all of this?
Until I can answer that question to my satisfaction, I must treat A.I. photography as both phenomenon and menace. The tech will be a route to either Eden or the Abyss, but every photographer must decide what it means to actually create, and whether he or she will in charge of that decision.
(P.S.—-the second image is the A.I.-generated one.
thenormaleye 