Impact of AI on wildlife photo competitions and conservation

[Sean]

Indistinguishable at what level? - tiny web or cellphone images, fuzzy TV screens?

Whatever resolution you want, as far as I know 4K, 8K and beyond as it can just keep upscaling.. Here is a v6 sample but I haven't spent much time looking

 

[Sean]

a few more random v6 examples:

The leap from v5.2 to 6.0 is dramatic, and soon 7.0, 8.0 will be coming and will be orders of magnitude better.

I find the technology both amazing and depressing.

 

[Sean]

And you can prompt it to do classic looking images like so:

 

[Sean]

one more v6:

 

[Sean]

It's one reason I almost never go to movies anymore. Just looks fake, no matter how big the budget.

I think that is going to change in the next 3-5yrs. One has to wonder if movies and TV will become procedurally generated when it achieves hyper-reality. "Make me a new Star Wars film, based on the original, a side story of the cantina bartender, dark comedy style" 2mins later the film is ready

 

[VinceInMT]

…But long before, elections were lost or won, and wars begun, by mere published sketches of untrue things…..

“Remember the Maine!!!”

 

[DREW WILEY]

Now let's put any of that, fake or real, side by side with a 30X40 inch optical print from large format film, and there would be no contest. Hypothetically, it could be done; but fakery and propaganda don't need to even bother, given their own mass-consumption purposes. Most people nowadays have never even seen a sharp picture.

Thirty years ago, the NSA was already so concerned about the possibility or digital deception that they didn't even allow computers in the special facility their U2 9X9 inch surveillance shots were printed using special optical enlarger. Unfortunately, the politicians in charge don't alway listen to expert analysts; and the second Iraq war was justified by a xerox or what was a crude pencil sketch to begin with. Likewise, the Spanish American War was justified by a newspaper sketch of a fictitious event. I think people want to be deceived all too often.

But in a photographic context, it's commercial product photographers risking either career extinction or else learning the same kind of Ai ruses. Advertising will never be the same after a certain point; but most of it is already deceptive anyway.

But pros guilds and owners of museum collections should start doing what some music recorders are now attempting, making piracy manipulation either a criminal or otherwise liable offense analogous to unlicensed theft, copyright or otherwise. You undertake all the overhead and labor, someone else steals the images, and with very little effort re-tweaks it into something marketable, in competition with your original. Same in literature too. Some kind of regulation seems inevitable.

But Campbell's soup already got sued several decades ago for an ad photo misrepresenting just how many edible letters were actually in their Alphabet Soup. We need a new saying, "The only thing which can stop evil Ai is an even more greedy class-action legal firm".

 

[Sirius Glass]

Back to the original thread implications - where does it all end? Who needs real wild wildlife and extant ecosystems when you've got zoos? And who needs even zoos when you can digitally re-created things on a viewing screen or "immersive" indoor experience? A downward spiral. We've already got 98% of scenic photography all gussied up like a cheap whore by Fauxtoshop colorization.

Sirius - being of SoCal, you no doubt recall the famous/infamous dam builder Mulholland. He set his sights, and that of the LA Water Dept, even on Yosemite Valley itself. He said that, just as soon as color photography was developed, simply take some shots of the place, put them in a museum, and then dam the whole thing, and "stop the water waste". That did of course happen to nearby Hetch Hetchy Valley in the same era, but by a different water dept (SF).

I can't even stand wildlife documentaries with all the "wild" animals in them wearing tracking collars. Yes, that might be necessary some places for research and protection purposes. But it sure blunts the edge too. Ai might be able to easily remove the collars during the film editing phase for visual purposes; but it still ain't the same thing ....

Correct. Now Mulholland is better remembered for his slimy and unethical acts and practices than for his work bringing water to the Los Angeles area.

 

[warden]

one more v6:

View attachment 359653

Thanks Sean, the images are amazing and it’s clear to see that AI images will eclipse traditional digital or analog photographs in terms of overall measurable image quality in the short term. What photographers have to offer is their authentic humanity and perspective, which is the silver lining around a very dark cloud.

 

[VinceInMT]

The technology is going to happen and improve and, as an impact, further erode whatever trust or interest the public has in photography. I suppose if we look back at air brushing as an anchor in this continuum, the evolution received a big push with PhotoShop.

All that said, since I don’t make a living from any of this and have always pursued it as an avocation and am not motivated by showing my work, I am not really impacted. Aside from that, these days I spend lots more time drawing than doing photography.

 

[Sirius Glass]

The technology is going to happen and improve and, as an impact, further erode whatever trust or interest the public has in photography. I suppose if we look back at air brushing as an anchor in this continuum, the evolution received a big push with PhotoShop.

All that said, since I don’t make a living from any of this and have always pursued it as an avocation and am not motivated by showing my work, I am not really impacted. Aside from that, these days I spend lots more time drawing than doing photography.

loss of trust or interest the public has in photography is the major concern for me. That is why I have posted about what I call the truth of the negative. I won a court case when I showed a photograph and the judge asked if I had the original negative. I pulled out a PrintFile sheet with the negative, he studied the negative and then ruled in my favor.

 

[VinceInMT]

loss of trust or interest the public has in photography is the major concern for me. That is why I have posted about what I call the truth of the negative. I won a court case when I showed a photograph and the judge asked if I had the original negative. I pulled out a PrintFile sheet with the negative, he studied the negative and then ruled in my favor.

Yes, I think that the negative is sort of the photographer's version of "the hand of the artist."

 

[DREW WILEY]

I heard a recent interview with one of the main fathers of Ai. On the negative side, which he openly admitted, the interviewer asked how we are going to tell what is real from what is fake? - referring mainly to deceptive political and propaganda imagery. His reply was simple - "Don't trust anything until you know otherwise".

 

[warden]

I heard a recent interview with one of the main fathers of Ai. On the negative side, which he openly admitted, the interviewer asked how we are going to tell what is real from what is fake? - referring mainly to deceptive political and propaganda imagery. His reply was simple - "Don't trust anything until you know otherwise".

That advice has been sound for the past 30 years or more, but I agree it’s even more true now.

 

[MartinCrabtree]

............................. His reply was simple - "Don't trust anything until you know otherwise".

That advice has always rung true.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

I think that is going to change in the next 3-5yrs. One has to wonder if movies and TV will become procedurally generated when it achieves hyper-reality. "Make me a new Star Wars film, based on the original, a side story of the cantina bartender, dark comedy style" 2mins later the film is ready

Part of the recent settlement with writers and actors guilds was an incorporation of limited AI use, and certainly no AI that would replace actors.

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

The technology is going to happen and improve and, as an impact, further erode whatever trust or interest the public has in photography. I suppose if we look back at air brushing as an anchor in this continuum, the evolution received a big push with PhotoShop.

All that said, since I don’t make a living from any of this and have always pursued it as an avocation and am not motivated by showing my work, I am not really impacted. Aside from that, these days I spend lots more time drawing than doing photography.

Isn't AI making fake prints, drawings and paintings as well?

 

[Alan Edward Klein]

I heard a recent interview with one of the main fathers of Ai. On the negative side, which he openly admitted, the interviewer asked how we are going to tell what is real from what is fake? - referring mainly to deceptive political and propaganda imagery. His reply was simple - "Don't trust anything until you know otherwise".

I raised the political issue with AI earlier and my post was deleted for being political. I wish we had some sort of standard here because I too feel the politicians will distort reality to influence the public for good and bad ends.

 

[VinceInMT]

Isn't AI making fake prints, drawings and paintings as well?

Absolutely. But I am not dissuaded from practicing my craft just because some bot is doing it as well.

I fully assume that an AI bot could scan the drawings on my web site and be told to create ->fill in the subject<- and base it on my style and it would do so. The final product in graphite on paper might even be possible with, I don’t know, a CNC machine holding a pencil, but, again, it doesn’t have an impact on what I do.

 

[DREW WILEY]

Well, Alan, the same skepticism and distrust SHOULD apply to anything submitted to a photo competition pretending to represent real content like wildlife behavior or actual environments. It would be hard to police; but it could bear the stipulation that if anything was later discovered to be Ai falsified or otherwise blatantly manipulated as a form of cheating, any prize would be revoked, and the offender permanently banned from further competitions. That could at least impact someone's reputation, and provide a warning to others going forward.

"Nature" photo competitions were once like that. Ironically, my brother had his image thrown out of one for having too blue or a sky. They accused him of tinting it. Well, it wasn't a dye transfer print, and nobody had dreamed up PS yet, and a blue filter wasn't over the lens, or else the entire scene would have looked too blue, and not just the sky. He took it up in the mountains, and the LA judges, back in its notoriously smoggy days, apparently never saw a truly blue sky themselves.

 

[VinceInMT]

I raised the political issue with AI earlier and my post was deleted for being political. I wish we had some sort of standard here because I too feel the politicians will distort reality to influence the public for good and bad ends.

We can discuss the use/misuse of the technology without veering into the political realm as the commercial/advertising arena probably has more impact. What you might want to say can be said by applying it in a parallel way without bringing politics. I did see your deleted post which was about critical thinking skills but you made a statement about the electorate which the mods decided was a step in the wrong direction. Instead, I‘d look at how the lack of critical thinking skills allows people to be sucked into buying products and services that they don’t need and that many can’t afford. The advertisers have long used psychologists on their staff to advise how to change someone’s behavior (to get them as a customer) and now with AI they have one extra tool to accomplish that.

I just saw a piece that said many product reviews on Amazon are now AI summaries of actual comments and tend to lean toward the positive. Recommendations work, especially from some celebrity. They also use algorithms for “predictive analytics” to track consumer behavior (even at the individual level) and use adaptive learning to make suggestions about what one should buy. If we were talking about a loaf of bread, that’s one thing, but getting advise to cash out one’s 401K and put it in cryptocurrency, well, ”a fool and his money….”

 

[VinceInMT]

…the LA judges, back in its notoriously smoggy days, apparently never saw a truly blue sky themselves.

I remember that red-brown sky quite well growing up there. Blue? I only saw that on vacation.

An interesting discussion on whether AI deepfakes, and I suppose other content, could be routed out with the use of some kind of watermark on the originals.

https://slashdot.org/story/24/01/14...a-form-of-watermarking-prevent-ai-deep-faking