It is not what you call yourself, it is what others call you that seems to be the issue.
"Photography IS Film"
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AI, Artificial Intelligence, is really a marketing tool. Computationally intense automated algorithmic searching and processing is a better term, but is a bit cumbersome (and less sexy and controversial; thus marketing). There are positive aspects to AI and there are dangers. It is here. We need to learn to deal with it. Short of massive EMP strikes, it is unlikely to reverse.
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Not for me. People can and have called me a million different names. One or two of them were even nice.
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OP
Well, of course everyone can draw whatever lines they like. My concern for the future is to still have some human creativity and skill expressed in a society run by AI tyrants.
I think that is a Chicken Little mentality. Hand made objects only become more valuable with an increase in mechanization. The problem is the ability to afford them.
Meanwhile Google Maps is still making mistakes calculating routes. Don't believe everything you read, specially in general/popular press.
Art is above any other consideration a form of expression. Painting, sculpture, dancing, music, writting, photography, cinema... they are just vehicles. All of them will exist somehow as long as human beings along with new ones we can't imagine now.
...and apparently some digital image makers feel...what left out? diminished somehow? Your argument goes both ways,
Perhaps some digital imagers would feel diminished if they were excluded from the definition of photographer. Probably depends on who is doing the excluding, and what their new moniker would be. I may not be very sophisticated, but whether I am using a film or digital camera, or making traditional, hybrid, or digital prints, it sure feels like I am doing photography. At lot has changed in the 45 years I've been doing this, but the essential elements remain the same, at least for me.
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General press? Ok, try this piece on how Amazon is destroying the publishing industry and seriously hurting the best, most talented, creative writers.
https://thefutureofpublishing.com/2014/03/how-amazon-destroyed-the-publishing-ecosystem/
Everything I've said about the subject of AI and photos, has essentially already happened in publishing toward the end of reducing the success of talented artists. The difference is that Amazon is already done destroying publishing, and Google and the other tyrants have just started destroying the art in photography and film making.
The effect of all this mass deployment of AI and various algorithms is: pushing serious creative artists off the map, and substituting them with automatons and rank amateurs, and garbage output. In the case of Amazon, the best writers are lost in a forest of pure garbage. Artists are what keep the worst inclinations of mankind from exercising their will on society. When gone, Katy bar the door.
Let's look at the Apple-Adobe-Google photographic play. When any Joe Shmoe - even an idiot - can type a few words into a PC and *cough* create a striking image of Yosemite - a place he's never seen - and then offer it for sale on all the stock catalogs, what schlub is going to hike the mountain with an 8 x 10 field camera as AA once did? Are you kidding? Look at the economics at work here.
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huh ?
ive been doing photography for decades and have cut my teeth on 8mm and DV .. and google and their tyrants have had absolutely nothing to do with anything i have done
today met with a friend who makes giant 10 foot long/scrollimage and google has nothing to do with it.
im more worried about getting the right grade aluminium for my tin foil hat than google and AI,
(after all) "bob" dobbs tells us about the conspiracy and we all need slack
... as bobby says " don't worry, be happy "
Here's one of my clients ( I processed his Ektachrome High Speed)...he lived life and didn't tell other people what things meant.
https://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/last-days-of-victor-wong/content?oid=9103
https://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/last-days-of-victor-wong/content?oid=9103
yup. nowhere does it say chemistry or darkroom or what have you.
The unique contribution of photography to the culture, has been its ability to capture a moment in time. That's all it means to me. You only have to look at the history of photography, or indeed a Flickr stream today, to see that isn't what it represents to lots of other people. They see photography as a branch of graphic design, or even fine art. The image captured is clay to their potter, stone to their sculptor, a starting point, data to be corralled to their objectives,
I attach no moral deficit to such an approach, nor is one possible. It's simply a matter of taste. All photography is abstraction, but there's a tacit acknowledgement that it tells a kind of truth more directly than the alternatives. Once it leaves that sphere it becomes something else, commerce often, tasteless frequently. Of no interest to me, certainly.
I attach no moral deficit to such an approach, nor is one possible. It's simply a matter of taste. All photography is abstraction, but there's a tacit acknowledgement that it tells a kind of truth more directly than the alternatives. Once it leaves that sphere it becomes something else, commerce often, tasteless frequently. Of no interest to me, certainly.
Would you feel the same about the 'Painter' not being called a 'Painter' in an exhibition because she used a Wacom tablet, painting software and output her 'oils' as an inkjet print? I'm sure people who have used real paints for decades and switch to using that software still feel like they are painting in some way, though the process and materials have changed.
Should she continue to be called a Painter (with no suffix or prefix) so she doesn't feel 'diminished'?
Really? Is the work you produce really all that matters? See the photo below.
A few years ago I climbed up the castle hill in Vilnius and took the photo on the left with my X100. That's exactly what it looked like: boring and foggy. And with a couple of clicks in Lightroom and Nik Effects, it looked like the one on the right (complete with film grain, you'll notice!). When I look at it today, I'm embarrassed. It looks over-processed and generally hideous, but the point is it's a total fake. I could have posted this to Facebook with the comment, "Amazing light in Vilnius today!", and I would have received a load of likes and maybe lots of people wanting to travel to Vilnius for the 'amazing morning light'. Which I faked. With a click or two.
Multiply that by a hundred billion, and you have today's Photography.
You see no problem with that?
(queue people saying I could have done the same in the darkroom).
The original definition of Photography is extremely broad, which means that almost any technology, no matter how devoid of human input, skill, art or craft, will be covered by the name. I think that's beyond argument. Consequently I'm coming to the conclusion that we went seriously off-track a couple of decades ago, when digital photography hit the mainstream and gallery owners, museums, buyers etc. decided not to stick with giving it a different name to define the process and materials used. The decision probably felt right at the time, but with the advances of AI and photo software in general, I believe the decision has left us in a bad place. We now have this thing called Photography which is so far away from the honest reality of the original craft as to sometimes be unrecognisable. This is only going to get worse and I can see it accelerating as AI starts to work it's way into mainstream software.
I am often wondering why people spend so much time online on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other media. It could be (between other things) that world is presented as nicer, more ideal, and more cool on the edited photos than in reality. Best example are self-portraits where majority of people present them self in much nicer, prettier, skinner, cooler way - in a false way. Your example is also following my toughts.
I got sick of Facebook a long time ago, primarily because of the endless bragging and 'one-upmanship': Look at my huge TV. Look at me on the beach in the Caribbean while you're all stuck at home. Look at my beautiful children. Look at my gorgeous dress. Look at my expensive lens. Look at this sunset that my new expensive camera took [which I processed to death to look much better than reality because I have to justify the cost, convince people I'm an amazing photographer even though I take the same tedious shots as everyone else, and compete with all the other OTT fakes on social media]. It's no wonder teenagers are suffering enormous mental health issues due to social media, after being immersed in it for years at such a young and impressionable age.
I also found I reached the point with Facebook, Twitter etc. where every photo seemed to be going around and around, just taken by different people with fancier and more expensive cameras. Every wedding shoot looked the same, every 'edgy' fashion shoot, every photo of 'grungy urban decay' etc. etc. And don't get me started on 'street photography'
Not that forums are any different. If you hang around long enough you'll find 99% of threads are repeated over and over.
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@FujiLove
AI is already in consumer software from Adobe and Google, and AI chips are now being put in lower end consumer cameras. So, it's already here and the pictures spewing out of that AI mind will have less and less and less authenticity until they have no human creativity in them at all. And we haven't even talked yet about "drone photography."
Anecdote:
8 years ago I was in a photo critique with 40 others. A person pinned a photo on the board of a charming back porch scene with a few twinkling lights. After a sentence or two the person said, "Oh, that moon wasn't there. I added that in Photoshop." The room gasped. The Rubicon had been crossed and everyone knew it. It was the huge moon behind the roofline that made the picture. Sure, everyone used P'shop for tuning a picture, but no one would have dreamed of adding a whole element from another picture. That was beyond the pale. It's not that plenty of faking hadn't been done in darkrooms, but everyone understood that the Photoshop just made such nonsense almost irresistible. Should we praise the next gorgeous picture, or is this one fake too? What sort of talent is represented in this one? Was the person really this good at composition or was this stuff added later? It mattered, even though no one expressly said "this just ain't right." Everyone had a level of discomfort about Photoshop. Everyone became kind of defensive - "I only adjusted the contrast" was heard everywhere. There were endless side discussions over the next year or so about how people should describe a photo they present. Everyone agreed that for sure any added elements should be disclosed, etc.
The important thing to note about this is that Photoshop easily won the economic battle as "the easiest and cheapest way to process images." Darkroom equipment was sold off at garage sale prices by the heaps. Everyone already had a PC, so adding editing software and a relatively dirt cheap Epson was a no-brainer. No more waiting for expensive lab prints to arrive in the mail. No more trips to Costco print center. The called it the "Digital Dark Room" which was a complete misnomer, but it made everyone comfortable that all they had done is "update their technology" - nothing had really changed. And at all the superficial levels, that's true - it was just a new way to develop pictures. But of course, that's a superficial analysis. What changed is that human creativity was being replaced incrementally with artificial creativity - bit by bit - ever so slowly - until the last bit of human creativity is wrung out of the process. A fully crap photo can easily be turned into a master-piece with the click of a mouse.
"All that matters is the final picture." Well, no. I'll say that the picture is what matters LEAST. What had mattered socially was the human creativity, because those creatives had a major influence on society specifically because of their creativity. "AI" is a social poison that crowds out the rare creative persons, and floods the arena with buffoons who can click a mouse. In economic terms, AI lowers the cost of production by orders of magnitude. What took 10 hours in a dark room, takes 10-seconds with AI. Cheap chases out expensive. That's just fundamental to market societies. When the iPhone was launched with camera, "serious" photogs laughed up their sleeves - "who would take pictures with such a crappy camera?" Who? Billions of people globally, that's who. Now the phone camera is a staple of photography. Go to any larger event and compare the number of people snapping away on phones to those with Nikon/Canon traditional cameras.
I use Photoshop/Lightroom too. I have had Epson printers. I own expensive digital cameras. I have shot pics with cell phones. I am a part of the flow, too. I am not making any moral judgments about individuals (in spite of the number of posts which assume I am). I am caught up in the same economic tsunami as everyone else. I am merely saying to artists who care - "watch out...things are getting worse...let's not lose the world of creativity to AI (alien intelligence)."
AI is already in consumer software from Adobe and Google, and AI chips are now being put in lower end consumer cameras. So, it's already here and the pictures spewing out of that AI mind will have less and less and less authenticity until they have no human creativity in them at all. And we haven't even talked yet about "drone photography."
Anecdote:
8 years ago I was in a photo critique with 40 others. A person pinned a photo on the board of a charming back porch scene with a few twinkling lights. After a sentence or two the person said, "Oh, that moon wasn't there. I added that in Photoshop." The room gasped. The Rubicon had been crossed and everyone knew it. It was the huge moon behind the roofline that made the picture. Sure, everyone used P'shop for tuning a picture, but no one would have dreamed of adding a whole element from another picture. That was beyond the pale. It's not that plenty of faking hadn't been done in darkrooms, but everyone understood that the Photoshop just made such nonsense almost irresistible. Should we praise the next gorgeous picture, or is this one fake too? What sort of talent is represented in this one? Was the person really this good at composition or was this stuff added later? It mattered, even though no one expressly said "this just ain't right." Everyone had a level of discomfort about Photoshop. Everyone became kind of defensive - "I only adjusted the contrast" was heard everywhere. There were endless side discussions over the next year or so about how people should describe a photo they present. Everyone agreed that for sure any added elements should be disclosed, etc.
The important thing to note about this is that Photoshop easily won the economic battle as "the easiest and cheapest way to process images." Darkroom equipment was sold off at garage sale prices by the heaps. Everyone already had a PC, so adding editing software and a relatively dirt cheap Epson was a no-brainer. No more waiting for expensive lab prints to arrive in the mail. No more trips to Costco print center. The called it the "Digital Dark Room" which was a complete misnomer, but it made everyone comfortable that all they had done is "update their technology" - nothing had really changed. And at all the superficial levels, that's true - it was just a new way to develop pictures. But of course, that's a superficial analysis. What changed is that human creativity was being replaced incrementally with artificial creativity - bit by bit - ever so slowly - until the last bit of human creativity is wrung out of the process. A fully crap photo can easily be turned into a master-piece with the click of a mouse.
"All that matters is the final picture." Well, no. I'll say that the picture is what matters LEAST. What had mattered socially was the human creativity, because those creatives had a major influence on society specifically because of their creativity. "AI" is a social poison that crowds out the rare creative persons, and floods the arena with buffoons who can click a mouse. In economic terms, AI lowers the cost of production by orders of magnitude. What took 10 hours in a dark room, takes 10-seconds with AI. Cheap chases out expensive. That's just fundamental to market societies. When the iPhone was launched with camera, "serious" photogs laughed up their sleeves - "who would take pictures with such a crappy camera?" Who? Billions of people globally, that's who. Now the phone camera is a staple of photography. Go to any larger event and compare the number of people snapping away on phones to those with Nikon/Canon traditional cameras.
I use Photoshop/Lightroom too. I have had Epson printers. I own expensive digital cameras. I have shot pics with cell phones. I am a part of the flow, too. I am not making any moral judgments about individuals (in spite of the number of posts which assume I am). I am caught up in the same economic tsunami as everyone else. I am merely saying to artists who care - "watch out...things are getting worse...let's not lose the world of creativity to AI (alien intelligence)."
Don't tell Jerry Uelsmann...
Doesn’t Facebook just send you things your “Facebook friends” have posted? If that’s what you’re seeing, you chose your friends poorly.
“Almost irresistible”? Yet the vast majority manage to resist Photoshop’s siren song quite easily. But you saw one photo 8 years ago, so everything is suspect.
Limiting the definition of photography to film and chemistry isn't going to solve any of these issues.
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I hear you there. I see tons of beautiful landscapes, often with uber dramatic clouds. I no longer trust them. I wonder were those clouds there? If you pixel peek sometimes it is easy to see they were added. Is it wrong to add clouds? Maybe with moderation it is ok, e.g., you have a blank sky, but just add a few clouds/sky so the white sky is not distracting. MAYBE ok. But if adding the clouds that were not there makes the picture (or adding the moon), then for sure it crosses the line. I sometimes remove a subtle, but distracting element from a photo, and even wonder about that. For portraits often I remove blemishes and smooth (especially for women), but this is expected. I prefer street style portraits, where I do not modify the face.
I notice a lot of software training videos show people adding clouds and elements as though it was nothing. They need to promote the power of their product. For commercial photography and graphic arts purposes, this is acceptable.
I saw one such photo on another forum (amazing image with uber dramatic clouds). I asked the photographer politely on the forum (after praising the otherwise amazing image) if he added the clouds. In the mean time he posted another, and it also had uber dramatic clouds. I pixel peeked the first and saw at the interface interference, so I knew they were added. He PM'd privately and told me he did add the clouds in PS. This is what we should do if we want to combat this. Just ask, and make them conscious of what they are doing.
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