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| p.2 #1 · p.2 #1 · The Beginning Of The End Of Fashion Photography As We Know It? | |
nathanlake wrote:
A lot of photographers are going to scream and holler that no AI will ever replace a good photographer. Unfortunately, I believe them to be wrong. I have been working in the field of AI since about 2005 and I can assure you that most commercial images will be computer generated (i.e. AI) within 5-10 years.
Over the past few months, even before the latest wave of publically available AI applications, I have been talking with fellow photographers and writers about where AI is headed. Writing is a wash and will eventually be 100% AI-generated. In photography, the only area that I believe will continue with minimal impact is the news. There will be a demand for photos/videos of an event that will accompany a written or spoken news story. Viewers will for quite some time expect true photos of the event rather than computer-generated images. But for things such as travel, stock, and fashion (and most other genres), there is no demand for such reality. An image that very closely approximates reality is quite sufficient. Editors will read a non-news story, visualize the image they want to go with it, and in a matter of a few minutes AI will give them exactly what they were visualizing.
If we look specifically at video, the future is still a bit further out. Even the best AI-generated video is usually recognizable as having been created by a computer. Give it 25 years and it will follow the path taken by commercial photography.
P.S. I have used the word "image" as opposed to photograph when talking about AI-generated products. At least during the upcoming transition, we will need to be able to differentiate between camera-generated photos and AI-generated images.
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I tend to disagree, not least because the "intelligence" part of the overhyped label AI is a bit of a misnomer. ChatGPT and its ilk are not intelligent. It's machine learning software relying on probabilistic pattern matching to generate text from a (giant) set of existing language data. The key here is "existing" data, and the same goes for the photographic equivalents of ChatGPT -- they rely on images already created for their data sets used to make up new images.
So, no, writing will not be 100% AI generated in the future because the lack of "intelligence" means the current AI bots cannot create anything genuinely new. They're basically giant plagiarism machines, which is fine if you just want to generate form content or replace grunt research work and this is where I think their strength lies -- they're increasingly being used already by the likes of AP (for writing basic business stories from PR and financial reports) and law firms (for doing some of the research grunt work of paralegals), for example. In that sense they'll free up humans to do more of the the actual thinking and creating to augment their new slave AI bots, potentially generating a whole new subset of jobs we haven't even begun to comprehend. That's how new technology has spurred us forward in the past and this IMO is no different.
Now, you could argue whether "genuinely new" is something that's valued in this day and age of ceaseless banal content, but that's a whole different debate and one that touches on something I strongly believe -- namely that we should not fear AI when it comes to the future of society but how those tools will be used by humans, just as it's humans, not facebook et al, that ultimately bear responsibility for the social media maelstrom that's turned society on its head in many respects. I fear human nature, not algorithms, because human greed/hubris/psychosis has been at the root of everything bad that's happened to society over the centuries. Technology merely facilitates.
Similarly with photography I don't see AI doing much more in the near future than what's increasingly already being done -- taking up the grunt-work. I knew someone 20 years ago who made a decent living as a product photographer until his job was offshored to the Philippines (and he decided to become a cop!). Assuming those jobs in the Philippines have not since been offshored again, I bet AI apps will soon come knocking. Same is probably true for basic catalog fashion photography, but I doubt many Western photogs make much of a living from that anymore just as I doubt many photogs make much of a living from stock photography anymore or travel photography. All grist to the AI mill. Publications and companies have long since succumbed to the bean counters and opted for cheap stock images (or their own image libraries) rather than commissioning a photographer. That ship has long since sailed.
But AI cannot generate a moment in time, a unique interaction of subject or light, which is where the much reduced business of photography still thrives. After all, we all know what a dragonfly or elephant looks like and there are a million stock images, yet still we get fascinated by wildlife photography awards, and still the likes of Nat Geo still commission photographers to take images of things and places we've all seen a million times before because that's the appeal of photography -- seeing something genuinely new or in a new context for the first time and, more importantly, knowing it was captured by some intrepid photographer somewhere in the world. It's all part of the story, and it's story, not just images, that has appeal.
I have no doubt AI will change the business of photography, and some jobs will disappear along the way. But just as AI can free up the intern at AP from re-writing press releases and enable them to help create genuinely new content, so it will also perhaps open up new avenues for photographers in the creative sector. Let's not forget that AI cannot create, it can only re-create. The media hype will die down, regulators will regulate (and seem to have already started in Italy), and machine learning bots will become just another technological tool in society to be used for good or bad depending on the humans controlling them.
/rant
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