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I personally find images in which certain things are 'impossible' or eerily 'not-right' to often be more compelling visually than pictures which represent a scene accurately. It's the ways that the camera sees the world differently than I do that makes it interesting to look at. And if you think this is "the beginning of the end" or something, I'd have to say that really we should think of photography as "the beginning of the end" of image-making by a person. Before photography was invented, people had to choose what to include in every step of the process of image-making (not that it was free of tools or optical aids of course, such as the various early cameras – camera lucida, camera obscura, comparator mirrors, grids, etc). If it's "man vs machine", all of you who participate in photography are already on the machine's side. Photography is a machine-made art. Yes, humans have something to do with it: choosing settings, composition, retouching… but all of those same choices can be approximated with text commands as well… I don't see how that makes the choices somehow less valid. Generative AI is just another step in the process of image making by machine, and many steps have already been taken that way since the dawn of photography, through the digital age. And seeing 'how a machine sees' produces so much of the visual interest in photography and photo-adjacent images.
The meaning of a work of art is created in the viewer, and at the moment of viewing, it really doesn't make any difference what the method of creation was, unless that's part of the narrative delivered through the piece. The image suggests a story or it doesn't. It produces an emotional response or it doesn't. It satisfies an aesthetic sense or it doesn't. Who cares whether someone changed "the original" by cropping, dodging, burning, cloning, or generative filling? No one sees 'the original' subject, they're only viewing the final result, and whatever is in the final result is all that matters to the viewer.
The only way I can see this as a threat is in the realm of documentary work, because the photograph has such an aura of truth-conveyance, but even that has been known to be false for more than a century, and people have been producing misleading or fantastical, surreal and impossible images using photographic processes for at least as long, so the association of photographic images with 'facts' and 'truth' is best left to those who don't want to know too much about the process anyway, and it is in fact that association that makes photographic-like images so easily used in the creation of 'deepfakes' as a way to deceive people… all of which has been done by other means than generative AI for generations now. Maybe the growing popularity of AI will finally dispel the notion that "if it looks like a photo, it must be real" – a notion that makes people very easily manipulated by fake news. But any image can be used to deceive, including one that perfectly represents what the camera was pointed at. Just pair it with a certain written phrase to direct the context and meaning-making of the image and voila – fake news! For example, take a shot of rioters burning a building from 5 years ago in another place. Then place a caption related to a current protest in your city next to that photo. People will assume the caption is explaining the image, and will create a story about the current protesters burning down a local building. It's been that easy to lie and deceive all along. And even major news outlets engage in those practices, so the notion that some news outlet is 'an established high quality journalistic organization with a longstanding history yada yada yada' is just one more layer which makes it easier for us to be fooled and accept their stories as presented, unquestioningly.
Generative AI just makes certain types of image-making easier, and therefore more widely accessible to a population less-skilled at digital image manipulation/creation. Just like, cameras make image-making easier, and therefore more widely accessible to a population less skilled at manual image creation with a pencil or set of paints.
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