photography and advent of AI

Long gone are the days of film, instant photos, and just leaving things be. Now digital photography has a new friend, or maybe foe. Artificial Intelligence. Personally, I am not a fan of AI generated photos. They look fake with colors pushed and a softness that’s unnerving and too ‘perfect’. But, with pushing the boundaries in science and technology, we as humans have advanced our own surroundings. Sometimes we forget how to be human. You’re reading this blog on a technology wonder, the computer - first invented the mechanical computer in 1822, and the first personal computer built in 1971. Recently photography programs have incorporated AI into their realm of ‘what can this do for you"?’. As a photographer, there are bloopers that need correcting, lights and shadows that need to be tweaked. Objects that shouldn’t be in the photo are painstakingly removed. But, is it no longer taking hours of moving pixels around? You now have the ability to select an object, have the program use AI to scan and look at the surrounding area and produce what it thinks should be replaced. Some with astonishing accuracy within seconds, not hours. I was floored and a bit freaked out.

I wonder what the photography world will experience in 10 years from now, or even after I am no longer on this earth. I suspect that humans will also evolve along with this, and visions of the Matrix may actually become a reality.

In the meantime, I like capturing my world with my measly digital camera, with hopes that others will remember what it was like to look at the real world, not a computer generated one.