A little more AI
After testing the update to SDXL 0.9
Recently I posted some new images I tested out on the Night Cafe site for AI generated images. I was curious to try the new SDXL .09 algorithm. It is, I must admit, an incredible improvement on the previous protocols. They seem to have finally sorted out the issues with rendering hair and even to an extent skin. The eyes and hands though are still mostly a mess. But no doubt that will be sorted out too.
Anyway. I had a comment/question posed on that post by a person who follows my page and seems to like my work, even though we are not personally acquainted, and who always has a kind word to say about my work.This man Aris (I won’t give his full name since he may not want extra uncalled for attention) posted this comment/question
Ethics aside (and that is a big question), it seems like AI can emulate a technically competent photographer. But is that enough?
There’s a story about Yul Brynner and Cartier-Bresson hanging out together, Brynner snapping away like a fiend while C-B’s camera stayed untouched. When Brynner asked him why, he replied “there was never the right moment”. Could AI ever make that distinction, I wonder?
An extremely valid point. And it is indeed something that a lot of us old photographers have been asking ourselves.
(At this point I would like also to mention a factoid about this new tech. Photographers, illustrators and graphic designers, arts in which I am a professional for all of my adult life, feel incredibly threatened by the new craze for generating AI images and designs. I don’t blame them. Some older photographers are still reeling from the loss of analogue photography. But AI really is a threat to almost all professions and specialities. But most of all I think, though I may only be speaking for myself, that we are mourning the imminent loss of the human element in these professions and arts. The old SciFi warnings about the supremacy of the machines over humans that we have all read, heard and seen for all of our lifetimes. From War of the Worlds to Metropolis, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep to Space Odyssey: 2001, Terminator, Isaac Azimov’s I Robot on and on, Science Fiction writers have been warning us about this for decades.)
So to my answer to Aris:
Simple answer, “No“.
Because in essence, even though we now seem to be living in a post-meaning time when it comes to language, photography is a very specific thing. It is not an arbitrary word to mean a vaguely realistic image. It by its very nature depends on an external, empirical tangible world. As photographers we turn our eye/lens on the external, objective world to give expression to ideas, concepts, politics, eroticism, aesthetics and so much more.
AI is at best a mere tool for doodling. In the same way that the Pictorialist (check out my essay here) photographers in the early years of the craft simply tried to emulate academic painting styles and subjects, AI is at best an imitative tool, simply taking its cues from the hard work of real image makers, and more than that stealing from them, to emulate the empirical world. The modernists in photography where the ones that elevated the craft to a legitimate art.
And so far all the dumb arguments I’ve heard by AI users to justify writing some words in a machine to create pale phantoms of an art they do not know how to make, are just basic bullshit.
The prompts I used in no specific order:
“Portrait of beautiful dark skinned woman in a misty morning in the city streets with a brown leather aviator’s jacket on and long dark curly hair closeup an old fashioned buildings 1940s New York”
“Portrait of beautiful middle aged woman in a misty morning in the city streets with a brown leather aviator’s jacket on and long dark curly hair closeup an old fashioned buildings 1940s San Francisco by the Golden Gate Bridge”
“Portrait of beautiful middle aged woman in a misty morning in the city streets with a brown leather aviator’s jacket on and long dark curly hair closeup an old fashioned buildings 1940s San Francisco bay”
“Portrait of beautiful woman in a night street with a leather jacket on and long curly hair”
“Portrait of beautiful dark skinned woman in a dusk countryside farmland with a brown leather aviator’s jacket on and long straight hair”
“Portrait of beautiful dark skinned woman in a night street with a brown leather aviator’s jacket on and long curly hair”
“Portrait of beautiful dark skinned woman in a misty morning in the city streets with a brown leather aviator’s jacket on and long dark curly hair closeup an old fashioned buildings 1940s New York by the Brooklyn Bridge”