AI in Photography

Old World Meets New...

Man creates technology to solve a problem. The adaptability of man requires them to adjust to the change of circumstance. So, in the end, we are changing our world to adjust to the new technology that was designed to solve a problem in our world. It is the classic definition of the tail wagging the dog.

But this is nothing new. Man has been doing this sine our arrival and will continue to do so. Some might even argue that we must continue to do this if we are to survive. Once Pandora's box was opened, and all the evil escaped, man committed atrocities to try to contain evil again.

In 1930, Sheldon Cheney wrote a book titled "The New World Architecture" and he included the following prediction of the future.

​"There will ultimately be machine-developed energy to solve all men's work problems...the elements themselves will be tamed, weather tempered, transportation become effortless, cleanliness universal.  The worlds of the intellect and of the artistic faculties will be transported instantaneously to all. Living will be speeded, concentrated, regulated, as never before...[and] you may turn around and find a gloriously clean, austere, and liberated art rising up out of the machines themselves."

Is his prediction astonishingly accurate? Can this man, writing before the jet plane, before WWII, writing before man made it to the moon, before television became universal actually be contemplating what we are today struggling with? 

The machines themselves providing clean austere and liberated art...sounds like AI. But are we there yet?  AI algorithms, such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN's) can create original artworks, music compositions and even literature. So I won't dive into how they work because...I can't. But essentially it is running two Machine Learning programs at the same time, pushing one against the other (hence the word Adversarial).  So take an AI program written to detect fakes and put it against one that is made to guess what is not there. So a picture with a gap can be filled in but the fake detection program forces it to become better. The can make images where there was none.

So, photographers around the world start to get nervous...similar to how painters felt in 1860's when photography began to replace the hired painted portrait. Time moves on and our approach to art has always changed with it. So can humans collaborate with AI to make art? Sure...kind of like how photographers started the pictorial movement where they would alter the negative by hand to make the photograph more "human". Where did that leave us? Directly to the world of straight photography where we acknowledged that the camera can be used to capture art without painting the negative.

Can AI replace photographers? Absolutely. Will they? Well I am unsure however there is an argument that having a human take the picture, we have at least one human confirmation of what the scene was like. AI can create one that never existed. But anyone who follows the sage of Steve McCurry can testify that we are already doing this.

But can AI do other things for us?  Why not consider Art Restoration and AI? So much of what we try to restore has to have human intervention, but AI might allow us more accurate restorations of these things.

Here is a great one...How about Art curation? The toughest job a photographer has is selecting which of his work to show. We are emotionally connected with the picture and even friends find it difficult to tell us the hard truth. I personally would love AI to step in and help me select the more powerful pictures...

Art Education, conservation, accessibility, and protecting the market from fake works of art all seem reasonable. Now can we be entering into a world where a computer is telling us what art should be? Why not...we have been listening to art elites tell us this for a very long time...maybe it is time for a change?

I see three unavoidable results from AI creation...a genie that we cannot put back in the bottle.

1. AI will increasingly alter how we create, interpret and value art.
2. People will rebel against the "cleanliness and austere" art that is created, so AI will adjust and make art that is unclean and less austere.
3. People will value art made by human hands more than they do today. Proof of items being purely man made will become important and there will be an entire genre that will just be focused on man-made art.

So don't give up on that darkroom...it just might start coming back into Vogue.