Ai little too close to home… Nothing in this series is real…
As some of you will know, as well as photography, a large percentage off my work has always come from being a digital image creator, so have spent the past few months getting to grips with the emerging Ai generative software.
As someone who has always been keen to get to grips with any new software the tech companies unleash upon us, commercially using Photoshop 6 back in the mid 90’s and all the other iterations that followed.
So when this latest set of Ai software applications came along, after an initial moral dilemma, I felt I had no alternative but to put my moral concerns to one side for fear of being left behind, by an industry all too keen to embed this new technology into our creative workflow, as quick as possibly.
Obviously still in it’s infancy, things are still way from perfect but even so it literally blows me away what this software is already capable of, and can’t begin to image where will be in thirty years time, seeing how far Photoshop has come.
Now I don’t feel it’s my place to go over again here the moral situation, that is for the wider discussion but if you have strong feelings like I do, I urge you to watch this video: https://youtu.be/xoVJKj8lcNQ
I’m not asking for comments or even debate, I already feel trying to turn back the tide would be fruitless in light of the major global companies backing Ai but have felt for years now, that there should be a separation of digital image creating and real single frame photography.
This series is simply to show where we are right now with the imagery and to iterate that, it’s definitely going to change our industry forever, so we cannot be so ignorant as to put our heads in the sand and wish that it would go away.
“Resenting a new technology will not halt its progress. - Marshall McLuhan"
So I’ve been posting on my socials the more fun conceptual personal work that I’ve produced using Ai generative software, using it as a creative tool, using it in combination with my normal postproduction workflow process.
However as well as this personal work, I have already worked on a number of commercial ad jobs, being asked to use my current knowledge of Ai to produce more natural looking imagery, similar to the imagery here.
I also noticed recently that a company advertising for a global brand photography manager on LinkedIn, were already listing Ai generative software as a requisite for the job application, a sign of things to come I suspect.
We truly are on the cusp of enormous change in our creative industry and have a feeling the larger public is totally unaware of this seismic change.
