There are many discussions about AI in Photography.
I read this article “No one is ready for this” from Sarah Jeong that goes beyond the techtalk and hallelujah’s about more fun or more evil intended misleading possibilities.
What’s about? Google has its Pixel 9’s equipped with Reimaging in the Magic Editor. Does it matter? Yes, surely for us, photographers.
Fooling people with artificial images is from all times, also in art and photography.
Remember the painting ‘This is not a pipe’ (The Treachery of Images) from René Margritte.
A painting of reality is not the reality. The map of the road is not the road. The photo’s we shoot are not the reality of the moment we shot them.
With Reimaging we can rearrange photo’s in seconds. We can add or remove whatever we want in the way we want and submit them wherever we want.
In Photoshop it takes a lot of time to fix that, like this one. That took hours, skills and money.
The problem as Sara Jeong writes, is not the techological possibility. It is the blurring of reality in peoples mind. The pipe of Margritte grows into mistrust about what’s real and what not.
All products of the media we will be exposed to, will be seen with this mistrust. The unaware spectator cannot distinct what is been seen as true or artificial.
There is nothing wrong with outstanding marketing photo’s of a model for Victoria’s secret. We all know that they are marketing and seducing.
With Reimaging all dummies and malicious criminals, and there are a mass of them outside, can create fiction as if it is the real truth. And nobody will knows it, since how you know what is real and what not?
We see that already happen with the Trump team creating an AI-made poster with Swift Taylor voting for Trump. We will see a lot of that shit coming around the next months and accusations on both sides of falsely used and AI-fabricated ‘news’.
By this uncertainty about reality, writes Sara Jeong, distrust will grow about the stories we tell each other. A walhallha for Conspiracy theorists.
Remember East Germany in the period it was DDR, a Sovjet Union vassal state. People distrusted each other since everybody could be a spy for the Stasi, the secret service. Even if you where a spy by yourself you distrusted everybody around you. Finally the state collapsed under such an evil.
So, what’s left for us, photographers? There is no value anymore when our photo’s are going down in a tsunami of manipulations, when there is no social consent anymore about the value of our profession.
On the wall of the art academy in Arnhem, the Netherlands, I read “Art is the mother of resistance”. Everytime when I read that, riding along, I feel uplifted, enlightened, joyfull.
We as photographers, are artists. As artists we have to resist the big tech corporations, the self enriching molochs and all their tools that destruct the value of our work and the value of being human.
We have to create awareness of ‘Ceci nest pas un pipe’.
There is much more to write about this, but I recommend you read the article of Sara Jeong.
