Photography vs. AI
I love photography and I like generative AI. I don’t like them together.
Photography holds a dear place in my heart. When I quit my job in 2017 to travel, it was with the purpose of taking more photos in new places. I’m sitting on an archive of thousands of images that I have never shared. I don’t take photos for other people, I take them for myself.
This week, Adobe released a beta version of Photoshop. What’s noteworthy about this release is its inbuilt generative AI tools. It’s phenomenal. I can add dinosaurs to a selfie taken at horse shoe bend in seconds. And, it looks real! If you could imagine what it was like living with dinosaurs.
I don’t believe that generative AI is going to be a key tool in a photographers pocket overnight. In saying that, AI powered editing tools have been around for longer than you may realise. Skylum’s Luminar AI has had one of the best sky replacement tools for some time. Not only can it accurately mask the sky, it can change it to something more dramatic. On top of that, it can also adjust the lighting of the foreground to make the newly replaced sky believable.
Despite the involvement of AI, replacing a sky in an image is nothing new. Photographers in the digital age have been retouching and replacing skies for as long as Photoshop has been in existence. AI makes it quicker and easier than ever.
No longer do I need to wait hours for the light to be just right. No more early mornings to catch sunrise. No more eating dinner at weird hours because of sunset. The perfect sky and the perfect lighting is attainable with a software subscription.
I’m not against AI. I recognise that there are huge benefits in using these tools. I worked in marketing where the perfect photo is often what we think we need. The benefits of using AI software to edit a photo are obvious. You can take a simple snap, change the background and lighting to sell any emotion you need. Again, this isn’t new, but now all you need to know is how to write an effective prompt.
As a hobbyist photographer, AI products are more toys than tools. They’re fun to play with, but ultimately, I’m not going to hang a photo with AI dinosaurs in the background on my wall. There is joy in the process. Photography for me was never about sharing the perfect photo on Instagram. Spending hours on top of a mountain waiting for the clouds to clear, or the sun to rise, is not about the photo. It’s my form of meditation. The photo may not be perfect, it may lack the pizzaz of AI augmented perfection. But, the story associated with that photo, the journey, the experience, the memory – that is what makes a photo great to me.