by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
The point of photography, in my opinion, is to capture a moment of the human experience. As such, I’m growing more and more frustrated with the growing popularity of AI generated photography.
What bothers me is there is all this AI-generated celebrity soft-porn floating around on social media that is getting so good that it’s difficult to notice that it’s AI generated on first glance. We’re probably just a few months away from a deluge of AI-generated celebrity porn.
Now, I will note that I’m not so upset with AI generated art. If something is stylized and is clearly an effort to generate art rather than photography, I’m rather indifferent.
But we’re reaching a moment in the development of AI generated photography when it will be impossible to determine if it’s real or not. We’ve already reached a point where some people get really excited by near-hyper-realistic photos that are good, but not so good enough as to not to be clearly AI generated.
Since I’ve staked out that particular pet peeve, I have to accept that there is going to come a point where not only will most photographs be AI generated, but most movies, too. I suppose still photography is more dear to my heart than movies — which I love — so the sting won’t be as great when a AI-enabled TV screen scans my face and shoots out a two hour movie that exactly fits my mood at the moment.
Or, put another way, in a sense I’m just being an old fogy. AI generated everything is the future and no one — least of all me — will be able to escape it.
