The AI thing is hot at the moment and I have paid into the argument, but at the end of the day, who cares?
An image is an image, whereever it comes from.
From the makers perspective relevance and income are at peril, which is up to us to work through, but from the viewers perspective, being dished up infinite “perfect” images will grow tiresome and we will disengage.
People come in all shapes and sizes, but I wonder what “perfection” AI would make in the place of this image and would it be relevant anyway?
Like many things in our world, we perfect and perfect until anything less than perfection is unacceptable, then rediscover authenticity with all its imperfections as the “new-old” thing. Just look at the younger generation’s love of film photography and all its limitations for a prime example of searching for that missing something.
Character comes from imperfections.
Character makes things special.
A bit like Dolly the sheep, fear of the sky falling in after successful cloning came with the realisation that another life is just another life. Most of us can do it with surprisingly little effort. Your clone will not be you, just look like you and possibly have even less connection than a twin would.
Is it right?
Is it part of the universes grand plan?
Does it matter?
It, like most things comes down to what we do with it. Cloning a copy of ourselves to harvest for parts, replace an individual without their consent, falsify someone’s location or compromise their role are the stuff of science fiction and what can go wrong has been covered by Hollywood and literature multitudes of times.
Like our twisting of religion for our own purposes, it is us, not the thing itself that goes wrong.
AI is much the same. If AI makes trusting the news impossible, then we will change our habits of communication or simply not trust anymore. We reap what we sow.
If fear of things not being authentic is an issue, then being there will be the only fix (except for cloning of course…..).
AI is good and bad in equal measure, but not the real enemy.
On one hand it is a powerful tool that will save people time, money and effort, fuel inspiration, make right things that refuse to happen otherwise and empower everyone to a similar level.
On the other hand it will make many people creatively lazy, cover up a lack of imagination, make entire career paths irrelevant, possibly kill our adventurous spirit and need for genuine self expression and our awareness of that.
In the neutral corner, it will shift the creative base of many fields, leave some as they are and make much of what once made us excited, simply mundane.
It is just a step in the journey and there will be more.
Authenticity, reality, human history will matter, the background may change, but the people won’t.
My job is to document real people in real places. That role may evolve, but real people and real places will hopefully still matter. Technology is moving ahead in different ways, but overall, only at the pace of the slowest element and that is increasingly us.
What is done with the images and video I make will definitely change, the role of the graphic designer possibly evaporate as it gets easier and less specialised, which I find quite ironic as my own path to full time work has constantly been stifled by not being a graphic designer, only a content creator.
No generation has been immune to change, this one seemingly at a higher speed than previously, or is the speed of change just part of that change?