Into a Bold New World

As many who know me know I have always been an avid photographer.  It is a passion that began in my college years and has remained a hobby of mine ever since.  However, over the last several years I have not put forth the effort to take new pictures, nor have I been posting anything new on social media or even on my website.  This is partly because of laziness and less time in life to pursue those interests, but is also due to the technological changes to the art of photography itself.  When I started taking pictures it was with a variety of film cameras such as Brownie and Rollriflex and then into 35mm SLR cameras.  At that time, it was just taking pictures to document life events.  In college when I began processing my own film, I became enwrapped in the art of photography.  I studied the science and mechanics of capturing images on film and learning the interrelationships between film speed, shutter speed, and aperture as well as the manipulation that can be done in the darkroom.  The choice of film type, paper type, and processing chemicals all come into play in addition to darkroom techniques such as burning or dodging as you are exposing your print.  So, with all that said, photography to me was a learned science where you had to know how to manipulate these various factors and apply them to create the desired outcome on paper.

As time went on cameras became increasingly versatile and automated and many new products were introduced that would allow you to further your creativity in capturing images.  I embraced all these advancements and invested a small fortune in cameras and Coken filters that you mounted on the front of your camera lens to produce some artistic effect.  Then came digital cameras which I fully embraced as they allowed you to shoot unlimited pictures without the expense of film and processing.  Along with digital cameras came software that allowed you to fully adjust and manipulate your digital image.  I began using Photoshop to a degree, but this is where I started to realize that true artistic photography was falling by the wayside.  The level to which you can alter or doctor an image in Photoshop is truly amazing.  While yes you still needed to capture the base image but is the final product truly a photographic piece or just a digital creation.  Photoshop does require a lot of skill and expertise, which I never fully embraced as I just didn’t want to expense the time and effort to learn it. I used it to subtly enhance images by adjusting color, saturation, exposure and such.  In fact, Photoshop always seemed that it was sort of cheating.  That what you were creating was not a realistic rendition of reality.

So that brings us to where we are today with AI and all of its capabilities.  Here is where I really struggle.  Because now you can create images with no knowledge of the technical aspects of image capture, you just have to be able to succinctly describe what you want in text.  So now the public can be presented with an image or video that a human may have described the concept of, but the actual end product has no basis in reality.  It has gotten so bad that I can hardly stand using social media anymore because you can no longer trust or believe anything you see.  Add to all of that the concept of copyright ownership and it is a real mind twist.  So, as it stands now, federally you can not copyright an AI generated work that was created without significant human creative input. These are considered to be works in the public domain.  A work that a human using AI as a tool creates can receive copyright protection for the original human contributions, but the AI generated parts are not copyrightable.

Then Tennessee came along in 2024 with the Elvis act which protects an individual’s likeness and voice from unauthorized AI use.  While this act was primarily focused on publicity rights and not necessarily copyright, it does include protection against impersonation and includes a general liability for AI tools that produce such works.  So, as I see it AI is quickly creating a minefield that politicians and courts are trying to keep up with and as usual will most likely totally screw it all up.  The only ones that will benefit from all of this will be the lawyers.

So, what am I to do?  Do I journey down the rabbit hole and use AI more in creating images or altering images that I provided the basis of?  Thus far my use of AI has been limited to simple technical tasks such as removing unwanted elements of an image or changing a background.  But it is becoming so powerful so fast that now you can totally change an image with ease.  I can take a landscape image that I took and use a preset to make it look like a Picasso painting with the click of a mouse.

As for me, I want to remain a photographer and not so much a digital content creator.  So, I want to recommit myself to get out more and capture beauty and captivating images that I find pleasing.  I will also try to share these images more on my website and in social media than I have in the past. I will continue to learn more and explore using AI as a tool for creative purposes as it does provide some amazing photo-realistic outputs but in the final analysis they aren't real!