Notes on the impact of Artificial Intelligence on photography.

   © Guillermo Labarca

With the development of artificial intelligence (AI), photographers are faced with many questions. The most obvious are whether photography will continue to exist as we know it. Experience with digital photography can help us give an answer: the disappearance of darkrooms and their replacement by digital image processing programs; The number of photos of the same object that can be taken with digital cameras, unthinkable with film cameras, has changed photography habits and everything that entails; the printing of the photos; the storage of images; digital sending is very different and easier than transporting paper images; the exhibition of the shots, more places appear to show the photos and it has become possible to dispense with galleries, books and similar media; the accessibility of photography, today anyone takes photos and countless of them are taken with cameras and phones, which has led to a loss of reactions of admiration for photos and for the fact of photographing. In short, there have been radical changes that dominate the world of photography, even though there are still photographers who, for whatever reasons, continue with the silver system.

This recent experience alerts us to Artificial Intelligence. Will we see changes as radical as those produced by digitalization? I suppose so, we do not have a crystal ball that tells us about the future, but it is plausible that we will see challenging changes and some dangers may also appear. As there are different approaches to photography that respond to different areas and objectives, we would have to distinguish the possible effect of Artificial Intelligence on each of them. We mention the following: Author or artistic photography, advertising, fashion and journalism.

Photography as an art will be, in my opinion, one of the branches that will benefit from Artificial Intelligence. I think something similar will happen to what painting experienced when photography appeared, visual artists at that time invented new techniques and languages. And that has to do with the nature of art whose essential component is creation. AI will force photographer-artists to generate new languages and techniques that allow emotions to be incorporated into the creative process by using huge databases and image manufacturing programs. A greater difficulty will be access to those programs and databases, the cost of which can be high and because it can leave them at the mercy of the companies that control programs and data.

Advertising and fashion photography will also benefit, especially the latter. It will allow you to generate photographs, much more realistic than drawings, before the models are made and to quickly modify details when necessary. The same goes for introducing variations until you find the image that best fits the designer's expectations.

At the antipodes of author photography are journalistic and street photography. The artistic one reveals reality through a creation, which is generally a departure from immediate reality, while the street or journalistic one gives an account of reality as it is, as long as possible. The least amount of falsification of the immediate facts as they are is what should characterize the latter. With artificial intelligence it is now possible to falsify events by passing them off as trustworthy, such is the verisimilitude of its creations. In this way it can contribute to the creation of fake news and hoaxes to which we have become accustomed to certain pseudo-journalism. There is a need here to have sound ethics and ethical control.

The use of AI will have two dangers: first, it will widen the gap between those who will have access to data and programs and those who will not, determined largely by its costs. And the second is that it will limit and condition what it will be possible to do, the data is not infinite and the programs will determine how we will work.

For all this, we are faced with several challenges that we have to face; it is a good work program.