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Here is something to contemplate. I was playing with Google’s Gemini AI on the Internet the other day and uploaded the above image from 2010. The photo is of the Glade Creek Mill located in Babcock State Park in West Virginia. Not particularly an image I would do anything with. Pretty blah. Unremarkable in every sense of the word. It was August, hot, humid and everything looked bland. Perfect for this experiment, however.
For kicks, I then sent this image to Google’s Gemini AI and gave it these instructions:
“Change the green foliage to show fall foliage with reds, oranges and yellows. Add blur to the water in the creek. Add a bit of blur to the water wheel. Add water flowing over the water wheel. Change nothing else in this photograph.”
The image below is what it sent back to me in about 45 seconds. I made no adjustments to it whatsoever. Frankly, I was amazed.
One extra thing Gemini AI did was to add the window and frame on the lower left part of the building. Cool!
I thought you would enjoy seeing this and, I suspect, start thinking, “Is there anything we will see in the future that is real photography or is everything going to be manipulated?”
We may not be able to trust our eyes any longer. Scary.
Mike Peters: One could argue that the only real photographs are machine made prints from actual negatives. Ansel and W. Eugene were quite liberal in their manipulations, as was everyone else that burned and dodged to their heart's content under the glow of the enlarger lamp. And ever since the advent of scanned images and direct to digital cameras, manipulation has never been easier, or done more widely.
ReplyDeleteIn a way, photography itself has always been a distortion of reality; color into shades of gray, 3 dimensions into 2, our eyes dynamic range squeezed into whatever the media of the moment could record, wide angle and telephoto lenses, putting a frame around life, and slicing the moving continuum of time into a moment forever frozen.
Humans have always lived under the illusion that we can control external forces, and tools like Ai strengthen that illusion by allowing us to meddle further and further from whatever truths we witnessed with our cameras. Truth has been malleable for quite some time now, basically ever since man gained the ability to speak and write, it seems, lies have tumbled forth. Lies are a fundamental part of what it is to be human. And now, the inability for much of the population to discern truth from fiction is at an all time high.
It seems indeed that people are more comfortable than ever to accept alternate realities, and liars and the lied to live in symbiotic harmony. Scary indeed.
The only control we have is over what we think and our intentional acts. So, as photographers, do we dive in fully and embrace the technology like Phillip Toledano who is quite clear about his use of Ai, or do we make other changes that are less clear and more subversive like many of those who are creating fake imagery and videos and pass them off as real?
How much is too far? Is Ai sharpening too much? Removing a light pole, taking out a zit, or replacing the sky? We will all have to come to grips with the levels that we are comfortable to embrace. Some will say never, and some will be all in, but I predict that for most of us, somewhere in the vast space between zero and one will be where we land.
Outstanding comment Mike. Thank you. ~Dennis
DeleteI think, as in the past, our standards for what makes an excellent photo will change. I’ve not come to purposely adding to my photos, but I do like the results I get when eliminating distractions (though of course stuff does indeed get added - generated - behind every removed distraction). Our tolerance for distractions I feel will diminish, as we see more and more images without them.
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