Is A.I. Killing Photography?
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- Опубликовано: 22 июл 2024
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You've heard the hype about A.I. created photographs and art but is the hype real? How soon could A.I. take over the photo world? Could it actually help photographers?
Tony & Chelsea dig into the world of A.I. and give their thoughts about how A.I. could impact photographers. 
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It's a brave new world. I'm a college professor and now students can generate writing assignments with a few well programmed key words. There are serious consequences if I let students graduate who can fabricate their assignments. At some point, people will stop believing the quality of the students I graduate. We will see where we go from here.
Here is the AI tool I want to see: I go out and shoot a few thousand wildlife or sports photos, get home and upload to the AI which finds the best 10 photos, applies some light edits, and sends them back.
I think some of this depends on how you define photography. Professional stock photography? I think there's a reasonable chance it will decrease that market. That said, photography is an art form, which means the process of creating is often as important as the final product, so for people who actually enjoy taking pictures it won't replace anything. Skills become more or less commercially viable all the time, so eventually people may need to ask themselves if this is just about making money for them. I'm frankly amazed real estate agents can still make money with how streamlined the internet has made homebuying.
"FranLab" brought up a great point, that photography destroyed the art of portrait painters. Portrait painters use to travel around small towns offering their services but when photography took hold people would just have a picture taken instead!
Different technique with different outcome. Also that was offset by increase in demand, caused by an increase in population, specifically of population with disposable income.
We are looking at the inverse process here. A deletion of occupations in the context of an aging global population and an increasing empoverishment of the middle class.
I know artists that paint portraits, they charge a lot of money for them. You will find that poor people couldn't afford to get portraits painted before photography, just as they still can't afford that. Photography hasn't replaced it, it just allows poor people a tool that enables them to also have portraits as well as capturing moments.
You will find a lot of wealthy people buy oil painting and spend a lot of money on art.
I like the idea of using to plan out a photo shoot… very cool to see color combinations and props
I am not sure at what time you guys did your research for this video but my experience with Midjourney was much better then what you presented. A few months ago it was horrible and looked like the images you showed but have you looked at version 4? It’s so much better! Much more keepers! Tony, consider the exponential (not linear) growth that is technology. I don’t think AI is very far off. Love your channel guys! Been watching for over 8 years.
This
Exactly. Midjourney v4 is currently the best and I'm sure it will be surpassed soon. AI research is advancing at an exponential rate. We might double the performance in 1 year. Most people just think linear.
Agree, midjourney lately is just nuts, with couple of words it create magic, just shame that so many instagram accounts pretending that they painted or photographed something but in reality it was done with midjourney, fakeness art flooding the social media.
@@brianrcVids It certainly progressed at a pace that was FAR beyond linear. But i'm not certain, that the last flaws of these AI image generators will be eradicated that quickly as well. I think the attempt to train AI to drive a car is a good analogy here. It was really easy to get the AI into a state that it could generally drive pretty well - but the last edge cases were so hard to eradicate that it has taken years (with insane investment in this space) of virtually no progression with no end in sight.
I have used midjourney as well and many images it produces are quite intense. I think there are good and bad things that will happen from this in the future but what in the world doesn't have pros and cons
Do you have any videos showing making a square space site and the practical uses for photographers. How to sell prints etc.?
Thanks for covering this! Great topics to keep paying attention to, and appreciate the time you took to cover this. Bravo.
are you recording with a "portrait" filter? soft Lens? or using post to soften/retouch your video?
Hey Chelsea and Tony, great video! I agree on a lot of things you said but I think there is more to discuss about AI.
I tried some of the services that generate images and I came to the same conclusion - they are fun to play with but not something that can replace professional photography (at least for some years to come). But there are also ways how photographers can use AI to help them complete tasks faster. One of the things Chelsea mentioned - going through the shot material and select images - there is a software for this. Making basic edits to your photos, so you can edit large projects faster - there is an app for that as well. While they are not perfect and require review from a human being, they can still save a handful of hours for people dealing with massive amount of photos like wedding photographers. And there is also another way to use AI bots, for example, to generate ideas for photoshoots, locations, outfits or to help with ideas for social media posts. All of this definitely requires a human touch but it can save time and help with some tasks. At the moment, I think this AI hype is blown out of proportion and when this hype wave ends, we will see more useful products hitting the market (hopefully).
Thanks again for this video! Have a great day!
They already do. I recently used an AI to make a headshot for marketing material out of snapshots. No photographer involved anymore. And it is not years - the speed this stuff iterates in is... turn that in quarters. Maybe a couple of quarters.
Perfect skies, perfect skin, perfect shapes, perfect colour, perfect contrast, perfect light...the list goes on. And those are the images taken by "real" photographers with actual cameras. Post-production has always been part of photography, and AI already in use in post has reduced most shared photographs to a mere concept of what was actually present. We've made reality optional most of the time; this is just the next step in that progression.
Yeah till the process doesn't need a camera anymore . Then it's killing photography
I enjoyined so much this video! As a microstocker I can vouch for everything you said!
Good video. I'm glad I pretty much stopped shooting commercially in 2005 after 30 years of running a studio. About that time I had art directors telling me they could just buy a digital camera and wouldn't need to hire a photographer for the job. Heck, now they don't need the camera or a model.
Pretty soon, no one will be able to know what is real or fake. Scary.
I spent a few days playing around with AI software, more specifically text to image (which I never thought I would do) however from my analysis I believe we are only at the tip of the iceberg with this technology so to speak. I can see it affecting certain niches like stock photography, commercial, possibly even product or interior/ real estate photography one day. However with that being said niches like editorial, photojournalism, etc will most likely not be as easily impacted or even at all. If anything photography is what contributes to this kind of technology so it will develop over time as well as the use cases it is applied to but I don't see it completely dying out only developing over time.
I stopped using watermarks years ago. I came to the conclusion that someone will always find a way to remove the watermark and it detracts from the impact of the photo. I realize this means someone has the ability to steal my work but i feel like its a small enough percentage to not worry about it and chalk it up to cost of doing business.
I put my watermarks in an easily removable place. Same effect, people can let it in to show their appreciation but I'm not making it complicated to just crop it out with no skill at all. At that point I'm hoping on people feeling bad for removing my watermark instead of feeling like they achieved something through perfectly removing an annoying watermark.
Tony and Chelsea...I don't know who set the mics up but they're coming in HOT! Need to adjust those audio recording levels. Did you use the Pany? or Canon? I know this was not the Sony LOL
I think that where AI is really helpful right now is in cleaning up actual photos---taking out noise, sharpening, increasing resolution, etc. That's not perfect yet, either, but I often find that it does a beautiful job. Also, I used DALL-E to fill in part of someone's shoes that I accidentally cut off. But I think Tony's right that AI that generates complete images is no threat at the moment.
I'm an amateur. AI has no place in the things I do (simply, shooting and even more, postprocessing) that I enjoy so much. BUT - the "proof of concept" notion had never occurred to me. Thanks for that, and for this very interesting take on professional and ethical aspects of this latest "new thing."
I used the watermark AI to remove watermarks on common icons I use in 1Password, and it does work great. I stopped putting watermarks on my photos though, it's pretty much useless and is a distraction.
I didn't know the Gartner Hype Cycle, and I love how it is an actual mass version of the Dunning-Kruger curve.
Is it wrong to try and have an AI remove artist logo? I commissioned an artist to do a piece and I received it with the artist logo in the middle of the image, I asked the artist if it could be move to a corner, they said no.
What do you think about the AI noise reduction and resolution improvement?
I’m surprised T&C didn’t cover this. AI scaling and noise reduction is a great addition to the tooling. AI isn’t just about replacing art and human talent.
I have seen too many 'will AI kill photography' videos presented by photographers. A super interesting video would be to have a panel of AI experts in image generation discuss with photographers what they are working towards. A more thoughtful topic might be: 'In what ways will photography morph in an AI-present world?' The 'kill question' videos risk repeating the well known change aversion of the experienced and ensconced (film photogrpahers eschewing digital, better camera technology democratising image taking tonthe chagrin of the old timers who had the 'craft' and thought no one else had earned it)
At 16:00 chelsey basically described narrative select during her “imagine this” statement 😭
People who don't know photography though see ai photos and don't see the flaws, they just see a perfectly sharp and clean looking photo, and give all the praise to the "photographer"... which plenty of people on Instagram are posting without labeling them as AI.
@@simone565 it's not going to teach anything.
@@simone565 the average person doesn't give it any thought. An Instagram page post impossibly perfect photos, and think the average viewer just thinks the photographer is genius.
But isn't that all it takes, is for the general public to see it as good enough & then that industry is done
I think it may be best to write something legally binding in to contracts that creates legal liability if the client does specifically that, with an additional fee of say an additional 3-5x your sitting fee for the session to ballpark anything you may have lost in print sales. Maybe also require 100% of the session fee due at the time of sitting + 50% of the estimated cost of physical and/or digital product deliverables due prior to delivery of proofs.
It's likely to cause customers to turn away, so IDK if thats a sustainable option or not, or depending on state by state whether such a thing would be legal.
Photography is a visceral activity. You are out and about with a camera, looking for visual poetry, textural oddity, iconic moments, and anything that looks just plain interesting. Painting and drawing did not place the camera, and vice versa. Digital drawing has not replaced paint and oil. I see AI is just another method for creating art, for expressing creativity, it lowers the bar for who can now create; it expands the potential base of creators.
These Dalle-Images remind me of mid journey 6 months ago. MJ has totally fixed the eyes now. Where it struggles is with fingers and toes. Its not uncommon to see a foot with 10 toes on it. Chelsea mentioned she only like 3 out of the 100 images. I bet that ratio would be much higher with MJ.
AI when used by a non-creative person to create an image is no more a threat to a serious photographer or photo-hobbyist any more than AI would have been to Faulkner, Hemingway or Bronte as novelists. The fact that you both were only able to select one or two images out of 100 sounds a lot like selecting from a portfolio. I do like your thoughts about AI for pre-visualizing a shoot. I also believe that intellectual property has value and using AI to remove watermark and then "AI-ing" it into something else is spooky.
You miss one important thing: AI doesnt´require any skill. Newest AI can even change perspectives. And also in this video they are oblivious to the technolgical progress which will come in the next couple of years.
Very interesting video, thanks!
My only gripe is as I get better at photography, people will think the pictures are AI. Or they look at them like you would a child attempting to paint the Mona Lisa. 🥴😂
That boat sailed long ago. If you have a lousy picture, you screwed up. If you have a great photo, it's "You must have a great camera!"
Put the photo of mona lisa on Ai! 😜
On a good note Vinyl is on its way back :)
Man, it's a tough time to be in photography and video, the technology is getting better, but more intrusive, expensive and somehow still inaccessible to the little guy. This reminds me of a guy I knew in college who wanted to have a machine that would make a movie just from his thoughts, so he wouldn't have to go through the pre, production and post. If AI can make photos from a collection of images, imagine when it gets good enough to make an animated video just with you typing something into a text box, imagine if it could make a film from stock footage or perhaps a trailer from stock footage, bummer for those of us in creative fields. I think an AI did edit a movie trailer a couple years ago, I think it was for the movie Morgan. AI in movies is now changing mouths to have a better lip sync, so if a movie is in English but subbed in Spanish, AI can change the actors mouth movements to match the spanish translation, they're doing this for the movie FALL. Check it out.
There's already an AI for that but currently it can only generate short video clip based to the text given to it.
I was at a Saint Louis museum and guess. From 1910, there was a 360 camera. And still a lot of models around. So it's about eletric cars and a bunch of other tecnologies. They exist. They change our realities a little bit. But mostly, cant get enough popular for a complete transformation. That's my opinion.
Good video, my guess is over time AI will merge with photography and like everything else one will require well-honed skills to get the best results. I presume overall quality will improve and photographers who refuse to learn new skills are in trouble. The rate of improvement accelerates with technology, so even if it's bad now, compounding effects will improve it over time. I think Chelsea and Tony will be pleasantly surprised. I do not think it will take away the jobs of photographers, I do think it will change photography in profound ways and may "traditional" photographers will miss out on extending their considerable skills to the new platform. Like surgeons, pilots or biologists, no one can escape the onward march of technology. And, yes, like other tech a lot of it is hype, but often the hype misses the more mundane but incredibly important changes we are about to see. I bet there will be more (not less photographers), but their products will be a lot better and varied. Many photographers will lose their incomes it they do not embrace the future.
That´s the thing: AI doesn´t require skill. This is a huge difference to other technologies like photoshop. People need to finally understand this.
@SMS GVG in the present form or AI it needs skill.
Even prompting needs skill.
It just changes the emphasis
Firstly, great video. I thought you guys had done one of these already? But I guess not. Other great YT ers have and they are all talking along the same lines. But surely we have brought this on our selves? I started a FB group where I wanted people to share their work ideas and skills. We had a couple of pros signed up and things were looking great. Then one guy posted a brilliant shot of a mountain range I knew well with a Chamois ram sat on the cliff edge. Wow I said how lucky were you, ( but really suspecting PS) So I asked a few more question and in the end he admitted what he had done. Up to that point everyone was happy with his image? The other pro posted his best work which was an obviously PS image of Chimps working on a VW car. Well this shocked me (relatively new to proper photography) So I said to the pro, this is not my idea of photography, I want my images to be real, yes I will clone out rubbish ( you have no choice here) but I will not add things. The pro replied. Good luck with trying to sell reality! We all have PS, well most do so we already have signed up to AI in it's most basic form. But here's my take, it will happen and it will take most if not all ad type work from the pros, but there will always be a market for Tony and Chelsea's work. Why? The obvious reason, the value you add to that image. Just like in the art world it's the attachment of it's creator that gives the value. In my little old world, my disciples follow my adventures through my photography, AI can never replace this......................for our generation. Young folks will love it, do love it and they are welcome to it. Most don't do adventure or care about it, just look at the film industry it has already gone down this road, with animated films making much more money than real films. But your asking the wrong guy here, I can't even watch HD tv!
Going to have to get payment in full for portrait packages before you ever post a watermarked gallery. 50% down to book the session. Balance in full for the package is required day of session.
i tried the dall e one, photo realistic it cant to yet, it falls apart on small details like eyes and toes etc, but it also failed to produce the correct image for a named classic car to which there are countless numbers of image online and in data banks so on one side its not just pulling images it hasn't had put into it but then its at a low state where it doesnt have the data base to give you what you want
i can see with millions of people using the systems it should get better with learning
Try Midjourney, it's currently the best AI image generation out there. I already tried this AI and you can specify the prompt like what camera, lens and aperture used and also how far the subject from the camera and the pose...and it will easily generate a super realistic photo for you. You can also add more details to the face to make it more realistic. Scary as hell. 😳
Great commentary. This subject needed to be addressed. Short answer: yes, it will kill many artistic endeavors *as we previously knew them.* Artists who wish to be paid for their work will need to adapt.
I have had some good results in retouching old or low res photos using AI to clean up the faces; not change the faces, but to smooth out the skin and removed artifacts due to noise and jpg compression.
Great video!
Tony & Chelsea, I am hearing some of the same arguments for AI as the movie industry has for CG. I believe that there will be a premium for unaltered photos, and that will take old-fashioned skills. My first DSLR was a Canon in the early seventies and still have Canon cameras and the changes have been for the better. Photographers are artists or they are not. Artists will command more money and respect because of their work, not because of how they got there by the tools of the trade they use. Yes, some perspectives will be that those who used M mode and film are better but I am thinking that boat has sailed. The issue with AI is if you got a great shot but the focus was not great, or the lighting, color perhaps dept was not spot on AI can or will be able to correct that, how amazing will that be? I don't miss film or the limited camera functions that were basically using manual. Thank you for your great videos!
I have experimented with it quite a bit these past few months. I don’t think it’s time to panic quite yet from a job loss perspective. It’s kind of like Photoshop, in that a creative mind still has to steer the car, sort of speak. Definitely have to keep our eyes on the ever-changing and consolidating stock photo distribution market though, agree Ai might be used as an excuse to change pricing and compensation structures more than they should be yet. At this moment I’m feeling AI is more like a useful tool for conceptualizing new ideas and enhancing existing work. If the human driving doesn’t have a creatively oriented way of looking at things and a good sense of how an image should look in its final form, the result is just going to be mediocre at best. Even when AI does spit out good material, it still takes the mind of a photo editor to sort out the good from the bad. The Harrison Ford interview where he talks about how in the new Indiana Jones flick AI was able to take existing footage shot in his youth and seamlessly integrate it into new scenes is the kind of thing it will be most initially successful at. Like the “metaverse”, it’s coming, but how much & how quickly is still debatable. You will definitely have to know more about tech, especially software tech, to be a photographer in the future than even so today. This much is certain.
I work as a product owner in Big Data and work with AI software. Our application is not in the photography world but it is in digital media. We are training our software to predict consumer behavior. Can't say how, but we are getting it to work and while you think it's 5 years off, I can tell you that we've programmed a smart program that is learning way quicker. From the ground up, we have a learning software doing a great job. I think we are a year off from being where we need to be.
As a photographer with a youth sports team and individual photography side hustle, I'm probably also a year from tossing in the towel on my business because people are stealing my images and removing the watermark. I simply tired of photographing sports leagues and simply not making a return on the investment since all of my costs are wrapped up in my prints. I'll shift to smaller team boutique shots, senior photos, and be really selective as to what leagues I choose to work with. It's only a matter of time before all of this goes away for youth photography.
Tony Northrup: "There is no way A.I. can displace real images". I think you are way underestimating the current capability, and how fast things are improving. Dig a little deeper into tools like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, Tony; I'll be interested in seeing if you maintain that opinion. For better or worse, machine learning is redefining how art gets made in a digital world. Looking forward to more of your thoughts on this.
I knew that watermark remover would come soon enough it was always easy to do it yourself in photoshop but now even ppl that dont have or don't know how to use PS will just be able to upload and press button on a large scale maybe even bulk images lol it would not surprise me if a PS addon is made sooner than later
So, I've watched your videos over time, always good info. This video looks strange, is it AI created?
😀😂
i don' think it will kill photography. but it will certainly take over the editing and the camera settings for the most part. but that will happen to all jobs eventually. who follows ai trends a bit notices, how crazy fast they get better at everything. humans will soon have nothing to do anymore.
Most of the jobs will be based on Computer Science.
I believe AI will only improve as time goes. As an a portait artist and recent beginning photographer, I feel AI gives people the option to buy cheap. When I draw portraits, I can easily make $300+ dollars but recently I have very little clients and I feel it is because of AI. Which now brings me to photography. AI is doing almost the same thing to photographers and as it improves, it will get better but I hope, as you said, that it is just a phase people go through. Great topic, love your videos!
I like the Gothic theme park that went viral the other week. I thought it was real. But I didn't do much research so, idk how much was ai and how much wasn't. 😅
The invention of photography did not kill the art of painting. The invention of Photoshop didn't kill photography. The artist of the 21st century was the best user of Photoshop and that person is not necessarily the best painter and the artist of the 22nd century isn't going to look like the Photoshop expert and it's not going to look like the the painter. It's going to look like something entirely different. It could be who's got the most creative imagination in driving the software to drive new outcomes. The Luddite argument is when you have new tools and you get more leverage from those tools you have less work for people to do and therefore everyone suffers. The reality is that new work emerges and new opportunities emerge. We level up as a species and fill the gaps and expand our productivity and our capability set.
The compensation discussion appears lack an understanding of machine learning/ai. These use a valuable training set of images to generate an AI model. Companies like Shutterstock are using the data it has now freely. When the model is trained and tuned using real images, those images aren't needed anymore and permission isn't needed anymore. The reason why Chelsea became white is because all the "fantasy" labeled imaged it trained on had white characters. This also touches on the debate where AI can steal artist's style (e.g. Viet artist Ben Moran on Reddit). You can train a model on Annie Leibovitz photos or Kusama art and generate new images based on that style. As many venture capitalists predict, many companies will be as valuable as the data they have that could be used to train the data. A startup owning millions of radiography images of diagnosed tumors can be worth billions of dollars for an AI company to acquire to generate a model that could be used to predict tumors. You all gave away the right and the value of all the images Instagram has or the natural language text youtube is full of to train the next DallE and ChatGPT.
I just viewed this 1-month after your posting and although I agree with most, Tony: I disagree with your 5-year prediction and agree with Chelsea’s statement that it’s no going away. As a photographer, I also wanted to use it to add to photographs with backgrounds and some compositing, but to use my own photos is difficult at this time. To me, the group of creatives that are on the chopping block first are illustrators. With the newest versions of the new AI, it’s becoming even harder to distinguish fakes with AI generated photos. As an example, counting fingers was a way to tell if it was fake, but that’s going the wayside too. It’s my sincere hope, restrictions are put on AI on use and where content for training AI is sourced, paying photographers, creatives and yes models; but the cat is probably out of the bag. I’m trying to embrace it, but it may be a bumpy ride - Dale M (Iowa) 🤔
Good job. Love the dialogue! For many of us, photography is a combination of the experience and recharge achieved when out and about looking at the world a with an eye for details.
"Peak of Inflated Expectations" and "Trough of Disillusionment" sound like locales from "The Princess Bride".
Strongly urge folks to look at stable diffusion custom models like “analog diffusion” and “protogen”
Hey guys. I'm very glad you made this the subject of your discussion. You're right, AI is a hype right now and yes, things are going to change. AI is disruptive and will shake up the order of things. Whatever can be done will be done, so it is merely a matter of time until AI will make a professional portrait in any surrounding from a snapshot on the webcam. And that is really when our services will no longer be needed. - Or will they... Whenever a disruptive technology comes along, things change. The calculator replaced pen an paper, the computer replaced the calculator and Wikipedia replaced the enciclopedia. What develops slowly initially - like some grotesque photos from Dall-e - will eventually be technically perfect and surpass the perfection level of a professionally taken photo. This will happen. And if you measure your value against the quality of such AI-pictures you could end up depressed. But... BUT the disruptive nature of photography did not render painters superfluous. Paintings were art and still are. And putting a painterly filter over a photograph does not make that photo a painting. The painting has value because somebody took the time to paint it and if people like it, they will buy it as a painting. I'm sure the same is true with photography. We as photographers create original hand-made art. And if people know to appreciate it for what it is, they will pay money for it. But there will be a shift: the standard portrait will be no art and the task of making it will be pushed to AI. The business portrait that needs to be produced at no money will be done by AI. And it will pass and be good for its purpose. So if you make your money from these standard portraits, I think, the count-down has started. The standard will be simplified and reduced to AI. But does that mean that your art will die? I doubt it.
Oh, to reduce photography only to the artistic aspect I think is wrong. It is a profession, it is a service, a hobby, etc. In the past, most painters were primarily service providers, and the vast majority of them were made redundant by photography and printing. They simply had to find another job, which was difficult at that time. Even though professional portrait photography boomed very quickly, most of the former service providers probably became industrial workers. Painting as an art form, on the other hand, benefited greatly from photography because it no longer had to worry about realistic things, and so Impressionism was born, which in turn also influenced photographic art a lot. But that is not what the thousands and thousands of photographers earn their money with. (Translated with DeepL/Translator (free version))
Impacts by type of image:
photojournalism - low., studio work eg fashion high, travel - medium, wedding - medium, astro - low, digital art - revolutionised, wildlife - medium. New genres created
I completely agree with Tony.
I would say that you would have to sue the water mark remover for removing water marks but would it be worth it in the long run if there was a large amount of people doing so might stop it. I wonder if the infringing on the copyright would be worth it but then that would mean you would have to look over all the photo that all your clients and I would say it would be better just to ban them for removing your water mark and might be better to go after the individual for knowing they did this with a contract with you
Hi. Can you do a video to talk about AI being incorporated in digital cameras and the possible positives and negatives if the AI really starts to alter your photograph in camera?
I already tried this AI and you can specify the prompt like what camera, lens and aperture used and also how far the subject from the camera and the pose...and it will easily generate a super realistic photo for you. You can also add more details to the face to make it more realistic. This will greatly affect the camera industry. Scary as hell. 😳
Thank you
maybe you should just do a local install of stable diffusion and try to use it yourself.
it's not really the monster you're making it out to be.
most people using it with any frequency, are doing their own training - which is now very easy to do.
for example, I trained it on data sets of my family, in order to facilitate restoring damaged antique photos of (waitforit) my family.
THAT is where this type of tech sings.
it's a wonderful tool - and just like a camera, or a paintbrush, a typewriter, or a gun, it can be abused by people who choose to use it in a nefarious manner.
I'd even go so far as to say that those people who use local AI installs, have so many variables available (prompts, models, samplers, weights, embeddings, etc) to them - that driving the UI is an art form in itself - in the same way that musicians in the 70's bought a MOOG, messed with the knobs, and said "dude, this sound is awesome!" and put it on an album.
some of those people had no idea what they were doing and still got great sounds.
some of those people spent their every waking moment trying to understand the relationship between all these input modulators to get their opinion of the best sound.
some people hated their sounds regardless of their skill level.
does that mean Vangelis, Gary Numan, and Keith Emerson were not artists, because they interfaced with a machine to get their product?
additionally, they didn't put pianists out of business.
but following that out... did Henry Engelhard Steinway need to give his permission for people to digitally sample piano sounds in modern music, or is it just "the way of things"?
if SamDoesArt gives a youtube tutorial on a specific technique, does the person learning that style have to credit him when they make future work using that technique?
If I go to an art museum every day and study brushstrokes, color theory, and technique - must I credit Monet and Matisse when I make a painting using concepts I have learned from them? do I owe their families money?
I think using professional datasets for training was a bad idea, but these models can be easily retrained on voluntary datasets, and the new variations of models like SD2.1 already are.
I also think that in the real world, people like Greg Rutkowski (if you know, you know) are probably benefiting from the notoriety of their ubiquitous use in prompting, and nobody is NOT buying his work in favor of an inferior AI copy. His prints are reasonably affordable, and now people who never heard of him (like me) are looking at his page.
moreso, if someone wanted a Teddy bear painted in his style, and he did not have one available - it's entirely legal (and morally acceptable) to go to your friend who is a professional painter and say "hey, can you paint me a teddy bear in this style?"... they may or may not do a great job, but if they looked at every image on Greg's publicly visible page - they might make a reasonably close stylistic copy. AND THAT WOULD BE OK.
The AI is essentially doing the same thing. it is NOT "copying work".
kinda like making a photo that was based on "Girl with a pearl earring" is not "copying work".
I became a professional photographer in 1973, as video became more popular and the equipment better I dabbled, only customers would buy a tape, make 20 copies and sell them to their friends. When I enquired about software to prevent this I found that for £30 I could get software to enable you to duplicate copyrighted material, but the add barriers in an attempt to reduce theft it was £5,000! Now, I tend to put video clips on RUclips, with the option to buy the full version, but nobody does, there is too much free stuff around.
In the early days of digital photography (±1991) I just couldn't take it serious. The first color monitors with only 256 colors. Pff. But now (32 years later) digital cameras and OLED displays are looking so good!. So let's see how A.I. is in 32 years.
Great video if a little depressing especially for stock photography :/ The Gartner Cycle - haven’t heard of that principle since doing a innovation course a few years back. Speaking of which in all new design there is an environmental impact too. Even software technology. Think of the higher computer processing demands of AI software. The increase in number of users rendering out highly complex images and video, people who would never previously have pushed their computers. As those computer fans running faster for longer. Let’s hope our journey to cheaper, cleaner energy is firmly at the top of that slope of enlightenment.
Well, as my Grandpa always used to say,........"People are just no damn good!" I have updated and shortened it to, "People suck".
I recently heard someone tell a photographer that he could always just learn to code....oh...wait... 🤣🤣🤣
@16:05 pitch that to Adobe
I use Luminar Neo and Topaz software that have AI tools that work.
In answer to the question posed here: I think its *too early to forecast* the impact A.I. will have on photography. But my instincts tell me that it will be moderately detrimental to Stock Photographers and Portrait Photographs, as Chelsea and Tony mentioned.
As a Fine Art Photographer I am not worried, that much, about the adverse impact of A.I. on my business. First, and foremost, **A.I. is NOT art** . Secondly most art buyers are " *buying the artist* " (along with the art) when they purchase art. They get the **human** connection to the art, the story behind the art, not just the photograph, or painting, or art piece.
Tony and Chelsea, I appreciated y'all continuing this important conversation.
Interesting. This has to be the sixth video on this subject on phtography channels today. What triggered so many to address it today.
Photography is about documenting your life, at least a huge part of it is that. I photograph places I visit. So no matter how good AI gets photography has it's value there. AI will be in that case used to enhance photography as oppose to replace. Recovering images taken on a sh*tty 2006 cheap camera with a whited out sky to make them look as if it were taken by a d850 for example would be one such application. But things made exclusively for beauty, AI will be more likely to replace rather than merely enhance.
ALERT!!! Chelsea is super beautiful in AI as well 😍
It would be same situation which we have in car industry. Lots of people lost their jobs because of automation. But we pay way more for hand build cars.
QUESTION: Would photographers still want to be photographers
If
the traditional (pre generative AI era) real-life (IRL) commercial photography field was moderately or severely impacted by future A.I.
where clients started to prefer AI generated images or simply used an advanced app instead of hiring photographers
AND photographers had their basic income needs met
(guaranteed education, basic income: food, water, shelter and health)?
What drivers would motivate photographers to continue doing photography regardless of these impacts on the traditional (IRL) photography job market if their basic needs were already met via a UBI?
I think many would but wasn’t sure. Just curious in terms of work, jobs, survival for artists and photographers for whom photography is their main source of income…?
Some would. Probably many. Likely most?
Here are some reasons why many photographers might still have plenty of reasons to be photographers, even with the security of a guaranteed UBI (Different set of reasons would apply to different people, of course):
SOME REASONS to stay hopeful and to keep at it (not in any particular order, just brainstorming):
• Joy of discovering one’s own abilities and surpassing one’s limits, boundaries, for discovery, for perspective, for the challenge.
• To educate inform, connect, document and communicate, inspire.
• Some will be doing it for the love of the craft, for skill, building comparative self-esteem, via skill refinement, in relation to the skill level of others.
• Some will use photography as a medium that captures truths about the real world.
• Some would to flex their skills (social validation).
• Some may pursue photography for scientific research (either personal or as a project). Curiosity, the joy of exploration and discovery.
• As a tool for promoting understanding in the world.
• As a medium to tell the stories of others that are not able to tell their own stories in the real world.
• Documenting history for future humans.
• A political tool for framing history, and reality in a particular way. (Depending on bias, one's politics and the bias of the zeitgeist).
• Real world photographers as human curators of the experience of human life in the real world (the way it was before generative AI). Something AI images obfuscate.
• To create photographic work that may be relevant for future humans.
• To use photography as tool that captures the beauty and the ugliness in the same subject.
• From a desire to surpass the limits of biology and "leave a legacy".
• Those photographers that are driven by the desire to make a lot more money from it: “Bigger bucks mindset”? Keeping up with the J's, having more than the J's.
• Those that want the prestige, social clout, want to be celebs, influencers, seek social validation/kudos.
• Paid assignments. No reason why photographers can't take on more assignments for various clients with various goals, even if basic needs are met.
• To be part of a group of like minded photographers in some sub-niche (a desire for belonging, meaning) So those photographers that want a sense of belonging to a photo community or the ‘photography world’.
• Those simply trying to capture a moment that is meaningful to them.
• Those that deploy photography as a means of making sense of the world and or coping with the world.
• Those using photography as activism. Street photography, photo journalism, etc.
• Those trying to hold onto fleeting memories, including memories of loved ones that may otherwise fade or be forgotten.
• To capture important life events. To hold onto what makes us human in the real world.
• Those trying to communicate concrete personal ideas via photography. Communication is their main driver. Some might care about this, others not so much.
• As a hobby, entertainment, for fun, out of boredom, as a pastime. A sense of connection to the world.
• Those who see and appreciate the beauty in ALL things and attempt to find it via the images they encounter (and interpret) in the world .
• Those with a desire to teach, educate.
• Those that want to say: I'm here. I was here. I'm not alone. I belong.
So still a lot of reasons to do photography, EVEN IF photography jobs were negatively impacted by AI imagery AND basic human survival needs were met for photographers.
I feel that machines cannot replace human photographers nor the real world human experience, even if machines may augment humans, to some degree.
So maybe it’s better to have 2 separate categories for photography then:
1. Traditional human photography (pre-generative AI era).
2. AI-augmented imagery (post-generative AI era).
And to use AI tech to tell them apart. Use AI on itself to help us retain what is human.
I would say don’t lose hope. But yeah job loss is still not something that everyone can deal or cope with or bounce back from equally. Everyone’s situation is unique.
The AI revolution is vastly different from previous major labor market shifts and will be even more so as time goes on. It’s not the same as before. Hope the job issue loss issue is looked at with care for IRL photographers that are at risk for losing their livelihoods and are not interesting in the “adapt to the robots or die” or the watering down of their craft.
I've used AI online services to enhance old photos, ie take scratches out, recover impossible to recover details by creating best guess AI algorithms, add colour etc, and to be fair some are actually really quite amazing! They may not be 100% accurate, but compared to a low resolution fuzzy and possibly worthless old photo, they can create a usable and amazing photo! As for enhancing photos with more dramatic/interesting backdrops, skies etc, that has been out for ages and many landscape photographers often cheat their way through their photographic life by creating super amazing looking images, which are totally unrealistic.
I've cheated a few times, using HDR software to combine different exposure level pictures to combine to create a OTT HDR crazy in your face WOW! pictures that our eyes just don't see in the real world.
Ever since darkroom photography developers invented tricks the way they could control and edit exposure levels in parts of the original, we have seen many of these 'fake' pictures, yet they were highly considered, acceptable and creative.
The future will get worse...soon REAL photography will be dead, and I do mean completely dead, nobody will take real photos in the future, just like nobody creates 1800's Daguerreotypes today, made by silver-plating a sheet of copper, then treating it with an iodine compounds to produce a coating of light-sensitive silver iodide! Who does that anymore? And So too the future will completely different to what we have now. It will be all AI despite peoples initial protestations and reservations, it will happen sadly.
Here's an example of POSSIBLE photography a 100 years from now: Take Elon Musk's, Neuralink Corporation today, which is a neurotechnology company that develops implantable brain-computer interfaces. In the future, such technology will be highly evolved and accepted. The human eye, ie you!... will look at an image, a scene, a person etc, then that image will be enhanced, recorded in your brain/chip interface, instantly uploaded to the internet cloud, maybe your personal online photo album, via 5g,6g,7g or whatever wi-fi network will be in operation by then, maybe even some extra physical enhancements to the human eye will augment the process, ie a new higher resolution electronic retina, maybe a small zoom lens implant will be available. It all sounds completely bonkers....but look at where we are now already!
Google maps, streets etc, has already got a huge repertoire of images and info on all types of landscapes, roads, skies etc, it would be nothing for your uploaded images to be collectively used to help and enhance someone else's uploaded image. By just recombining different shots, your image will be a 3d image, also zoomable right into the smallest details!....
AI does this now to some extent , it creates and restores lost details in blurry old photos and faces, by comparing your uploaded image to millions of others in its data bank and making a best bet guess to create new eyes and teeth and other feature to make yours look real again...And it works! not always 100% but when it does its amazing!
Photography will be dead probably within the lifetimes of many reading my crazy post! As for the excellent, Tony & Chelsea Northrup who we all love for the experience, expertise, intelligence, photographic skills, and excellent YT videos, they will be dinosaurs of a bygone age!...There will be no need for photographers like them in the future.....mark my ways, mobile phone cameras are just the start, wait until 100 years there will be no phones either!
Until then sorry for such a long post, and keep up the great videos Tony & Chelsea...
Tony has a Graph for ever situation ;)
In terms of predicting the future I turned to past around 2001 when Napster took its last breath. After all, what is the differences between a music artist sampling a copyrighted song downloaded from Napster and an AI software sampling copyright material from the internet. The AI software is not AI, its not self aware. Without the images and user input, all the AI software combine could not spontaneously create a work of Rembrandt or Shakespeare. It’s a program based in statistics that is used to evaluate input content and build a knowledge framework. In the next 5 years I predict there will be some landmark cases that place boundaries around AI systems. I think the boundaries will address how images are legally obtained and even how transparent the acquisition of said images. I also think deep fake will be recognize as a serious legal concern and will have further implications for AI and photography as well.
Interesting video, but the audio had some weirdness going on. It’s okay on a phone, but don’t listen with headphones or earbuds.
Why do I feel like Michael Douglas in "Falling Down" when I see AI content discussed like this... get off my lawn too while I'm here. (AI will be great...early use cases are egregious however)
Throughout history since 1816 when the first camera was made, many technologies have passed, especially recently.
Video cassettes, CDs, DVDs, now digital records and cloud systems are coming... the only thing left of everything is a simple photograph of a moment or event. So AI can take a photo of us, but it will never be able to take the moment when the photo was captured, and such photos have no price. I bought my first camera so that I could take pictures of my child and those moments that remain memorized in photography.
A photograph of everything has survived for these 200 years.
You need a new file format for photography and each photo will be treated as traceable NFT. When you work is used somewhere, the smart contract will give you some royalty revenue
I think that it will eventually take out Photography and videography in the sense that we will still use cameras but it will be controlled by AI. Arsenal 2 is a small step that way, I think eventually technology like that will be combined with the AI that generates images, together with a camera such as future version of DJI Ronin 4D. So it will be like a package of a camera that you place in a spot and tell it what you are looking for... then it adjust the camera and generates the image from the people standing in the image, add more people, change background and so on. But is not something that is here tomorrow, it will take time to reach that point. So we are good for now but not forever
I disagree on the shutter stock angle. I think it’s a fair way to delve into it. Folks already give up their rights when they sign on to distribute through stock sites.
I think A.I. will change digital photography like how digital photography's changed film photography.
now Tony, you've been around software long enough to know it's neigh impossible to fix bad input with algorithms. It ends up like squeezing a balloon: as soon as you fix one problem you create another. There is no substitute for high quality input. I like my optical view finders. I think a quality optical viewfinder is the key to getting quality originals. If you have to put your image on photoshop...... you're rollin' down that lost highway. I bet Chelsea will agree, if not completely, -- at least "to a point".
on the issue of Generative AI bias, that can happen when you don't give AI enough details, it fills its best guess given the context. So if its not leaning the way you want, definitely add more details to push it where you want to to go.
Also. That Msft chatbot that got racist that they mention. That’s the precursor of chatgpt. Same model. It was gpt 1.
I agree - AI is here and will find its niche. I also firmly believe that Photography is an art form and is also here to stay - Keep shooting and experimenting when you create your photographic art - We can do magic with our images in Photoshop - making beautiful images - Anyhow - have a great day:-)
I love amateur photography and I show 3% of my hobby to friends and family if they say something nice like can I have copy WOW!
I use an 'AI' program rather than the big monsters to make minor crops and with '1' slider it uses AI to make light adjustments.
Where does that fit in the AI world?
I would be shocked if it was five years away from being spot on!! That's an eternity in AI years. It is truly unlike any other technology before in our history. I've already seen a lot of AI generated stuff that was perfect. I'd bet each year from here on out you'll see leaps and bounds.
I already tried this AI and you can specify the prompt like what camera, lens and aperture used and also how far the subject from the camera and the pose...and it will easily generate a super realistic photo for you. You can also add more details to the face to make it more realistic. Scary as hell. 😳
Love to watch your and the exchange of ideas. But, here we go again with more about how life is being ruined (or...changed negatively?) by technology. Yes, technology continues to advance and the field changes with it. But it's as much a positive (opportunity to learn, opportunity to be part of the progress etc) as it is a negative, for those who don't keep up and are losing work. Anyway, my suggestion is that you trend the next one more towards how you/we/I can be a part of an exciting evolving field, and not whining about what you think you may have lost. Its happening - we need to move past it
There is a lot of fake in photography already. People use post to make photos look nothing like the originals. I don’t like this and feel it tends to makes photography and photographers disingenuous. Good job guys!!
I've spent a lot of time recently with AI photo restoration with some good, some not results. I think many time it helps in this area.
i have used a local install of stable diffusion (automatic1111) to train datasets of my family, so i can automate restoration of damaged old photos. it's FAR more accurate than the adobe neural net stuff built into PS, and it's all free if you have a decent GPU already.
IMO AI will not replace photography for all kinds of purposes. I don't think anyone would like wedding photos to be AI generated. Or the photos of your big birthday event. Or even the photos I take during travel and vacation. These are conserved memories of certain situations that can not be faked or recreated by an AI.
AI will possibly take more space in product photography and more 'artistic' photography. Or design for book covers etc.
These two are realist
Opt-in/Opt-out, you make me feel creepy as I cruse the stock photo sites looking for inspiration. As an unskilled photographer, I learn by watching RUclips videos like yours and reviewing images on sites like Shutter Stock. Yes, AI may be trained on your work on shutter stock (or music from music catalogs, text from novels, or programming code from GITHUB), is this materially different than an aspiring artist, musician, writer, or programmer learning from masters that practiced these skills before them? I will agree that I cannot take one of your pictures, mask out the sky and replace it with my own, or visa-versa, but we all learn from the experts that preceded us and I see teaching AI from the works of the masters as the same as me learning from the masters.
Sorry, I have not generated too many AI images yet, but for my woodshop, I did use generate a logo that I know should not result in any copywrite violations ('black and white line art drawing of soft coated wheaten terrier head").
I was messing around with dall-e mini (Craiyon) and the images it produces are extremely off. I prompted "person's face" and the faces I got back could hardly be called human, definitely something out of a horror story. tried "cat" and the pictures were awful. I thought the AI stuff was legit based on what I saw online, but now I'm thinking it's shit
I can see the advantages to photographers as far as composite photos easier. I lived through this going from film to digital. People said photography would kill "art" of painting, digital photography will kill the "art" of film photography, There are so many AI features that will be overused because of the hype but when it wears off, it will become a useful tool.
Unfortunately, I have already seen new photographers use AI instead of actually doing the work She faked a sunrise because there was no need to get up early since you could add it in post(her words)) Just be hones that its AI generated and not straight out of camera.