You are a small-town American doctor, and to your surprise, aliens have replaced your community. Plant spores have fallen from outer space, creating seed pods capable of making identical human copies. Pod people take on traits and memories along with unique personalities. Slowly, an invasion has started. Wait a minute, hold up, reverse that! Sounds scary, right?
Well, maybe if you were a kid in 1956. This is the plot of the 1956 sci-fi film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. You might be wondering why the correlation is to photography. It's more about fear these days and the takeover of AI. Is it something we should fear as photographers? That is a world where I can draw a line in the sand and say we should be afraid while simultaneously saying time will show there should be no fear. Remember this thing called the digital camera? More on that later.
Job Security
It’s coming for our cameras, right? Yes, it will. But only for a select few. I see this as clients who may go to AI instead of emailing us to discuss creating images for them. In the grand scheme of things, this is happening today. There are clients for everyone! Let's say a commercial photographer is talking to a client about a project for a local company. The company has a meager budget, and the photographer costs more than the budget allows. This client knows the photographer has fantastic work, so they called them. Ultimately, the client didn’t expect the budget required to create the work. They called another photographer with much less experience who charged the client much less to get the job.
Naturally, the company sacrifices quality in favor of the almighty dollar. That is where I see AI coming into play in the future. This type of client will never actually hire a photographer they need. This client will sit back, thinking they will fire up the computer and create the images using AI. You have to ask yourself, is this the client I want to work with? Actually, no. These clients make you want to hang up and throw in the towel. They are not profitable clients, and in actuality, they were never your clients! To be realistic, AI will make job security a little more challenging for some photographers, but not for all.
The photographers who will succeed in this new era, whether amateur or professional, will be the ones who learn to adapt to or embrace AI. This is not a threat but an opportunity for growth and innovation in our field.
Creativity
There have been arguments that AI will stunt the growth of creativity. It feels like the world has lacked thinking and creativity. AI can create images based on existing ideas and mix them into new images. While this is true, creating images will still take some creativity. You'll have to think about the image you want to make and articulate it clearly for AI to produce the image you envision. AI is still going to struggle in some ways. The biggest fear is that images will lack intentionality and originality. This will likely happen, as it takes a human being, not an algorithm, to create images with intention and originality. Every artist and photographer creates work with vision, depth, and a personal touch. These things can only be made by an individual, not an algorithm. This is where I also believe that AI lacks in creative endeavors. In the end, AI will not be able to defeat creativity or add personal vision to your photographs!
I used Adobe Firefly and asked it to create an image for a website promoting a protein powder. The image on the left was uploaded as a reference file, and the image on the right is from Adobe Firefly; as you can see, it's not perfect.
Dependance on Technology
We know we spend thousands of hours and years perfecting our craft and techniques as photographers. Skills are built over time through experimentation, failures, and successes. Will AI hurt our skill sets? Only if we let it. With so much automation being introduced into our editing platforms, from generative fill to noise reduction, we can’t fall into the trap of allowing automation to make our decisions. It will make our editing times faster, but we must remember not to get complacent. Once that happens, we will start to forget the skills we developed to make these adjustments manually. If AI makes these decisions for us, we lose these critical skills.
Market Saturation
I believe the most significant fears are ease of use and content volume. Remember the introduction of the digital SLR? Meteors were supposed to fall from the sky, taking out every photographer known to man. Your Uncle Joe was supposed to become the biggest wedding photographer in town, and professional photographers would be wiped off the face of the planet. Did that happen? The family chose Uncle Joe to photograph the wedding over a professional photographer. Some photographers went out of business, but not all, because they decided to hold on to the past and not embrace the future. Why did all this happen? Digital cameras became more accessible, and they were easy to use. The market became oversaturated, with new photographers charging little to nothing and giving away “free” sessions for their portfolios. Will AI do the same? Yes, but only because some photographers will hold on to the past and not embrace the future. Their demise will be due to their own actions, not because of AI.
AI will start to saturate the market with a large volume of content. We already have a market saturated with images, as billions of photos are uploaded to the Internet at any time. We already know that just as many awful photos are being posted as superb images. This will happen with AI as well. In the end, this is nothing new for our current market.
There are things we need to consider about AI that I haven't touched on. I can guarantee you that AI will force a good number of photographers to the sidelines permanently. However, this will be due to their own decisions more than the rise of AI. We can’t close our eyes and hope it goes away. AI is here to stay and will significantly influence the photography industry. The question is, will you be the one who closes your eyes wishing for AI to disappear, or will you embrace it and adapt your skills and business model to the changing landscape?
