AI vs HI. Which one wins? Is artificial intelligence better than human intelligence? AI is undoubtedly faster, but does it produce a better picture? Does AI work feel genuinely creative by its users, or does it give you a bit of a guilty feeling that you're faking it? I wonder if I used AI, whether I would feel proud of the work I had done.

I ask those questions because I’ve never touched AI, beyond the use of Topaz Gigapixel AI to upscale my images for print. But I wonder sometimes how I would like it. After all, I’ve spent three decades editing images in Photoshop. I’m certainly not a purist in the sense that some folks believe it’s immoral to alter a photograph into something that distorts reality. Whatever works… I just wonder if AI tools would give me better results.

This photo is one example. The original was taken a few years ago in San Francisco, in color with a Nikon D800E, and with all the elements of a modern city. I changed the picture to black and white with an old-time sepia texture and entered it into our camera club competition. The judges agreed that people on the street and in the cable car looked incongruent with the attempted look and feel of a vintage picture. The guy in the front left was wearing shorts and sneakers, probably Nike’s. So I set out to fix that. I searched through volumes of old Victorian era portraits from the US Library of Congress that I could download and use from their public domain collection. One by one I removed modern elements from my picture such as cars, people, street sign, advertising poster on the cable car, a fire hydrant, and a mail box. I then clipped the old Victorian people from their portraits and pasted them into my contemporary picture. Things like orientation, shadows, direction of light, softening edges, and diffusion of light through glass in the cable car window all had to fit in order to look like the real thing. A lot of pixel peeping. It took three days to get it the way I liked.

Someday down the road, I may feed the original picture into an AI editor with a few text prompts for converting it to a Victorian scene. I’m skeptical that it would do as good of a job. On the other hand, maybe I’m afraid that it will do a better job, and take three minutes instead of three days to do it, rendering over 30 years of mastering Photoshop skills relatively meaningless. Oh, and if you slap a 1 or 2 vote on my image, please leave a comment explaining why. Constructive critiques are so much more helpful. That was the motivation to get from the original to this version. I also realize this entry does not fit the contest theme precisely; however, I wanted to expand the conversation about AI.