Painting of Chimpanzee admiring his glass of wine edited in Midjourney.
Original image is of a chimp sitting in a sanctuary reaching up to take a bag of popcorn from my girlfriend. However I've had this idea of a painting of a chimp admiring a glass of wine clothed in a silk gown sitting in a lavish royal chair for as long as I can remember. I've asked multiple painters to paint this for me, but noone understood my insane idea or would paint it for me. I tried photoshopping this for years but was massively unsucessful. I had all but given up by the time AI became available. Once it did, it took me 3 days of prompting and modifying every little detail: the plant, the picture on the wall, the bannana, the knife and fork (suprisingly difficult for AI), the tablecloth and the chair texture, to the glasses and the robe. The number of hours and effort/care I put into this also seriously rasies the question of originality: is it my work or AI?
Regardless, its now hanging above my dinner table
2 Comments
I think if AI totally overwrites your photo it's now AI.
In my opinion, it's your work. That's the easiest question to answer. It was definitely your unique vision. After all, how many other people on the whole planet would conceive of a picture like this? You crafted each and every element. That working process makes it distinctly yours. AI was just the tool to turn your thoughts into something tangible. As it turned out, a more efficient tool than a paintbrush, but a tool nevertheless. If it's not an original idea, it would only be that if you copied the idea from someone else, not because AI executed your instructions. That can get into a gray area because most of our most creative ideas are often a derivative of something we've seen before. Originality can be a complicated subject.
The other question people will debate is whether it's a photograph. With Fstoppers being a photography site, some people will claim your picture is not a photo augmented by AI, but something else. That may be true... I would hesitate calling your work a photograph, as Marian suggests, but that hardly matters in the larger scheme of things. Call it a picture, a computer graphic image, call it whatever you want... it's still a creative work that you made. As photographers, we often lose sight of the fact that there is more than one way to create a work of art.