For better or worse, artificial intelligence is going to dramatically change the face of the photography industry. Here's a look at the photorealistic imagery that AI tools can generate from scratch in a matter of seconds.
Artificial intelligence is expanding into many areas of our lives, from online services, like generating search results, to various types of photo editing. Computers can now use their networks of data to perform tasks that a human would normally do. Photography is one of the many areas that will continue to benefit hugely from AI, and it will be exciting to see how this technology will continue to help photographers to make better work.
One interesting glimpse into the future of photography is in photographer Mathieu Stern's latest video. Stern uses an AI program called DALL-E to create photo-realistic images from textual descriptions alone. The video starts with an explanation of how the program works, where we learn how DALL-E can imitate the styles of different artists and can even modify existing images. The latter of these examples may pique many photographers' interests, as it could be a useful tool for editing. The example featured shows a picture of a dog being replaced with a cat to great effect. What makes these convincing edits especially impressive is that these actions are being done by AI in a matter of seconds.
The video concludes with some fun applications of the program, as Stern asks DALL-E to invent some theme-based cameras. This produces some interesting results, as we get to see the characters from Star Wars, The Hulk, and The Simpsons manifested into camera form. One thing all these generated cameras have in common is that they all look like real photographs. While these renders are fun to see, they do show the potential of AI replacing large parts of our industry in the future. If a client can ask a computer to generate a picture of a product in various settings, why would they go to the trouble of hiring a photographer? I feel AI is going to be a great tool for photographers, as it will eventually automate many of the laborious tasks we currently do. We do, however, need to keep one eye on where this powerful technology is going so we are best prepared for our futures in the industry.
What would you ask the AI to generate if you had access to this tool? How do you think AI will impact photographers going forward? We'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
To whom it may concern: don't call "art" the outcome of playing with DALL-E.
But could one maybe consider the "art" being the development of the concept of what to ask DALL-E to generate? The how it is generated is merely mechanics. To use an example from the video, the "artist" had the concept of a photo of a tiger in a wig and used DALL-E to visualize that "original" concept. Had Salvador Dali painted a tiger in a wig, I don't think anyone would question whether it was art. The big difference would be how the image is generated. Certainly Dali would have needed his considerable "talent" to make a pleasing image, but is that the "art" of it? If the Dali painting was converted into a paint by numbers, and I painted it as such, I don't think anyone would hail it as great art - even if it perfectly matched Dali's original. Therefore, the value of art is certainly in good measure determined by the originality of the concept and imagination to develop it.
While, I doubt that I would ever be enamored of AI-generated art, I can appreciate that some very creative artist may be able some day to generate truly original and captivating images using AI as the medium. Monet had an idea that conflicted with accepted norms and Impressionism was born. Ernst and Miro were influenced by Freudian psychoanalytic theories and ushered in Surrealism. Niepce used a machine and chemistry instead of paint to generate an image, and photography was born.
I think art always needs to push into new frontiers. There are a lot of dead ends, but the transcendent evolutions would not come without that experimentation. Marshall McLuhan said of journalism, "the medium is the message". In art, is not the opposite true, that the medium is merely the mechanism to realize the message?
In the title of the article the phrase "The AI Tool That Will Could Replace Some Photographers" does not make sense to me. Is it 'will' or 'could'? Typo or American collooquialism?
We need to stop calling these software techniques "artificial intelligence". They're just new and improved algorithms, drawing on bigger data sets. Impressive, possibly useful, but in no way intelligent. They're single task programs - when not processing images, they're just code sitting inert.
It might be more appropriate and accurate to refer to them as "AI- trained" algorithms. I have no doubt that they use AI to develop the algorithms and train them on the data sets, but as you point out, they do not recursively "learn" as one uses them. I imagine the argument would be that over time, the developers continue to run the AI to "recursively" update the algorithms-but those only seem to come in the form of deterministic software updates, not by the embedded algorithms truly "learning". It's like training your dog to do a new trick every couple of months and trying to claim that he has trained himself to reason and think of new tricks.
I guess for some even “toys” can replace sex.
So I got a Dall-e invite after reading this article I signed up, see results below..... my first results were childish to say the least but the more descriptive I got the better the results. I put them on my profile to show people that it is getting scary good. To those who are pro's you'll notice some inconsistencies but literally I put the words into the engine and this popped out. I think at the very least art departments in ad agencies are going to lose some talent over this. Maybe not photographers... yet.....