Photography and AI: how has and how could AI change photography as we know it?

Homework from Andrew McLuhan’s Understanding Media intensive

Let’s go back one step earlier. How has photography changed recently? Well, now everyone is a photographer because of smartphones ubiquity. What changed is there were more images than ever and more people contributing images than ever, too.

Previously Photos were developed or printed. Now they printed, maybe less are now… but they were “shared” on flickr, facebook, elsewhere. Ironically, many of those have trained the large transformation models that generate art from text prompts. What’s changing is more and more people can express than ever.

People will continue to capture images and share them. And meanwhile, people will continue to synthesize ai art images. Photography will only continue to grow and emerge as it has an art form, synthography will affect it, but I don’t think aesthetically or in practice. Rather, the effect is going to be trust on images, even the mundane.

So photographers will be required to prove, likely through machines, that they were where they claim the image was made. But this will be easy to do, because you phone already captures that information…