Simon's Blog

For a number of interconnected reasons I’m starting to think seriously about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be implemented over the next few years. The result of this contemplation is: I’m really not sure. The most obvious impact on my work is the way that Adobe introduce AI into their software. At the moment I only use the the denoise function in Lightroom which is not really what can be defined as AI compared to say the Secret Invasion title controversy.

Perhaps a better example of how AI can really take over image making can be found in the Smartphone world. We now have the situation where the image that is produced by most modern smartphones is not actually the one captured. I personally don’t really like the results that the iPhone produces and so use the Lightroom app on the iPhone which saves the images as a DNG, so allowing me to play around with them a lot more in post. Nonetheless there are times I have used the iPhone photo app for certain types of image making, Panos primarily, that the software is really good that there is no really need for other complicated post production intervention.

I see that Adobe have been testing in beta an implementation of AI where the computer creates whole new sections of the image. Again it is reasonable to argue that this has been available for a long time with such functions such as ‘cloning’ otherwise the verb to ‘photoshop’ an image would not have been coined. The difference is that it is reducing the skills required to create such an artifice in the first place.

I guess in the end of the day what all this says about photography is what anyone who has attended any photography course knows: All photographs are in some sense artificial, the important thing is that the producer of the images is honest about how the image was created. Personally, I make use of the facilities that Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop provide to enhance the images I have captured. I don’t create whole new images using the software but I am also aware that this is a very distinction that maybe in a few years will be impossible to define.

One thing I know AI will not be able to replicate or replace: The satisfaction of walking around my garden and capturing moments of time. For now?