Sometimes my brain independently interviews itself on certain topics. This time, a background process researches what I think about photography as an artistic medium. I managed to grab it by the tail.

Will AI Kill Photography?

Do you think AI will, at some point, become better at taking pictures than humans, and photography will be dead?

I am not afraid of what will happen. Stronger, there will be a point in time when AI will be better at creating a particular kind of picture. But that is not as disastrous as photographers think it is.

1. The current capabilities of AI are vastly overrated. AI is still an aggregation of what is out there. There is no invention, no novelty. Will there ever be surprising novelty? Maybe. But would you be interested in it? I doubt it. For advertising, as illustration, but as art, that surprises and moves. I doubt it.

But suppose AI becomes better than us at taking pictures:

2. Keep making pictures anyway. People are still playing chess. It’s the process, dude. I guess each of us needs to consider why we are taking pictures in the first place. Do you really want to leave such an important activity to an AI?
3. It is our challenge to find something that AI can not do better than we can. It is our challenge to find something no one can do better than you, in general, as makers. AI capabilities would be a fantastic challenge to human creativity. We should embrace that challenge rather than be afraid of it.

Will things change? Yes. But we should not react with the same Luddite arguments as photographers did when digital photography emerged.

On Cropping and Creative Freedom

Something different: Do you crop your pictures?

Uninteresting question, and you will see why. Yes. I crop whenever I want to remove things from the picture I don’t like. I am not religious about cropping. Or applying whatever modification to the picture, in fact. If someone can make a lovely image from a photo by cropping everything except a single pixel, I am totally ok with that. Or when someone glues 273 images together to create a great picture, it’s totally fine.

Really, I am fearful of orthodoxies. You must… use 28mm for real street, apply golden rules, only photography at dawn/sunset/hard light/…, shoot from the hip/viewfinder, use layers/deadpan/… in your pictures, never crop, never pose, … Screw all that. Wolfgang Tilmans blew up low-res images to great pictures. David Hockney cut and glued images to create fabulous artworks. Even Elliott Erwitt cropped the hell out of his photos.

I don’t want to limit my creativity by any such orthodoxy.

The Finite Space of All Images

My brain is researching the creative border. On that … Lately, I was also thinking about the limited pixel space we operate in. Say our images are 1000 by 1000 pixels, that is 1 million pixels, but the size does not really matter. It could be a million by a million, that is not the point. Each pixel in the one-million-pixel space can have 256 different color values (or 16000; again, the exact number does not matter). Then the total number of possible pictures is 256^1000000 (256 to the power of 1000000). That is a lot, but it is a finite number of pictures. Think about that.

These pictures include everything we can photograph around us, at any moment in time. Everything we see today, tomorrow, any picture we take fits in that space. And anything that happened in the past. A portrait of Napoleon, the building of the pyramids, a Neanderthal, a dinosaur, the Earth being hit by a giant meteor, everything.

I am only orthodox about trying not to be orthodox.