A.I. Photography - Are we doomed?

[manaheim]

AI doesn't have a soul, a heart, or a moral basis of decision making. It's just a more fancy program written by programmers. Nothing new.

A heart, as a philosophical thing, is just a series of neurons firing in your brain. Same goes for a soul, morals, etc... all just neurons firing along pathways that have been encouraged or discouraged as part of our brain's development. Which is exactly how a neural net works.

We are all just machines. We just happen to be squishy ones.

And even if NONE of that were true... it doesn't change the fact that, behaviorally, machines will be able to replace us.

 

[AlanKlein]

A heart, as a philosophical thing, is just a series of neurons firing in your brain. Same goes for a soul, morals, etc... all just neurons firing along pathways that have been encouraged or discouraged as part of our brain's development. Which is exactly how a neural net works.

We are all just machines. We just happen to be squishy ones.

And even if NONE of that were true... it doesn't change the fact that, behaviorally, machines will be able to replace us.

But they shouldn't because they can't make moral decisions. They can't love, feel, emote.

 

[ClintLloyd]

That's coming out now, look at the Google mess with their prejudicial programming. Sadly the code is not sterile, it's generated by humans, who conscious or not have an influence on the outcome. IMO even if, "God Forbid", the code becomes self generative, who's to say it won't develop it's own prejudices.

Fingers crossed hey! With basically every powerful opinion now being lobbied by billionaires with ill intentions, I'd be open for a synthetic entity to decide itself. Whatever it comes up with can't be worse than the current garbage that is forced upon the masses...

 

[JoeW]

First of all, Computer Generated Imagery is not photography, it is illustration. I have seen posts from people who say that the camera will be obsolete, replaced by CGI and never needed again. When I ask how they will get CGI to record their family portraits, or their daughters' weddings, they say that you can put them in any setting you want, anywhere in the world. You can record a wedding in Paris without ever leaving Wichita. Okay, but who is in the pictures? How does the program know who my daughter is and what her aunts and uncles look like?

If I want a picture of my (theoretical for me, maybe not for you) classic Maserati, how will the CGI know what it looks like? From a prompt describing it in every tiny detail? Why not just take a picture?

Ad campaigns will doubtless utilize CGI and put some photogs out of work, but it is already used extensively in just about every ad you see, so how can it get much worse?

Camera manufacturers are coming out with new and innovative cameras every week. They don't seem to be too concerned about prompts replacing lenses and sensors any time soon...

TJ,McG, I'm not attempting to argue that AI generated work is the same as photography. Conceptually they're not even the same sport or ballpark. But the ability to distinguish between the two is going to get tougher and tougher. And therefore efforts to regulate are likely going to be piecemeal and inadequate. To your question about the family--it's easy. Instead of hiring a photographer to take a more recent photo of the family, they'll use an AI program (much faster and cheaper) to age a photo from 5 years ago. And also delete your daughter's boyfriend she's since broken up with. And you say "but it still required an original photo." Well I could spin scenarios where that isn't the case. But more likely what we'll see in the short-term is people using AI as a way to cut out a lot of photography.

It will absolutely get worse. I'm going to sound like one of those ranting seniors "get off of my lawn" with this next piece. But here goes...a guy who used to be the entertainment journalist at USA Today told me that with the elimination of many papers and magazines (and those writers working independently, setting up their own website and blogs) it led to less critical questioning of the people they interviewed. Why? Because they couldn't afford to tell a politician or star "that's BS!" So they were more likely to throw softball questions, give praise, and write the kind of web piece that lead them to get referrals to other stars as a "soft interviewer." Well, what AI does is allows news organizations to shrink staff, replace researchers, and generate content which isn't verified. It's taking information agregators to their extreme. So now let's take this to photos specifically. Staff photographers are now almost nonexistent at newspapers these days.

And yes, camera companies are worried. First, they've seen an increasing amount of their business move to phones. And the expectations are that the camera world away from phones will continue to shrink. But separate from that, if photos get scrubbed and are then used to generate someone else's content (let's call it "graphic imagery") but you (as the original photographer) get no royalty, no say or approval, don't you think that hurts photographers OR the sharing of photos?

 

[manaheim]

But they shouldn't because they can't make moral decisions. They can't love, feel, emote.

I think it's fair to say that you're missing my point.

The things you're referring to are our human encapsulations of firing neurons. Electricity going through our squishy brains.

You're saying we're unique in some existential way. And we are. But what I'm saying is that AI is going to behaviorally wind up doing the very same things.

Point of fact... when ChatGPT/Bing AI was released it very amorously stalked a journalist. As far as anyone could tell, the AI was in love with that journalist. Whether it is or is not is effectively irrelevant, because it behaved as if it was. And the minute you hit that, you have to ask "how are we any different"?

A Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled (Published 2023)

A very strange conversation with the chatbot built into Microsoft’s search engine led to it declaring its love for me.

www.nytimes.com

And if you cannot at least SEE the existential challenge to your perspective there, then you're not really equipped for this conversation.

 

[Woolsocks]

I've seen the ai stuff in videos and it looks good I admit. But I've seen a lot of user's on facebook submit ai generated stuff and it's terrible. Looks like clip art. Terrible. There's also phone apps that use ai cloud and they post that stuff without mentioning it's been auto generated. weird creepy stuff.

 

[greybeard]

Don't worry about it. Pretty soon AI is going to take over the world and eliminate all of us.

This is a real worry given what would could happen if it ever gets into a quantum computer.