We’ve all been hearing about AI for a while now, but up until last year or so, it was a somewhat alien concept looming in the not-so-distant future. But now we all find ourselves a part of some great experiment, whether we are ready for it or not. Someone likened it to a 20-mile-wide asteroid that has made an impact with the world as we know it. I think that’s an apt analogy. Will we fare as well as the dinosaurs did? This remains to be seen. 

I wanted to share my thoughts specifically on the way AI is affecting and will surely continue to greatly impact the area of life in which I found my calling—creativity. Photographers, retouchers, and digital artists have been manipulating images for years. I’m sure most of us are grateful for the advancements in computer software that have made this process abundantly easier, more user-friendly, and far less time-consuming. I’ve personally never been a big fan of heavy digital manipulation. Complex, Marvel-like photo composites just never did it for me. In most cases, that type of work just came off as fake to me—more digital skills than art. The same goes for films, my main source of influence. I don’t want to be able to easily tell what’s CG and what was clearly shot on a green screen. That’s why I admire a director like Christopher Nolan so much. He thrives on making his films as real as possible by doing the vast majority of his effects in-camera while shooting on film with giant, burdensome IMAX cameras. His new film, Oppenheimer, is said to not have any CGI effects whatsoever. That’s an INCREDIBLE feat in this day and age. Sadly, Nolan is a dying breed of film director.

My favorite director working today, David Fincher, is someone who embraces the latest technology but only uses it in subtle ways in service of the story. He will meticulously obsess over every detail in order to achieve a level of realism that becomes impossible for the viewer to decipher from the special effects he deploys.

And now we have Hollywood writers and actors on strike, partially due to AI’s "existential threat." We’ve reached a point where someone with no credible skills or experience can simply download an app and make Arnold Schwarzenegger sing and dance like Whitney Houston. Isn’t that "fun?" More mind-numbing entertainment to consume while scrolling on the toilet. AI can write you a script good enough for a Netflix night in.

But getting back to photography... I remember the first time I saw some of the Midjourney-produced images that exploded all over Instagram and the internet at large a few months ago. For those of you unaware, Midjourney is a generative AI program that generates images from natural language descriptions called "prompts." Basically, you type in key words and key phrases in order for the AI to generate whatever creative concept you have in mind. These "creations" were impressive, to say the least. Some of them were incredibly wild, surreal, and unreal, which of course they were. Suddenly, people were given the ability to create Wes Anderson-like film stills from the comfort of their homes. After a while, I learned how to spot them. Everything in the image was either too weird or too perfect. The beautiful human level of slight imperfection was missing, unless you count odd hands and fingers that AI seems to produce… Midjourney and other programs like it completely bypass most stages of the creative process. The prep, the planning, the scouting, the sourcing, the casting, and most importantly, the collaboration with other humans, as well as the actual shooting, are completely unnecessary. You can just sit in your house and feed prompts into the machine. It’s yet another shortcut created to make our lives "easier." Another "technological advancement" to keep us from having to interact with other people in the physical world. I personally value human creation over artificial generation. 

It comes as a shock to realize that the creatives of the world make up a segment of society seriously threatened by the implementation of AI, before the blue-collar workers or individuals with seemingly more "mundane" jobs.

Of course, some people will say that these are just more tools to aid the artist in their creations. What’s the harm in building out your fantasies in a world that is starting to resemble a kind of "virtual reality" with every passing moment? Well, it becomes a problem when you can alter someone’s appearance beyond recognition. You can literally turn someone’s frown into a smile, take off 20 years and 20lbs and call it good. Put out more fake content into the world. Distort reality; create your own version of reality. Life imitates art, and vice versa.

I think a lot of us have a love-hate relationship with technology. In some ways, the tech industry has produced some of the greatest inventions of our time, but it’s a double-edged sword, like most things. Social media was sold to us with the promise of connecting with other people, but the side effect so many of us are experiencing now is an epidemic of loneliness and isolation. We are slowly losing our humanity to the machines that we’ve created. Everything has become instant gratification: instant result, instant dopamine hit. We’ve cut out the journey of discovery, which to me is what makes life and being a human so beautiful. We’re growing more numb, needing more and more stimuli with each software update and the latest gadget unveiling. We’re also overwhelmed by the amount of information and visuals broadcasted into our minds via our precious, shiny hand-held monoliths every single day. The tech industry is creating a world of machines. What will be our purpose as humans? What’s the end game? The next few years will be fascinating and very telling, no doubt. We have no choice but to adapt and fight for our survival so we don’t end up obsolete, like the dinosaurs.