“AI photos” are very different from “old-style” photos. I think it’s one of the big “unthought” of our current time.
To illustrate the stark contrast, let’s examine two images side by side.
This is a picture I took from my smartphone at an Arctic Monkey show.
When we zoom in on this smartphone-captured image, we notice a loss of detail and clarity. It’s a familiar experience for anyone who’s used a smartphone camera.
Now another image with my 20-years old digital SLR:
Zooming in on this photograph taken with a trusty 20-year-old digital SLR reveals a different story. The details remain crisp, and the image retains its integrity.
These visual comparisons highlight just how distinct AI photography and traditional photography are. AI photos represent a departure from the “objective truth” that traditional photos sought to capture. The latter offered a window into a moment in time, seen through the eyes of a machine. AI photos are ontologically different from photography. They are closer to a painting than a photography.
Argentic (and digital) photos are an “objective truth”. It’s an image of a point in time from a machine. That (now) simple fact changed the world. For the first time in history, you could show what had happened somewhere else and it was “more objective” than the retell of a human being (whether through an image or a text). Philosophers have written books about it. Some of the most famous books are La Chambre Claire from Barthes and On Photography from Sonntag.
In contrast, AI photography introduces a layer of interpretation. It captures what the software deems important, removing and inventing parts of the image. It’s no longer “real”. It’s a facsimile of reality with a point of view built-in; an “update to reality” derived from a consensus of what is perceived significant in a multitude of similar images.ve
This is all really cool and fascinating. But it’s also a big problem: we are now more than ever an image-drive society (by opposition as a “text-driven society” which we were 100 years ago), and AI photography has effectively replaced all previous photography; yet we barely know what AI pictures are. We do know we can’t trade “old-style photo” for these images, yet we do. Society has not adjusted yet. We have already moved into a new type of society but we don’t know which yet. In the meantime, I’ll stick with my SLR.
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