My Take on AI "Photography" As an Engineer and Photographer

So I'll preface this by saying that I'm not one of those "super-cool" engineers that gets comped to the stars and works at exclusively the hottest labs, startups, or blue-chips. I'm a pretty run-of-the-mill classification guy with some expertise in the now-somewhat-antiquated NLP/NLU space. What this means is that I have history with machine learning as it relates to data primarily dealing with images. I work daily with a gamut of frontier LLMs in some capacity and very regularly play with diffusion models on my own time. This is to say that I have a decent idea of what's going on with this stuff--of course less so than the people who actually engineer, train, and deploy things like ChatGPT or Claude or Midjourney, but more than the average joe.

The point I want to make is that no matter how amazing generated images look, regardless of how "eerily real" or whatever, no matter how they make you feel, sickened or fascinated or otherwise, they are not concrete depictions of events that occurred in what we would call consensus reality. And that is the space that photography is ultimately going to embed itself even more than it already does now--capturing a slice of real time, in real space, of *real people (*or animals or stars or whatever your thing is) doing real things. A diffusion models pulls an image out of pure entropy, a primordial soup of information that's so high-dimensional and densely featured it doesn't make much sense to the smartest people in the field--you make an image by a physical act gathering photons on a sensor. You record a couple having the happiest day of their life, a product a whole team of people spent maybe years of their life perfecting, a perfect synchronicity on the street or a finely-crafted set that expresses some fundamental human truth. Sure, a machine living on some massive cluster of computers can make something visually intriguing in less time than you or I are probably completely comfortable with, but that doesn't matter! It's not real! It's vapor in the ether!

You as an artist have import. You are doing something a machine, in my humble option, cannot nor will ever be able to do--create something with intention (in the philosophical sense). You, as a photographer, occupy a unique position where you can create something total literal, complete and whole documentary, or something that blurs the line between your subjective experience and the world we share. You can do so from one second to the next, however you feel.

You use the human creative faculty which is weird and fascinating and cool. You bring things down from on high to the place of the living. You are now not too dissimilar from a traditional media artist, and I can absolutely foresee a renaissance in photography for these exact reasons, just as the traditional arts did at the advent of photography. And who knows, maybe this'll push the average photographer to get just that much better. People are uniquely capable of amazing things.

But I can't see the future, I'm just a guy, and I could be totally wrong. But don't bet yourself out of the race yet.