The photo below was made on an early morning poodlewalk with Kayla in 2022 in the local bushland in Waitpinga on the Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia. The photo was made around the same time as this black and white one.
Kayla and I did a lot of our early morning walks in this particular bushland, as it was one of her favourite places to walk in. We would come across foxes, rabbits and kangaroos in the winter/spring months and so there were lots of scents for there. She would wait whilst I photographed. On this occasion I was attracted by the subtle colours of the bark and the leaves.
This image is produced by a form of lens-based photography as distinct from the photographic. Then former involves creating images using light, a camera and film. (Digital technology replaces film with a sensor.) We need to make a distinction between photography and the photographic and to see them as two distinct entities, given the emergence of AI-generated images. Our photographic language has become a free floating entity separated from (lens-based ) photography and it now has a life of its own.
That is our starting point in the current situation.
I recently returned to the bushland in the autumn of 2023 to introduce Maya to it. Suprisingly, though the old piles of bark were still lying scattered on the ground, they had lost all their colour. They had that dead, withered, whitish appearance. Early autumn in southern South Australia is a very dry time. Plants and grasses in the bushland look dead after the summer months. They appear to be hanging on waiting for the autumn rains to come around in mid-late April.
This is another photo made on an early morning poodlewalk with Kayla in 2022 in the local Waitpinga bushland using the Leica M4-P:
Coming back to the issue of the photographic in the form of A1-generated images we need to say that these are not photography in the traditional sense because they are not created by capturing light through a lens, camera using either film or a sensor. They are ontologically different as they are created through the use of algorithms and data input, which are processed by a computer to create a visual image.
Boris Eldagsen, the creator of the PSEUDOMNESIA: Fake Memories series of AI-generated images, is very clear about the ontological. difference. In this interview he says:
"I think it’s very clear that we need to come up with a name for synthetic generated images that look like photography. I’ve heard some interesting suggestions—some good, some bad. The best proposition so far, which I have from somebody commenting on my social media accounts, is promptography. I liked that a lot. It tells you that it’s something else, and it should not be mixed in the same category. We need to be clear to say it is not photography. It’s using the photographic language. With the same tool, I can use the language of painting, I can use the language of drawing, I can use the language of 3d animation… the options will become more and more. It’s an explosion since last summer, and by the end of the year, we can’t know where we’ll be."
He adds that the current situation is that Pandora’s box has been opened. It’s a huge industrial revolution. We will have an AI-fication of all parts of our life and jobs. A1 generated images are going to radically change the photographic industry, photojournalism and concept artists in gaming and film and TV to freelance logo designers. More broadly there is the threat of deepfake images that are a downside for democracy, whilst AI in the form of the large language models (or rLLMs such as CHAPGPT or GPT-4 chatbots) raise serious issues for academia and the professons.
It is game changing and we we really need to openly talk about what is taking place around us. A serious discussion as the technology that’s coming will be even more ubiquitous, powerful, and destabilizing, and it t is in no country’s interest for any country to develop and release AI systems we cannot control. The current downside is that there is little chance of sensible regulation emerging anytime soon.