The two pictures below was made whilst I was on a poodlewalk in my local coastal area along the southern Fleurieu Peninsula. They were both made with a 1970s handheld Leica rangefinder with Kodak Portra 400 ASA film. Its bare bones photography. The film was then processed in a commercial lab and the negatives were scanned to create a digital file (jpeg).
This classical and hybrid approach to the photographic is in marked contrast to the AI and computation that has entered the aesthetic realm in the second decade of the 20th century. Aesthetic machines such as Midjourney's Discord server can generate images that appear to be human made. This AI imaging is a machine-learning system, and it's software enables you to create images that look like photographs, oil paintings, cartoons, etc. You can leave your expensive camera in the cupboard.
No doubt some will drop their cameras and spend their time with Midjourney's Discord server's chat-powered AI image-generating bot to produce images that are based on the prompts that you give it. My understanding is that Discord is primarily a social media messaging app, where users can join servers or create their own to interact with friends and communities, similar in some ways to Reddit or WhatsApp.
You'll need to sign up for Discord if you don't already have an account (it's free) and then join the Midjourney server as a beta tester in order to try out the AI. You have 25 free prompts allowed before the free trial period will expire.
After this point, you won't be able to request any more images (prompts) in the chat without subscribing to the program starting at $US10 per month (approximately £8 / AU$14) or $US30 per month (£25 / AU$43) for unlimited personal use of the AI and the images that it generates.
This new method of image creation will be useful for purposes such as book covers, advertisement, journalism and other businesses and promotional copyright-free content. So does AI replace Leica film photography? Is this the end of photography? Not really. They can both exist since they are very different approaches to making poetic images.