Thoughtfactory: Leica poetics

Leica, film, snaps, chronicles, cliches

Leica v AI

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.