My grains of thought: AI vs. Photography
Ronit Novak
THE GRAIN: The pleasure and peril of AI and the future of creativity. Also, Director of Photography and Video at Toronto Life magazine.
This week on THE GRAIN Podcast, hear my dialogue with image artists Miles Astray and Boris Eldagsen, who both ignored the rules of photo contests—and made headlines for winning with the opposite of what was asked for. What makes a photograph real? Boris and Miles joined me to discuss from Berlin and Bolivia.
Photography is the perfect place for me to start talking about AI vs. Creativity, because the foundation of my own career has been framing pictures on a website or print page. I personally experienced the shift from analog photography to the digital age, and now my career increasingly involves thinking about artificial intelligence.
Listen to the episode at this link or find THE GRAIN wherever you get podcasts. And to accompany each episode, I’ve got some grains of thought on these recent pieces:
AI is the future of photography. Does that mean photography is dead? [New York Times]
When photography was invented, they said it would kill painting. When digital photography emerged, they said it couldn’t be called photography. This piece from last winter offered a snapshot of the evolving definitions by asking four AI-based artists—Alejandro Cartagena, Charlie Engman, Trevor Paglen and Laurie Simmons—how they were using image generators, and what makes a photograph a photograph.
The last stock photographers await their fate under generative AI [Wall Street Journal]
This side of the industry is well-aware that artificial intelligence is coming to eat its lunch like a woman laughing alone with salad. Getty Images, Adobe, and Shutterstock have all partnered with AI generators to train off its database of licensed images. The artists are getting compensated, but it’s a fraction of what they made shooting conventional stock photography. While they adapt to the changing technology and client needs, this industry may be speeding the inevitability of its own demise.
You don’t hate AI, you hate capitalism [Art in America]
Most of the criticism about the ethics of AI for artists relates to copyright infringement—generators training on images without credit or compensation. It perpetuates the assumption of each artist as grand creator and in need of protection, while the labour inherent in developing their tools, manufacturing their work and distributing it, all goes unrecognized. Joanna Maciejewska summed it up in a now-legendary tweet: “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.” What makes chores, housework, rote tasks, menial labour, less valuable and worthy of protecting than master artists whose ideas are leaning on a silent army of workers and technology?
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A photographer embraces the alien logic of AI [The New Yorker]
Charlie Engman leans into the weird of Midjourney’s distortions of the human as it interacts with forms around it. The result is an uncanny realism that blends fantasy with familiar. Like passing a bad car accident on the highway, I want to look but I feel I shouldn’t—it’s too horrific. And much like this taboo temptation, AI-generated images feel like a violent collision that seems to warp the order of things, a chaos that shouldn’t exist. But artists like Engman are embracing this discomfort, and creating a tension that tugs the viewer in two directions: looking away, and lingering for more.
The rise of Cara: the anti-AI social media platform for artists [Creative Bloq]
Jingna Zhang founded this alternative to Instagram, which is struggling to raise funds while managing conflict among its membership. Cara aims to mimic user-generated image feeds with likes and comments, while also blocking AI scrapers from using the platform's posts for training. However, since social media relies on user content without compensation, this anti-AI stance feels more like a gimmick. If innovators want to fairly distribute artists' work and prevent theft, they can’t have it both ways.
The incredible blandness of AI photography [The Verge]
Consumer tech reviewer Allison Johnson argues that realism is more engaging, and AI-enhanced family photos only make them look cheesy—similar to what we used to see more frequently with Instagram filters. It’s nothing new. But here's a radical idea: don’t take a picture at all! Go to the waterfall, take it in, listen to it, feel the mist on your skin, and chat with the tourists around you. Are there any natural tourist spots where photography is actually prohibited? We are long overdue for a counterbalance from the impulse to block a majestic view with a phone screen. I feel this reset could ultimately elevate the quality and intention behind human photographic achievement.
Stay tuned for further grains of thought about photography in the newsletter.
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