Member-only story
Photography, Artificial Intelligence, Art
AI “Art” is Usually Rubbish
Powerful technology in the right hands can produce beautiful things, but the opposite is also true. Give a careless, unimaginative, unskilled person access to an artificial intelligence photo editing tool, and the results won’t be art. They will be the opposite of art or, if you prefer, rubbish.
How do I know this? I hesitate to admit it — and to apply the adjectives in my first paragraph to myself — but I took one of my recent photos and “toyed” with it in Photoshop. I wanted to see what their “Generative Fill” AI editing tool can do.
Please take a second to look at my photo. Do you see the four critters I added to the picture? Can you guess what type of car was in the picture before I asked “Generative Fill” to change the color from grey to white?
Photoshop is a great program, a gift to photographers. I have used Generative Fill hundreds of times to improve photographs. I recommend it. But I had not used the tool to “let my creativity run wild.”
In the right hands, or even in my hands on a day where I practice a little discipline and think about what I am doing rather than just doing it, art can be produced with the help of AI.
My photo above represents an abuse of “Generative Fill.”
© 2023 John E Dean
