How to Find Meaning? – Having recently finished 21 days of an augmented reality investigation followed by another 21 days of research paper investigation and compilation, I’m feeling somewhat down. I think that primarily it is due to my investigations into AI generated art. The further I dig into this, the more depressed I become. I’m sure this is just a transient phase. Why am I so sad? It’s because over the years I learnt so much about photography. I collected a wealth of knowledge on this subject especially because each year I tried to present my students with increasingly technically challenging workshops. I was proud that I was able to replicate pretty much any style of photography from slow shutter work to speed shooting, star trails to zoom burst, macro photography to physiograms. I felt I had reached the pinnacle when I managed to work out the technique that Michael Jackson (the photographer not the pop singer), uses to make his ethereal Luminograms. Even today colleagues are badgering me to give up that secret which I flatly refuse. It’s so beautifully simple yet complex at the same time and I nailed it! However, with the advent of AI art […]
Has Ai Killed Art? – Ai or Artificial Inteligence/Machine Learning has been around for a while now, but never has it’s presence been more keenly felt than in and around the Creative Arts. Producing imagery was once the domain of illustrators and graphic designs. Now it appears that everyone with a computer/tablet/smartphone and a connection to Dalle and Midjourney can produce the most amazing images. At first as a photographer I didn’t feel particularly threatened by ai. I suspected that what I was producing was safe for a while and that everyone would always need good photographers? As a simple test I ran a text prompt through Midjourney – a text to image ai generator. The results to me seemed less than impressive. Below is an example of what I do and what ai thinks I do. To generate the image below I used the text prompt “Oil on Water”. I decided to give the ai a second attempt. Although the result was better, it was still significantly different from the kind of imagery that I was producing. Below is the second time I ran the prompt ‘oil on water’. Fortunately or unfortunately depending upon a […]
