OK, You Made an AI Image. What the Hell Am I Supposed to Be Looking At?

AI content is everywhere now, but I have never been told why I should care?

Photo by the author: Available on Unsplash.

I really want to know how I should respond to AI imagery.

Nice image of a saguaro cactus next to an arch in southern Utah; titled “Photograph of The Arches”.

It’s not. It’s AI.

A smiling man sitting in front of a cake he just baked according to the caption.

It’s not. It’s AI.

A “portrait” of a woman taken in Spain titled; “Spanish woman in the light.”

It’s not. It’s AI.

When you show me something made by AI, what do you want me to see?

I sincerely want to know.

For example.

You show me something you think is really cool; a picnic basket on the side of a stream.

Created by Adobe Firefly

It’s sharp, with good color, some shallow DoF, and composed in an acceptable, if not altogether creative, way.

So what am I looking at?

A photograph?

Surely not. Not in any possible description of the artifact, could it be called a photograph.

That stream doesn’t exist and has never existed. Nothing in or out of the basket has ever existed.

The light isn’t real, nor is the softly receding focus behind the basket.

It simply never existed.

You, the author of this, want me to see what?

That you created this?

You didn’t create anything, you prompted it.

Like me saying to an artist, “Paint a basket of cheese and bread along the side of a stream”.

And the artist does it.

Do I get credit for the piece or does the artist who made it?

There is a special skill involved in bringing an image into the world, and prompting it is not one of them.

Art directors, creative directors, editors, brand managers, and a hundred other job titles prompt people to do something.

They do it.

As a creative director, I would tell my art directors to work on a campaign, and they would then find a photographer or illustrator to create the work.

I prompted them, and they prompted the artists.

And that photographer or illustrator gets the credit for their work because what they do is difficult and takes special skills. They have honed those skills to create their art.

And while creative directors and art directors have skills they have honed, they take credit for their work, and their work alone, not the work of the artist or photographer they ‘prompted’.

We should separate the art from the creator.

Really?

Yeah, Bucko, that ship has sailed.

Works by artists, composers, photographers, directors, and writers have been removed because something their creators said or did went against the current social common.

There is no art without an artist.

I could take a drum machine and craft an incredible drum solo, with impossible sticking, requiring three arms, a piece that no human could ever perform.

Would that be as interesting as listening to a real drummer play a drum solo? One that may look or sound impossible to play?

Would you pay money to listen to a fake drum solo?

And if I made the fake drum solo, what, exactly, would I want you to hear?

Code? Computer sounds? Something that requires no skill at all with sticks and drums and cymbals and stuff?

Meh.

That drum machine output requires no skill, no practice, nothing special… at all.

It’s a machine.

No art.

Let’s get this right out of the way now; I am not talking about AI noise reduction, AI color palette generators, GPT, or any other AI stuff you wanna play gotcha with.

I am talking about AI images being shown to me as a photograph.

That is what I am focused on.

So when I see a photograph of the Dolomites taken by a photographer who actually climbed them, waited for the light to be what they wanted, and spent effort, time, pain, and money to get that shot, I know that it is a piece of art — or at very least art was attempted. (Whether it is good or bad is not important at this point. Those are subjective terms and doing all that to get a shot doesn't make the image good or great by any means.)

When you show me something that looks like the Dolomites rendered in Midjourney, what am I to make of it?

What the hell am I looking at?

It took no skill.

(“But I prompted it!” Oh please. I can get prompts anywhere on the net and simply change a word or two. Really.)

You didn’t climb a mountain, wait in the cold, catch that wonderful moment of light in a brilliant framing.

In fact, AI has no frame, so, yeah that never happens.

I guess it is a rendering of a bunch of data, and even if it is really cool looking, is a result of algorithms, not vision.

Yesterday, I read an article discussing a new piece of AI software that makes “music”.

“Rodriguez sees Suno as a radically capable and easy-to-use musical instrument, and believes it could bring music making to everyone much the way camera phones and Instagram democratized photography. The idea, he says, is to once again “move the bar on the number of people that are allowed to be creators of stuff as opposed to consumers of stuff on the internet.”
— Suno AI

“Bring music to everyone”.

I suppose there are some people who believe that making music is something anyone can do if they get some software. Yeah, I’m sure there are.

I want to know what this part means: “move the bar on the number of people that are allowed to be creators of stuff…”

Allowed?

No one is forbidden from making music. You only have to learn how to make music. What his dystopian rhetoric attempts to do is to borrow from the victim porn for people who have chosen not to do something but want to get the perks of doing it at the top levels without any expense (money, passion, time, sweat, work).

All that keeps someone from making music is their CHOICE to not learn how.

Read the article by Patrick La Roque.

So tell me what I am supposed to see or think when I see AI stuff, cause all I see is less than interesting stock “content” to be thrown in for nothing more than needing a visual thing… content.

And have no interest in content.

This photo of me is by Carol Rioux, taken on a camera: light-painted in Calgary, BC.

Hi, I’m Don Giannatti, a photographer and mentor for up-and-coming photographers. You can find me on my website, Don Giannatti, and at my Substack site, where I also publish for creative people. All subscribers to my Substack have access to a free, long-form workshop on the business of commercial and professional photography.