Stop Telling Me How to Write! and Make Photographs. . .
I’m actually in the middle of writing another blog post right now, but I had to pull off that because this just could not wait. (But before I really get started, I want to apologize for my font choice to anyone reading this named Al. You’ll figure it out.)
Microsoft Word has decided I have written something wrong. Not misspelled a word (which I do alot (and sometimes on purpose)), or gotten bad grammar, but that my choice of words was flawed. It was by no means the first time this had happened, but what was different was that, in addition to my usual frustration, I yelled at my computer to, “Stop telling me how to write!” That got me thinking, how often, every day, do we encounter other “not people” telling us how to create? I get it, MS Word’s AI is supposed to be helpful, giving us suggestions on how to be more clear and concise (like right there where it’s telling me it should be “clearer and more concise”). But what if I don’t want to be “clearer and more concise”? What if I want to say, what I want to say, the way I want to say it? What if sometimes I want to break the rules?
What if everyone wrote the way Word told them to write? We would all sound the same. Eventually, “we” wouldn’t be needed to write anything at all, since we would have already given up the creative decisions in our writing. Word’s AI could do it all for us, all of us. What a wonderful world that would be.
“Isn’t this a photography blog? What does this have to do with photography?” you may be asking. Didn’t the title give it away?
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Writing, for me, is as much, if not more, of a creative exercise as is photography, and for some cold AI to tell me how to create, well, I find that OFFENSIVE. No one would tolerate the suggestion of allowing AI to tell Van Gogh he’s putting too many petals on that sunflower.
If the idea of AI mucking about in my creative writing or other people’s art offends me, what should be my response to AI’s involvement in my photography? Should I rejoice at the trend toward AI powered sky replacement in image processing programs? Should I rant about it on Twitter or the YouTube comment section (or in my own blog)?
“But photographers are free to use or not use that feature, should they choose to do so,” you might say. While this is true in this most obvious case, where has AI crept in that we are unaware? What is “Clarity” anyway? Isn’t this just some magical AI powered slider in Lightroom to make things “more clear”? That’s exactly the reasoning behind Word’s suggestion with my writing. See a pattern?
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Let me be clear, I’m not saying AI is all bad (I could give you a list of sci fi movies as long as my arm that make that argument better than I ever could). What I am saying is that if we exclusively rely on AI to control our creative process, we will all end up with photographs that all look the same. Obviously, this could never happen, as is apparent on Instagram where just the existence of their algorithm causes creators to mimic each other. When AI takes over our workflow, are we even the ones doing the creating anymore? And at what point is the photographer finally made superfluous?
As much as I hate AI (in case that wasn’t apparent), I am also forced to recognize its usefulness and even necessity in many aspects of life. I gratefully exploit the benefits of AI every day, and then cover my eyes to that fact, screaming, “You can’t see me!”
All I guess I’m really saying (now that I’ve calmed down a bit) is that we should “recognize” AI for what it is and what it’s doing, and what more it’s capable of. We all need to be willing to reflect on where we place value; on the work of other people and their creativity (or blood and sweat), or the work of some AI that’s been programed to just show us what we want to see (and tell us what we want to hear).
I’m just saying, maybe that’s NOT what the world needs right now.
Now back to my other blog post. Thank you for listening
for listening
listening
listening
list. . .