Photo Shoot: A.I.=Artificial Images
A.I. is invading photo world. Technology behind the combination of these two improbable words, artificial and intelligence is making life very interesting. The cellphones in our pockets now have enough computing horsepower to take on artificial intelligence image generation. A simple search in the phone’s app store turned up any number of these new programs, several for free. The scary part of all this, making fake photos, completely fake photographs on demand.
These image generating programs first start with a massive database of free or common content imagery uploaded to the now famous “cloud.” Software magicians work their magic, presenting a simple user interface. This is a text- based prompt system. Users type in an image they want generated using keywords, for example, black and white, Ansel Adams style landscape, California coastline, sea lions in foreground. The familiar spinning wheel starts up and several programs give a time estimate, usually one to three minutes. Then out of the image cloud it arrives, your neatly organized pixels, bringing imagery from your words.
This same artificial intelligence can take to the printed page, again using text prompts, to produce term papers, book reports and I suppose even a letter to your sweetheart on Valentine’s Day, if you really want to test the limits.
So what does all this mean for consumers of news content? Make sure to know your source, now more than ever, especially on open source social media, a picture might be worth a thousand words, but it all really could be just “fake news.” For this old school photojournalist, it is just one more screen distraction while the real world still has so much visual potential waiting to be discovered by the curious lens.
When covering the Vineyard Wind project last week, their cable ship Ulisse was working off Craigville Beach. Framing up a photo I thought at first the tiny person in the foreground, arms out stretched, was perhaps gesturing towards the ship, just as a gull did a flyby, making an interesting composition. A walk to the water’s edge was my introduction to Edna Felix, a home health care aide who was just warming up for a jog along the beach on a warm January day. To complete my experiment I typed all those keywords into one of the image generating programs, 90 seconds later, an image of a sinking tall ship came on the screen. Never bet against technology, especially anything reported to be “artificially intelligent.” But I will stick with boots-on-the-ground photojournalism, you get to go to the beach and meet the nicest people.
This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Photo Shoot: A.I. = Artificial Images that I will skip, thank you
