When the influential French painter Paul Delaroche roved his eye across a Daguerreotype around 1840, he bluntly declared: ‘From today, painting is dead.’ Painting survived and photography found its role as a new way to create and see. Since its inception, photography has faced myriad changes and challenges from technological developments, more recently multimedia, videography, digital photography, the omnipotent internet, Photoshop and smartphones, among others.
The latest disruptive technology to flip the photography world upside down and turn inside out is Artificial Intelligence (AI). There’s already a lot of AI in photography: DSLRs, mirrorless cameras and mobile devices use facial recognition, autofocus and tracking. The Olympus OM-D E-M1X was one of the first cameras that features deep learning technology to identify subjects and track them more efficiently. There’s AI in photo-editing software, frowns can be turned upside down using Neutral Filters in Photoshop. Skylum Luminar allows a new, potentially better, sky to fall into place in just a few clicks. There’s AI in Lightroom’s selection tools and Narrative Select image-culling software allows you to quickly identify the worst images from a shoot.
The AI that seems to be rattling the industry most is image generation. A variety of machine-learning models have been developed that generate digital images from natural language descriptions or prompts. These can be anything and I mean anything: ‘A painting of a fox sitting in a field at sunrise in the style of Claude Monet.’ Or ‘A Pikachu fine dining with a view towards
