We all say we value authenticity, real relationships, real interactions.
Yet at the same time we embrace (usually in the name of efficiency and cost savings) solutions that lead us to spend time and energy on things that are the opposite of these values: social media, fast food, cheap product knock-offs.
AI technologies hold out immense hope of helping us parse, analyze, and summarize vast bodies of data, be it scouring medical studies to find useful paths for research, or scanning digital user agreements to cough up malicious or exploitative permissions.
But we truly need to be careful about what other human pursuits we delegate to the bots, for whatever reason.
It is one thing to stop remembering phone numbers because they are all in our "smart" phone. It is another thing entirely to stop being able to write or paint or create because it is so much more "efficient" to enter a prompt into a box and have AI spit back something "cool."
It is to create unique works of art and culture formed from human consciousness, to share in our human experience through the exchange of ideas.
Photography is an art form not because of the technology involved, but because of the humans involved.
You can't create an authentic, interesting, real portrait of someone (or yourself) by uploading a bunch of selfies into an AI and asking it to spit back perfectly posed images. Because a portrait is fundamentally about a creative process, an interaction between a photographer and their subject that seeks to evoke and show off the subject's unique spark, their charm, their person.
AI can only be derivative – a copy and remix of the data it has been fed. AI cannot feel. AI cannot like or dislike.
Photography as an art form literally means "to paint with light." At the very least, if one uses AI to create images, it would be more honest to call it aiography – "painting with AI."
Simon Sinek, the philosopher of business and self posed an interesting thought experiment on this topic. Imagine, he said, you were struggling with your partner and didn't know what to do. So you entered a prompt into ChatGPT and it spit back some advice about what to say in your sticky situation. And then you said those words to your partner. And then they felt this didn't quite sound like you, so they said, "did you get that from ChatGPT"? How do you think the rest of the interaction would go?
It is inevitable that humans will always prefer that which is more real, slightly flawed, yet truthful. We, being humans, agree with that preference. And so we will always underscore that all our images are made with real humans, on real cameras, in the real world.
We feel it is a benefit of working with us that our clients can always say, "Yes, that is the real me. I took the time to show up, interact, and engage in an act of creation that I could be proud of."