On Generative AI and Its Impact on Photography
As technology continues to evolve and impact various industries, it's worth exploring how it will change the work of photographers. In this blog entry, we'll take a closer look at one particular technology that's making waves: ChatGPT.
For those unfamiliar with ChatGPT, it is an AI-powered language model developed by OpenAI. It has been trained on an enormous dataset, which means it can understand and generate text with remarkable accuracy. This has the potential to change the way photographers work in several ways.
Enhanced Social Media Presence: Social media has become an important platform for hobby photographers to showcase their work and engage with their audience. ChatGPT can assist with creating captions, hashtags, and posts for social media, making it easier for hobby photographers to share their work with the world.
Personalized Learning: ChatGPT can also be a valuable resource for hobby photographers looking to improve their skills. It can provide tips, recommendations, and personalized advice to help hobby photographers grow and develop their craft.
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Have you noticed anything up to this point? No? Then you’ll probably be surprised that the introduction of this post has not been written by me, but by ChatGPT (chat.openai.com). It merely took a short description of the type of introduction I wanted to have, the rest was done for me. No writer’s block, loads of ideas in seconds.
An excerpt from my discussion with ChatGPT about how it will affect the work of (hobby) photographers in the future.
As a computer science master's student, I've found ChatGPT to be an invaluable tool for daily tasks. Programming, conducting literature research, and brainstorming became much more efficient in an instance. Quickly, ChatGPT has become my virtual assistant, there to explain contexts according to my level of expertise and come up with new ideas whenever I got stuck! (Tip: Ever stuck with finding ideas for a birthday present? Tell ChatGPT what the person likes, and it will give a customized list of ideas. Try it!)
Despite all that, I noticed that I haven’t yet found the chatbot useful for my photography. Hence, I started to do some research and had a conversation with ChatGPT itself about how a chatbot could also help out photographers. Let’s take a closer look!
Personalized learning using chatbots
When thinking about ways how ChatGPT will affect the world of photography, it is important to first consider that chatbots will fundamentally change the way we access information in the future. While up to this point, we first googled photography-related questions and then searched for the answer in resulting webpages, chatbots will give us a tailored answer. Trained on the millions of webpages out there, ChatGPT basically read the web for us to answer our questions.
Considering that, it becomes clear that chatbots will not only revolutionize web search, but also change the way we learn photography. To make this clear, I came up with possible scenarios describing how chatbots will lead to a more personalized and intuitive approach to learning photography basics.
What is the main ingredient for taking a good landscape photo?
Finding answers to that questions was one of the first things I wanted to know when starting out photography back in 2018. Back then, I would have loved to have a chatbot available like ChatGPT. Instead of passively absorbing the knowledge of YouTube videos and website like I did, photography beginners today have a virtual assistant at hand that answers every question. This is especially helpful when a video raises more questions than it answer.
How does a black and white conversion work again?
Garbage in, garbage out. The worst photos can’t be turned into a good photo, even with the latest advancements in post-processing. Still, post-processing is in my opinion an essential part of today's digital photography. It can not only emphasize the mood of a picture, but allows complete change the look of an image (which is for example desired when you want to recreate how you felt while taking a particular picture).
Despite (or due to) the massive capabilities, today’s post-processing tools can at first feel very overwhelming. Especially when starting out in photography, the numerous settings and options can scare away beginners from taking first steps. In that scenario, it massively helps when you have an assistant that can provide you with easy instructions, as shown in the example below.
However, simply providing you with the next steps won’t likely be the end. With OpenAI just releasing its plugin store, developers can now integrate software directly into the ChatGPT to allow a corporation between their software and the chatbot. This means that (soon) beginners will be able to edit their pictures by writing prompts instead of manually adjusting the sliders themselves. AI startups, like Genmo, could thus massively speed up post-processing routines while providing you with editing suggestion. Plus: Being able to use software via text or voice instead of learning the details on how to manually use it could thus massively drop the entry barrier for leveraging post-processing software and software in general!
Your personal writing assistant
Besides making knowledge more accessible, ChatGPT is a massive help when it comes to writing texts. Based on initial thoughts, the chatbot can generate a first draft that then can be further iterated.
Social Media Presence
One of the things I struggle with the most when it comes to writing text in the context of photography is coming up with ideas for writing captions for images. Here, getting a bunch of ideas you can start from helps a lot. Simply describe the picture, and ChatGPT generates some drafts you can iterate on. No more writer’s block, just ask it to present you with some ideas, and off you write!
Customer Service
Besides social media, a writing assistant can also be helpful for managing customer inquiries. Even though that’s not (yet) the case for me, I know photographers that do spent quite some time answering e-mail from their customers. By prompting ChatGPT with the gist of the mail they want to write, ChatGPT could all the formulation for you. This means less time writing mails and more time for photography.
From text to image
Indeed, a breathtaking photograph - but not real. AbsolutelyAI, an Australian start-up, used a machine learning model and not a camera to craft this image. Click here to read AbsolutelyAI’s blog post for further details on why they submitted the image.
Generating text based on a prompt, that’s what ChatGPT and other chatbots do. But what about creating images based on text? Simply describe what kind of image you want, and there it is. Sounds far-fetched? It’s not. The technology is already here!
Generate woodland shot with deepai.org.
It was back in February when big headlines were going viral inside the photography bubble on social media. Newspapers and tech magazines around the world reported about a start-up winning a photography contest with an AI-generated image. The contest hitting the news was hosted by DigiDirect, an Australian electronics company, which was looking for the summer photo 2023. After the jury announced the results of the competition, just as every year, it turned out that the winner did not take the image. Nobody did, an AI-model from the Australian start-up Absolutely AI created it.
The response on social media ranged from sheer outrage for submitting a fake image, to admiration for the technology. And while I found it fascinating to watch the reaction of people on this matter, I found it way more interesting thinking about what this actually meant for the art of photography. In a world where AI-models can fool a jury of skilled photographers into believing that fake images are real, what is the work of photographers worth? With such powerful technology at hand, anyone can create stunning images. All it takes is an idea and access to the AI model. No expensive camera equipment required, whatsoever.
And while I have no definite answers to this question, I think that in future it will be more important than ever for photographers to work in projects. Projects allows us to revisit locations, get a deeper connection with it, and more importantly, tell a story. It will be the mixture of planned and spontaneous events during projects, that will create a unique and outstanding set of images – images that can’t be imagined while sitting in front of a screen.
