I really need you guys opinion on this matter. I took a lot of candid moments; some I will keep secret till everything becomes history, but some I really wanted to share now.
all I hear is “but mom, they’re doing stuff I don’t want them to do!!”
“this new tool is not like the other new tools! This one is out to get ME”
People flipped out when photography started, when videography started, when Photoshop came out, when premiere came out BUT NOW IT’S DIFFERENT
^^THIS. I remember Photoshop being the biggest new threat to human kind since a skilled user could create an image that looked real but was totally fake. One could argue that AI generated images takes no skill, but having clocked dozens of hours using Stable Diffusion/Automatic1111, I can assure you that it still requires a lot of skill and technical understanding to create an image that looks real and doesn’t have weird mutations.
To that regard, I view it as a new tool for creating art, rather than a threat. In fact, I might train a model on my 10s of thousands of photos I’ve taken and see if it can replicate my style just for fun.
If anything, AI images will lead to raising the bar for good photos since with AI, anyone can get a competent looking generic image with minimal steps. It’s when you’re looking for a specific style, composition and pose that you need to prompt engineer or even use controlnet which is quite hard and at one point it becomes easier to use a camera to get a desired shot.
So photographers would need to put more thought into their work to make it stand out but if you have studied the styles and know what you want to convey, you will be fine.
I’m a big fan of inpainting as it can really save a lot of manual work from Photoshop.