Over the week, I got the opportunity to visit some pretty cool locations. And I drew a lot of my inspiration from the landscape around me. In my scavenger hunt with AI, I decided to test the prompts: time, power, loneliness, joy, and focal point. (You can find the AI interpretations in the left column and my photos on the right.)
What I found with using AI is that it tends to recreate the same photo over and over again. In the same browser session, it found out I liked the autumn color palette that it had used in the photo for "time", so it kept with the fall theme for the rest of the photos. The first con of AI is, don't use it if you're looking for variety in your photos. That being said, I think that even though they were generated by Artificial Intelligence, I think the photos on the right were able to represent the prompts in creative and interpretive ways.
Rather than being very stereotypical (which it still does, kind of) it was able to reference the fact that it takes TIME for the leaves to change, and feeling on top of the world is POWERFUL. That someone walking down the street by themselves is LONELY, that a large smile does represent JOY, and that centering a crowd around two pathways of trees creates a FOCAL POINT.
That being said, I do like my photos better than the ones that were generated. I really tried to outdo the AI in some of them, as far as interpretive-ness goes. For time I wanted to highlight how much TIME it takes algae to grow in undisturbed water, and how the rush of white water is inherently POWERFUL. The LONELINESS that a pet feels when you are gone (this is my roommate's dog and she will sit by the window until she gets home), and the JOY that you feel on your birthday, especially if you are surrounded by friends. Finally, I wanted to show how a single figure with a prop immediately draws the eye away from the foggy background.
All in all I think there's a lot to be discussed about using AI in photography. Ethics is one of the biggest topics to discuss, there's no telling if any of the places or people in the AI photographs are real. When AI was first being developed it had to get it's information from somewhere, I've personally used AI generators in the past that have asked for references to create from.
Furthermore, it is also going to be endlessly more fun taking the photos yourself rather than having the computer do it for you. I made wonderful memories when I took all of these photos, and I created the AI ones in less than 10 minutes at my kitchen table.
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