the question of the last 110 years

[LabRat]

Now AI is thrown in just to screw things up even more.

AI might destroy photography as we know it... But also give us something to push against...

Steve K

[jnantz]

AI might destroy photography as we know it... But also give us something to push against...

Steve K

and if it wasn't for those meddling kids I would have gotten away with it ...

[John Layton]

Next level for AI will be an "AI enabled" digital camera/smartphone which communicates with its own motorized tripod head. Just plunk the tripod down and let the camera do its thing. Wait for it....wait for it....

Or (ha...even better!) a hand-held "AI enabled" digicam - with internal gyros which help to move the camera about until the photo is "just right."

[jnantz]

Next level for AI will be an "AI enabled" digital camera/smartphone which communicates with its own motorized tripod head. Just plunk the tripod down and let the camera do its thing. Wait for it....wait for it....

Or (ha...even better!) a hand-held "AI enabled" digicam - with internal gyros which help to move the camera about until the photo is "just right."

hi John
aren't auto exposure auto focus is pretty much that already? the problem with that scenario is the camera is photographing something that is there infront of the camera ( indexical .. ) these AI images aren't indexical ... but a compilation of a billion different images to look like something we recognize as a photograph. (they remind me of some sort of poster they had at a church I went to of some sort of renaissance painting looking thing from a distance, but if you actually looked at the image it was like 10000000 different images all adjacent to each other).

I would imagine the next step AI enabled would be a link between the mind of the persons and the camera actually you don't even need a camera, personal data bank of images..
it just compiles some sort of image from all the fractured images in one's head. I mean at present there is already the chip you can install in your head so people can hear what you are thinking, it's probably not that much of a leap to make images, there's probably tech that already exists and Chris Carter did an X-Files about it . and it's probably "alien technology" harvested from Area 51! Maybe Philip K Dick wrote about this already, he was pretty much living now back 50+ years ago
...

[Tin Can]

We made the blind see already with sensors and wires inside the head

VR goggles are getting better fast

[John Layton]

...or maybe a chip which would allow for a playback of dreams? Maybe going too far...I could almost imagine a potential negative result of such a playback being some kind of self-destructive psychological feedback loop. Probably best not to go there?

[Corran]

No need for motorized tripod heads or gyros at all, just a wide angle lens and an AI deciding on the best composition. They already do this for "ptz" webcams that just use the wide angle and crop in to automatically "pan/tilt/zoom."

Here is one example, I'm sure there's more:

https://manual.skylum.com/ai/en/topi...sition-ai-tool

[rdenney]

Late hit, but it is what it is.

Anyone reading my old posts knows of my distaste for creating definitions that exclude whatever techniques the definer chooses to disparage. So, for me, a photograph is a picture made using a camera, and a photographer is the person using the camera to make the picture. The use of the camera to connect subject and representation is what makes it a photograph.

None of that has much of anything to do with art. Or craft. But we even try to define art in a way that excludes what we disparage. So, for me, art is an expression that is 1.) intended as art, and 2.) received as art, at least by somebody.

Whether any of it is good or not is a matter of taste, and there's no accounting for that.

These definitions apply to people, not computer programs, because that's how they were defined (what do you a call a person who makes pictures using a camera? a photographer.) If I write a program that creates art, then I'm the artist, even if I can't predict what the program would create, just as Jackson Pollock could not predict which way the splatters would go. And if the art is banal or offensive, I as the programmer am to blame. Of course, "I" can be "we"--even to include nameless masses whose input somehow shapes the result. But I rather think in that case the intentionality of the product as art becomes more difficult to defend, even if it is received as such. Of course, a photograph can still be a picture made using a camera even if there was no operator of the camera to claim the title of photographer.

Rick "thinking we make this more complicated than it needs to be, but why?" Denney

[Tin Can]

Perhaps we are just an evolutionary step as the UNIVERSE sorts, grows and never ends

Maybe we get an epiphany, maybe not

art is quest

[jnantz]

These definitions apply to people, not computer programs, because that's how they were defined (what do you a call a person who makes pictures using a camera? a photographer.) If I write a program that creates art, then I'm the artist, even if I can't predict what the program would create, just as Jackson Pollock could not predict which way the splatters would go. And if the art is banal or offensive, I as the programmer am to blame. Of course, "I" can be "we"--even to include nameless masses whose input somehow shapes the result. But I rather think in that case the intentionality of the product as art becomes more difficult to defend, even if it is received as such. Of course, a photograph can still be a picture made using a camera even if there was no operator of the camera to claim the title of photographer.

Rick "thinking we make this more complicated than it needs to be, but why?" Denney

but Rick if the program harvests 2billion photographs that the program did not create in order to make something that looks photographic but was neither an INDEX of something in front of the camera, nor made by the program's "camera" how could that be a photograph? it is photographic ( it looks like what someone who has lived since 1840 might considered to be familiar, a photograph) but it might not be a photograph itself. supposedly the index thing is key (but I am sure philosophers of photography will debate that in the days, months and years to come), the thing infront of the camera reflected back into the box onto a surface that in turn rendered an image that might (or might not) be to the likeness of the thing infront of the camera. I say might or might not be the likeness of what is in front of the camera because I have photographed places and things, with a paper negative based system, and something/someplace else entirely ended up "recorded/ INDEXED" on the paper and seen after it was put through the chemistry that "preserved" the latent image (I don't mean oh, that tree didn't look like that because the slow shutter speed made it blurry or the light looked a certain way, I mean I photographed a field and trees and a seascape or marsh, ANOTHER PLACE was on the negative). the camera was there and something reflected back (was indexed) but when there's nothing that reflects back ( is indexed ) is where I have to wonder. It's like taking a magazine photograph and gluing different eyes, hairdo, and mouth on the person in the photograph, and saying THAT is a photograph (and the person who made it a photographer?), when it's a photographic collage made of photographs, unless of course it is REPhotographed, in that case it is a photograph.