With new technology seemingly invented every day with the power to enhance our profession, it’s easy to become discouraged about the future of our art form. Fortunately, there is a fundamental advantage we hold that cannot be eliminated.
I have a problem. I was not the only one. However, since I write about technology every week, I may be a little more susceptible to this particular issue. As a technology commentator, it is part of my responsibility to stay up to date with new and emerging technology. It’s not like I can predict the future. Isn’t that nice though? No, rather, you just need to understand new technology as soon as possible to know how and when you need to adapt your business model. Of course, being constantly aware of potential threats can also be extremely frustrating. Why keep fighting when you know that an even bigger wolf will soon be knocking on your door? However, we continued to march. Simply put, for a true artist, continuing to fight the good fight is as basic as breathing.
Of course, most of these impending dilemmas never really mean anything more than slowing down. Other times, the incoming wave is as clearly visible as the mountain top, yet the path to the other side is still less visible. We are in the midst of perhaps the scariest threat to artists in centuries with the advent of artificial intelligence, or AI. I have expressed my thoughts on this subject, both practically and ethically, many times in the past. But in short, love it or hate it, AI is here to stay. As someone with a dual career as a still photographer and filmmaker, I had to consider how technology would fundamentally change the way I worked, and what this new competitor in the market would mean. What does it mean to me professionally and what the future of the entire industry will even look like once AI has fully integrated into the world.
Of course, going down a mental rabbit hole trying to figure out how to deal with the coming industrial revolution-sized changes that AI will create forces us to ask the next question. How can we adapt to stay competitive? Most of us do not take years to become masters of our craft as photographers, directors, writers or any other field, but are forced to spend the rest of our lives Enter prompts in front of the computer. And, many of us want to keep making the art we love the way we love to do it, regardless of what the algorithm says.
However, in many ways, AI is just the newest kid on the block. It may be the most dramatic but hardly the only technological change to befall artists over the centuries. Think about what the artists must have been thinking when the first photograph was created. More recently, think of the transition from film to digital. Remember how many artists felt that photography itself was dying because of the “easy” process of making the process digital. Apple only intensified this question with the invention of the iPhone. Suddenly, everyone on Earth could make a perfectly exposed photo that previously required a skilled artisan with technological knowledge to create.
Technology has a way of making our jobs as professional artists easier, but also more difficult. In many ways, it’s been a great blessing. For example, with the transition from film to digital, it’s allowed us to be bolder in our artistic risks. You need to be extremely confident in your technique to expose film or take your chances in a darkroom when you don’t have an LCD screen handy there to double check that you’re on track. In many ways, digital has given us a lot more flexibility to push ourselves creatively while still maintaining a certain safe space. At the same time, digital removes much of the mystery from the photography process. Before then, obtaining an image using photochemical methods was simply a magic trick to much of the world. Sure, there are eventually things like automatic exposure meters even in film cameras, but most high-end work is a very technical process that separates the truly professional photographers from the photographer. A professional needs to really understand the techniques to create quality images. In the digital age and especially the mobile age, it is still easy for people with little or no knowledge of photography to create a technically perfect photo simply by purchasing the right camera. (or phone). This does not mean that the image will be beautiful or artistically special. But at least it will be focused and exposed correctly in grayscale. This makes more and more people think that they do not need the services of a professional photographer. I mean, why pay some guy to take pictures when all you really need is a cell phone and some pre-installed editing software to make it look cool? ”?
Obviously it’s all nonsense. An artist’s value is not simply their technical ability. An artist’s value comes from their unique way of looking at the world and how they translate their personal emotions into their art form. What stories do they choose to tell and how do they tell them? It’s not just “what camera did they use” or “what brand of lights did they buy”. Rather, where did they place those lights, why did they place those lights in the places they did, and when did they choose to place those lights in unexpected places or not use lights at all? to create something completely new that is unknown to the audience. have seen.
There’s an old adage that seems to come back to me every time I worry about the possibility of technology replacing me and my job. I don’t know who said it first, but it reminds me that pencils have been around for hundreds of years, but that doesn’t mean we have more Shakespeare than when people used to have to write with pencils. expensive stuff. markers. In other words, making “art” easier to create does not necessarily make people more creative. Anyone with a smartphone in the modern age has more filmmaking tools at their disposal every minute of the day than the early Hollywood pioneers had to make their feature films. But that doesn’t mean anyone with a cell phone is automatically a genius like Buster Keaton. Just because I own a camera with an autofocus feature that ensures my photos are always sharp doesn’t mean I become Annie Leibovitz. What an artist does is find unique ways to see the world and tell their stories that are not simply an element of technological advancement. Instead, they are creating and perfecting the art form itself.
I mention all of this because it is the only power we have as artists that is not threatened by technology. Even something like AI, which literally performs magic tricks by stealing from other artists, is mathematically incapable of creating truly original work. That’s right, it can create a final product that no one has ever seen before. However, AI models are literally trained using pre-existing material, finding ways to translate that work of art into mathematical equations, and then creating “new” works based on millions of equations of other works it has trained. This can lead to some surprising results. However, essentially, AI’s knowledge is always based on the available data it is being fed. So what it produces is always derivative, in some way. Now, I could easily go on at length about the legal and ethical consequences of this, but, again, as AI will continue to develop, we’d better think about what it means. can’t do and how that relates to our goals as artists. And one thing that no technology can replicate is our ability to be unique storytellers. Yes, ChatGPT can imitate other writers. However, it was impossible to come up with that original thing in the first place. That is the human realm.
Sometimes it’s hard not to get discouraged thinking about all the challenges we face as artists. We work in highly competitive and supply saturated industries. We constantly need to prove our financial worth to make ends meet in the face of inherent downward pressure. And then, to make things even more interesting, a new technology comes along every year that threatens to completely destroy an entire industry that we then have to fight against to do the things we love.
But, at the end of the day, we love it. That’s why we became artists in the first place. And whatever technology may come along that promises to be able to do our job better than we can or that can offset our decades of technical craft experience by adding a button that can click to do the same thing instantly without training, the world will always need unique storytellers. The world will always need people who are able to create unique and limitless thoughts. The world always needs people with creative thinking. To create. To expand humanity. The world needs people who can convey the true feeling of life.
