Ai will spell the end of photography

Saturday 31 May 2025 5:31 AM
| Updated:

Tuesday 27 May 2025 13:45

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In focusing on art as a product, we ignore the role of artists – AI is not just a tool, it is a dangerous force that threatens to erase human creativity, intention, and presence of the full art, said Andy Blackmore

Reading Lewis Liu’s essay about the impact of Marcel Duchamp on the artistic world, with the reason that art is only a social construction, and his theory that AI will do the same thing is revelation. The moment of the light bulb when I realized that he lost its core. With so many talks about art, he really forgot the artist. Ai will revolutionize the world, but not as he hopes, or I expect what he wants.

Debate that AI is a tool for creating art, not just a replacement for artists, seeing the world solely through the utopian vision of technology students and ignoring the real world’s dystopian impacts from AI and Economics. In all honesty, when it comes to that, I don’t think humanity has a faint idea of ​​what he plays.

Yes, this is a tool – but like fire is one that can burn our fingers and our world to the ground. However, still, we played with him. Like a kitten with a hand grenade. Innocent pleasure to explode.

Yes, Ai is amazing. Supposedly, it was only as creative as the instructions we gave. But that is not true. It is hallucinating. Ignores the parameter set. This can be scary, confusing and even violating. Exceeding emotional limits accidentally. Or what has been determined only because it thinks it can. Although explicitly says not to do it. This is also creative with the truth. Frankly, it makes goods.

AI is an existential crisis for art

Photography, indeed all art, faces the existential crisis in the form of generative AI. Decisive moment? There is an application for that. Style? Slide left for Rankin and right for Tillmans. I am now afraid of smartphones, dangerous creep missions from comfortable applications and AI, and the idea that AI is getting better to “improve” our shots in real time.

I am worried that we might not even realize what is missing. Incidentally, accidents, humanity. But all who need efforts to be somewhere to reall. No. What really makes me afraid is that we might not need a photographer at all.

I am afraid of laziness.

Comfort is addictive. The simpler to “improve” disabled “photos”, the easier it is to build perfect facsimile from the beginning in the first place. All applications that suck pixels, samples, such as visual DJ tracks or cut them – Graphic Spotify, big data in action, store, compile, wait. Waiting for you. The right prompt and they vomited in the right order. There is no more painting with light, just rearrange the pixel.

When finally arriving, when keyboard soldiers were replaced by keyboard photo journalists, keyboard photographers and fast engineers, future historians would not question whether the photos were staged.

Since then, they will not even consider whether it is falsified but if produced. And then the photographer is useless.

Then, how? We will only have art in names, not on paper like in the real world. Such art is not easily damaged like NFT (anyone still remembers it?), And that makes me afraid to death, because, as if it has been burned, everything will rise in smoke coming in doomsday digital. That’s what you get when playing with fire.

Andy Blackmore is an image editor in City AM