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AI-AI-oh!

A friend’s post on Facebook the other day brought to mind a gripe I’ve been chewing on of late: the burgeoning effects of AI (artificial intelligence) upon the world we live in and the implications it holds for the future as human beings. 

I find it such a shame that, due to the proliferation of AI, great talent is becoming less and less appreciated by the average person — especially when it comes to the art of photography. It’s increasingly more difficult to tell the difference between photographic image and an AI image, so that a talented photographer’s work is largely overlooked, or worse: doubted for its validity as an artistic expression. 

Don’t get me wrong, a great image is always going to be a great image, but it saddens me how AI, along with all the Snapchat and Instagram filters and beautifying apps that proliferate, have robbed us of Reality in some way. Now we can’t appreciate a really good photographic image when we see one, and, for the most part, we’re unable to discern what so many people actually look like, such is the level to which pics are manipulated. What took great skill (along with years of practice) with digital manipulation of photographic imagery (and even greater skill in dark-rooms of old) is now simply a Snapchat filter or an AI ask away. 

I was recently cheated out of a potential illustrative commission by AI. It was way cheaper for the client, if not entirely free, and far easier to get what they wanted — in fact I could but support the client’s decision as a no-brainer. Think for a minute though, what effect the still-developing AI market will do to the advertising and branding industries where graphic designers, illustrators, photographers and the like will become largely redundant. Even creative copywriters.

Having had a career in advertising, branding and marketing from the eighties to the noughties, I saw the complete morphing of the repro and print industries resulting from everything going digital. Many embraced the changes and grew with them, whilst so many gifted tradesmen sadly succumbed. Now even the print industry itself is slowly becoming obsolete.

The effects are of course way more far-reaching and across many industries the world over. If automation was the game-changer of the last millennium, then surely AI represents the same and more to the 21st century and beyond.

Sure, it’s called progress, I get it, and we’ve come a long way from painting in caves, whittling and firing sticks to make spears and sending up smoke signals to chat with the neighbours — yet what I find most unsettling is this slow erosion of the human factor; as mentioned earlier, our capacity to determine what is real against what is artificially contrived. 

Who knows though, perhaps I’m just showing my age…

Guy McGowan
WASA representative in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal.

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