AI in the Realm of Photography

With the US government recently ruling that AI art cannot be copyrighted (and rightfully so), and with my own lack of joy for the practice of AI art from a creative’s perspective, I still can’t help but be curious by the potential AI may serve for composite photographers such as myself. In addition, AI is here to stay, whatever form that may be, and will continue to evolve. My opinion? Acknowledge its presence and evolve along with it.

Although I have no intention in becoming an AI “artist”, nor will I ever consider photo-realistic AI images to be “photography”, there may still be uses that a photographer could eventually consider, including continuing potential in retouching and eventually - as in my case - create backplates for personal projects when the funding isn’t quite there to shoot the backplate that I want for the image in real life.

Yes, I have slowly opened up a bit to its potential, and I am actually practicing a lot with Midjourney at the moment. However, I find the entire process very unfulfilling and, almost entirely when it comes to photo-realism, I still find the general appearance of AI art to be visually unappealing to my eyes. I know that eventually the quality of AI will be improved dramatically, and how the world will respond to it, both creatively and legally, we will have to wait to see.

Here are some recent experiments I had using an AI-generated arcade room as a backplate. Models were photographed in-studio and composted into the AI backplates.