A question that’s often floating around in the air these days: Is there a need for living, breathing photojournalists anymore, in the age of A.I.?
The simple answer - YES, of course!
If there wasn’t an appetite for real photos, we wouldn’t all be constantly taking them of ourselves, and each other on our phones. Photos remain integral to our lives: to document and preserve memories of an event, as things to share with others, or to document an accident, a crime, or some paperwork, a meal you’re proud of mustering up, or simply to record a funny or unexpected moment, a cute cat, etc. The uses are endless, and none of them involve artificial intelligence per-say, aside from the tech that’s inside the camera/phone to identify eyes, faces, lighting, etc.
The longer answer - There may be a place for A.I. generated imagery, but it’s not in photojournalism or documentary photography, primarily because it doesn’t fit existing editorial rules and standards. A.I. images also can’t tell us anything factual about the present, and relies on regurgitating existing online photographs to provide a fictional version of the past - which is what photography inevitably always is - the present documentation of the past.
I’ve been to plenty of exhibitions where the vast majority of the work consists of images made by machines, (as a result of human text input), and I love some artists using A.I. images in their work, especially to produce images that bring imaginary or dreamscape ideals to life, but it’s not photojournalism.
Here are a few of my Istanbul focused favourites: Sarp Kerem Yavuz, Cihan Bacak, and Anıl Can.
The problem is that at least for the time being, A.I. generated often images look like a Hollywood film-cum-cartoon-cum-Japanese anime combo. What makes photography such a successful medium is that it’s by us, about us, and for us - humans. Since its invention and wide adoption, its popularity is down to its honest and simplistic beauty.
All those lovely nuances and intricacies, that mood created by subtle lighting, the expressions, the ironies, the hard-hitting shots, the shadows, the comedy. All of this is real, daily life for all of us, humans. From street photography to conceptual photography, we use all these elements to create imagery, and viewers automatically understand it, and somehow relate to it. Cultural differences aside, non-humans just can’t replicate this, and I don’t think we’d ever really want them to.
RULES OF PHOTOJOURNALISM
Photojournalism adheres to a strict set of guidelines regarding image editing. We’re basically permitted to do anything you’d be able to do in an analogue darkroom, in a digital one. This means none of the advanced item adding/removing trickery is allowed, and is mostly left to fashion and advertising photography. Having to follow clear and strict guidelines means that readers can trust, and believe an image from a reputable photojournalist, or media outlet.
A.I. also comes in many forms, it can help with identifying the sky, or a human whilst editing in software like Adobe Lightroom, or it can be used to generated entire images using DALL-E and the like. It can also create and manipulate algorithms on social media and the internet itself - for better or worse. Perhaps it’s not photojournalism vs A.I., but photojournalism with A.I.
I’ve used the assistance of A.I. whilst editing images, and it can be a time saver when editing on tight deadline, and you want to quickly select the human face or the sky, and make toning adjustments, I don’t see an issue with that.
Impending doom nigh? Some might argue: what’s the point is paying a human a day rate and travel expenses, if you can just pay €20/month to OpenAI and generate many images of a described scene?
The summary: I think photojournalists still have a firm role moving forward, and for now, we can just laugh at the comical eight fingered, cross-eyed humans portrayed in A.I. image form. For other sectors in photography like advertising, it’s a scarily different story.
Would the readers care if they didn’t have real photos, by a real person, of a real person or scene? I’d like to hope they’d miss our work, and I loved this issue of Liberation magazine, where the editors demonstrated the need for photography, by publishing an entire issue without it - see below.