Meet the Streets: Street photographer interviews
Interviews with up-and-coming as well as established street and documentary photographers from various locations.
Meet the Streets: Street photographer interviews
A conversation on AI, Creativity, and Photography Ethics
How does AI really impact the creative community, and are your original works safe? Join us as we explore whether AI-generated content genuinely threatens to steal your creative thunder or if it simply mirrors the human process of drawing inspiration. Using the landmark Lynn Goldsmith vs. Andy Warhol Foundation case, we’ll dispel fears by outlining the legal protections in place to combat direct plagiarism—all while equating AI's methods to traditional forms of human creativity.
Ever wonder if AI could replace traditional photography? We take a close look at the ever-evolving photography industry, examining everything from faked news conferences to the potential for AI-generated images to stand in for real-world photo shoots. From discussing the ethical implications of digital enhancement to navigating the ongoing debate between purist photography and modern editing techniques, we uncover the necessity for transparency and proper labeling of AI-generated content.
What are the ethical boundaries in the age of AI? As we compare AI-driven workflows with traditional methods, we dive into the multifaceted ethical dilemmas facing today's creatives. From the implications for intellectual property rights to the trustworthiness of social media platforms in recognizing original work, we dissect the challenges and advantages of integrating AI into the creative process. Wrapping up with a reflection on transparency and the complexities of digital provenance, we also look forward to an exciting meet-up in Paris to continue this crucial conversation.
Thank you for listening! If you want to see the video, go to my youtube channel street photography mentor.
To see my street photography you can go to my instagram @keithmpitts or go to my website keithpitts.com. There you can also get info and sign up for my street photography workshops in Paris.
Thank you for coming this talk on AI and its effects on the creator community, which I think we all have. I'm sure we all have an opinion. So I'm going to preface this whole thing with I'm not a copyright attorney, I have zero law degrees. I'm just a man of opinions and I sometimes think about them and I thought this is one of those and I have given this actually some thought and I've got a few ideas which are more to assuage the fears that a bunch of people have, because obviously we're all thinking that AI's well, whether creatively kill us or one day down the line get all Skynet and actually kill us. Then I'm worried about the creative at the moment. I'm worried about the other stuff later on. So, just to start off, this isn't going to be like a lecture. I'm just going to throw something out and then I'm just going to invite questions amongst each other. It's not all necessarily having to go through me Like anybody that has a question and anybody that's got an answer. I'm inviting everybody to really make this a participatory thing. So, to start with, I just want to say with again, everybody's at the well, everybody and whoever everybody is the fear that say you go on to what's called. You put your images up on Instagram, say, we use Instagram as the foil here and they're allowing Meta's, since they're a subcompany of Meta, that they're allowing the Meta AI programs or AI machines, or whatever these things are, to train on our images. So all of our images, at least in the US.
Speaker 1:The US has the most stringent copyright laws. So in the US, as soon as you expose that photograph, whether it's on film, on digital, however, whoever at the moment of exposure, you have the copyright of that. So everything that, and whether you want it or not, it's yours. So everything that's being skimmed and learned from on Meta is copyrighted material. Now, that scares some people thinking well, they're stealing my stuff. What gives them the right?
Speaker 1:Now here's my thought on the whole thing. It's exactly the way we all create to begin with. Everything that we've ever created is based on things that we've copyrighted, materials that we've looked at, been inspired by, learned from and incorporated into everything that we do looked at, been inspired by, learned from and incorporated into everything that we do. So none of us are reproducing exactly any work that we've looked at in the past and were inspired by. So if there's no way to as people. Of course there is a way to restrict computers from seeing all this, but what is the gain really, and what is the point? What's the threat, if you think of if they were to spit out something that was an exact replica, or even a very, very close replica of, of the fame of, say, the vj day kiss, or the uh or the v day, which can't remember which view was Kiss, or the V-E Day, which I can't remember which V it was, or any of Ansel Adams work, or any photograph that you can name or not name. If it had done that, copyright protection would allow the owner of that copyright to sue because it didn't make a derivative of it, it wasn't inspired by it, it literally plagiarized that.
Speaker 1:There was a case which I just recently looked up I was just to refresh my memory, but it was Lynn Goldsmith had sued the Andy Warhol Foundation, and so this is people on people. This had nothing to do with it, but it's relative and relevant in the fact that what's going on? Back in 1981, what's? The Vanity Fair had commissioned Lynn Goldsmith to do a photograph of, or to had commissioned a photograph from Lynn Goldsmith that she had already shot of Prince, and so that was that? So, years later, I'm talking like, okay, let me Sorry about that. So, okay, what happened was she had this photograph. They commissioned the photograph from her to be interpreted by Andy Warhol in the color purple to be purple prints in which we all know and so it was a one-time use. Done, sailed, signed, delivered. That's it.
Speaker 1:In 2016, again long after Andy Warhol's dead, she finds out that he had made a series of these images in multiple colors, and so then they had licensed. The Andy Warhol Foundation had then sold a license to Vanity Fair for this. Basically, the same exact image, only now in a different color, and they're like well, it's a different image. First of all, they were never licensed to make a second, third, fourth, fifth or any other copy of it to begin with. So they're off and running with this. They had no chance but you never know with businesses and stuff like that but the Supreme Court a lower court upheld that she, that Lynn Goldsmith, had the copyright and that the Andy Warhol Foundation had breached it, and then the Supreme Court had upheld that.
Speaker 1:That being said, it's the same thing. You can apply it to AI. If AI does something similar, then you easily could go after them for like, if it doesn't like, if it looks like something you did so close that there's no arguable way that they can say it's something else, you'd have a claim. So, other than that, it's just a matter that we it's the same thing as any as a baby growing up to become us we learn by seeing, we learn by experience, we take all this stuff in and we just eventually output it into whatever creative medium we have, in whichever way we're able to, and nobody bitches about it. Nobody's like oh my god, that's because that person went to the museum and saw way too many Robert Franks and now all his shit looks like Robert Frank. Well, I wish, but it's not how it works. So does this make sense to anybody?
Speaker 1:Okay, because you know I hear a lot of people automatically think and I say that, and again, my knee-jerk reaction to a lot of this stuff is like, oh my god, I'm gonna have to find another way to display myself outside of Instagram. Instagram has a whole bunch of flaws with it, and what's going to drive me nuts, like I got myself into something where one I spend way too much time looking at stuff I don't need to be looking at and then kicking myself if I don't post on certain specific days because I've gotten in the habit of doing that, and I'm kidding myself that anybody cares whether I post on a given day or not, and so I'm like, okay, well, my, I'm going to be disappointing somebody. I know like anybody that cares even a little bit knows that at some point something else is going to come up and there's so much other stuff to look at. No one really cares. It's, it's there, so, uh, yeah. So on, instagram has a thing right now where they're? I just recently heard that they're going to either they're currently or they're going to be labeling things that are that are generated with AI, whether it's fully generated with AI or even has an AI component to it, that is, that can be read off from whatever the metadata. They're going to be posting a thing saying generated with AI or something like that. So I'm not sure exactly how specific they're going to get and that can be misleading in a way that you might.
Speaker 1:Let's go to. I don't know. Like I said, I don't know how precise it's going to be. Like if you clone out, let's go to you retouch a portrait which, if it's a portrait whatever, somebody's got a zit. You want that zit out like it's a portrait, who cares, you're not sitting there. If you're fully removing them and putting them in a spot where they never existed, then that's more of an issue. But still, versus something where you just inputted prompts and it's created completely from whole cloth digitally. That's like I would like, the kind of like a made with AI versus made by AI, just the simple words, just changing with and by completely changed the meaning of the entire thing. So again, I personally think it's an interesting step that Instagram is making. I guess it's encouraging.
Speaker 3:It's encouraging if they're doing that and that's always been a question I've had is you, you know, how do you determine the level of discrimination between you know how much editing you're doing, as you say, if you're just, if you're cloning something out, or if you're, you know, getting rid of a spec that's that comes up on your sensor or whatever, versus just synthesizing something that's completely you know, uh has had nothing to do with the camera, basically. So I mean I'm hoping they can do that. Um, I mean, I do a lot of landscape photography and, quite frankly, it's I don't, um, I don't see a place for AI as far as you know, something where you can pass it off as a photograph. I just don't think that's the arena that I mean, if you want, you know, if you state it as AI, fine, I mean, people can accept it or reject it.
Speaker 3:But I guess what I object to is this sort of you know, not not having full disclosure and then having that out there and people, that's an amazing, amazing image, but realizing that it had nothing to do with the skill of a photographer. It had everything to do with the skill of somebody working with an AI algorithm. So, and I think that's. I think I think that's a step in the right direction. I guess is what I'm saying in terms of you know, if social media platforms like Instagram and so forth are willing to be transparent and just say, okay, this is an AI generated image, you know, then let people decide whether they want that or whether that's something that they feel that they can be moved by. As far as the art or whatever the purpose of the photograph is or image is, reports, I've seen so far, sorry reports.
Speaker 4:I've seen so far that Meta has tagged very, very few photos as AI images as AI, and this is likely to be largely voluntary compliance. So for whatever that's worth.
Speaker 2:Yeah, when you post an image now there's a checkbox Is this AI generated? But I've never seen anything in my feed that indicates that.
Speaker 1:Me either. Actually, a French photographer the other day sent me something again knowing that I was going to be doing this. It was named Peter. He's a big YouTube star, peter. He's Canadian, he's a filmmaker, he does photography videos. I can't think of his last name right now, which somebody's gonna go look at this and go, okay, the guy's got like a million followers, it's like, but anyway, he's entertaining. But his. That's where I actually heard about this, that Instagram is doing this AI tagging, because he would mention that he had put something up and it got tagged as AI and he said, yeah, well, he did some AI in it, but it didn't necessarily, but he didn't like create it out of whole cloth, he just did some whatever. And then he's uh, and seeing other people coming up now I think it would be great, hopefully, and not just from the creative community, just for the community at large. Just again, if you think extrapolate this and move just from the creative community, just for the community at large. Just again, if you think extrapolate this and move it into the news medium and recognize what's, because they're.
Speaker 1:Just recently I was reading that, uh, there was a fake. Where wasn't anthony blinken, but it was some, uh, some us, uh, us, uh foreign policy guy where they were talking about. They had him and they just basically put whole different words in his. They had him in a news conference and they faked the questions and then they faked the responses and so they're like okay, it was obvious, the timing of the, the words and the lips were off and at one point his tie changed color. But let's go to uh, if you don't pay attention and think what's good that when you're watching on the internet interwebs, that what's called uh, that thing, sometimes just the sync goes off. Now lips are going this way, words are going that way, people, and if you hear something you want to hear, you stop really paying attention to the close details a lot of times and that's sad and scary. So at the moment these things are still again. It's easy enough for the people that like to do this stuff to do it and getting harder and harder to find the fakes, so it's going to get exponentially harder. Hopefully the technology will somehow catch up where your computer, wherever computer filters go through. They will be able to catch some kind of a tag in there that will give it away. I'm sure there's gonna be some ways where every time you find a way to include metadata, somebody finds a way to strip it out, so we'll see where that goes. Voluntary is a good place to start, but it's obviously not anywhere near good enough.
Speaker 1:So, but I found it was at a point where I thought I had an uncanny ability to and it wasn't. I didn't think it was that hard either to spot these things that were AI. And then recently I've seen some that I fully was digging into it, going, I'm looking for it, and I cannot find like this looks like a full-fledged photograph to me. I'm like I know what I'm looking for. I could not find it. I mean it was just like a full-fledged photograph to me. I'm like I know what I'm looking for. I could not find it. I mean it was just like a damn good photograph, I thought. So I screwed around with I didn't use Midjourney, which is supposed to be the best of these things, but I played around a little bit with some of these things just to see what it's about, and the stuff I'm coming up with is trash, like it's really awful. Obviously, the ability to do these things well is a skill and art unto itself. So I don't mind progress, I don't mind new art forms as long as they're labeled what they are. They're not photographs, because just by the name photograph it can't be a photograph, because as we all know how the word breaks down. But if they label it computer generated, this or AI that more power to them. It's a skill and the ability to go through there, just like we all get.
Speaker 1:Historically, everybody gets scared. Color film was the death to black and white. 35 millimeter was the death to true photography, because all photography was a larger format. Digital was going to absolutely kill film and photography in general. So every step of the way when something new comes along and the old guard gets absolutely like persnickety I don't use that word often, so I'm just going to throw it in there but yeah, as long as people grow with it well, don't even grow with it. No one really cares. So you don't know. It has to grow. Their art can stay exactly as static as you want it to be. We make our own stuff. But the idea that in and of itself it's going to topple the art world, yeah, I don't see it. But would anybody have a comment on that?
Speaker 2:Well, I think it's going to affect different kinds of photography differently. Like you're a street photographer, I don't think anybody's going to have AI doing street photography. If you were a celebrity photographer or news photographer, yeah, then I think you've got a lot to worry about.
Speaker 1:Actually funny. You say that Specifically. There's another instance I ran across not even thinking I was going to. I happened to be skimming through some podcasts and for the life of me I don't know why I stopped in this one. It was by the Wall Street Journal, which by and large I like the Wall Street Journal, but their guests on this thing were Paris Hilton and her husband. I had no idea she was even married. I haven't heard her name in. It seems like decades now.
Speaker 1:But again, the woman's a savvy business person. So I remember when she pretty much created this whole celebrity, being famous for the sake of being famous thing and to maintain that this long is no easy feat. So, anyway, people that think, oh, to maintain that this long is no easy feat. So, anyway, people that think, oh, the influencers, they don't do anything. They do an awful lot in order to maintain their level of influence. It's just a whole thing that I don't necessarily understand, but I can respect because I have zero idea how you do it and they continue to do it and do it well. So more power to them.
Speaker 1:But the reason I bring her up is that she had she put up a hypothetical talking about, so that she's shy and she's probably had a bazillion photographs taken of her in every way, shape and form throughout her adult life. Now so, and she's got a clothing line, all sorts of stuff. So now imagine, or whatever her other business is you can imagine at this point, if a publicist says I'd like a picture of you on a mountainside in a purple parka, riding a snowboard, and she just she's on a boat in the Mediterranean and she's like I'm a bit warm and I really don't feel like doing that. She could easily hire somebody or to AI and skim the all those pictures and all that stuff. And bam, there's no photographer sent to the scene. There's no what's called. There's no photographer sent to the scene. There's no flight crew that's getting paid to take that flight. There's a certain set of infrastructure that will take a hit. It won't be a hit that you can see immediately, but over in time it could actually work up. So that's the first thing I can see as being what's going to kind of a direct threat to those kinds of assignments.
Speaker 1:But the downside to that and this is again which I thought of after the fact, I think I really actually thought about an hour and a half ago was since the US does not see recognized copyright on anything not generated by a human. So, again, if it wasn't generated by a human, it can't get copyright. So therefore, if she did that, suddenly that image becomes public domain and anybody could do any damn thing they want with that picture and she could say nothing about it because it's public domain. So you have to be careful.
Speaker 1:Somebody's going to do that because they're not going to think about that and they're going to create this thing thinking that they're solving a problem. What they're going to do is they're going to open up a whole can of worms and create new problems for themselves, and so somewhere along the line it's going to get ugly. That way, hopefully it doesn't get too ugly and people learn quickly, but uh, so give with. With that in mind, I think I just talk myself into a circle, which is how I usually how I pretty much learn anything. I usually say one thing and then continue talking. I find myself back where I started again, uh, and so I think that in itself might actually be what would keep her from, in the long run, from continuously doing that. So, and other people so I just the flight crews now get their miles back and the photographers can work again.
Speaker 4:A business that I've thought of is imagine doing graduation portraits, not by taking somebody out on a nice day into a nice location in nice clothes, but just parents send all the photos they have of their little darling and they choose the clothes and they choose the location, and you just do it in mid-journey or whatever and send it back.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and virtual memories so that's the question, then I mean and you've already said it, keith, but I mean, how do you photographers I mean, I'm a science geek so I don't do this for a living but I mean, you guys, who do I mean, how threatened do you feel by it? I mean, I gather Keith, not as much, but is that a? I mean in your conversations with people in various, you know, forms of photography, is there, is there an expression of concern that that this might, you know, minimize or or reduce their, their workload, their careers? Reduce their workload, their careers, because they're not being asked to go out and make photos of things and do assignments and whatnot.
Speaker 1:So, Roger, are you a full-time photographer?
Speaker 4:I'm an obsessed hobby photographer, a large-scale street photographer?
Speaker 1:Okay, I don't see this really being Okay. So, as I can see, I'm the only full-time professional photographer here who's kind of reducing his workload, but I just imagine that I haven't had lots of discussions, because I know people in lots of different aspects of photography and I haven't really had a lot of discussions on AI with anybody, but just by and large and just reading and human nature and what I see out again in print and on video and stuff like that. It seems just everybody. Just at some point or another it gets weird and people get nervous. Just the idea that there's so many agents I think it was SIPA or just Magna, I forget. There's a number of agencies and then, of course, just the people that use Instagram or any other thing. Again, initially just get worried that what's happening, why your computer is using my stuff without my permission, but again they're not equating it to the fact, as I mentioned earlier, that everybody else that's going through that feed is either somehow being inspired by or they're being affected by your work in the exact same way that the computer is. It just has a better memory than most of us do At least it does in the short term, because it's learning really, really fast. That said, I don't know the future, but again, i'm'm not necessarily scared by it, just knowing that.
Speaker 1:What's going on? There's been all sorts of seismic shifts in the landscape tons of times and things just grow, you might. There's always somebody that's going to be affected and they always feel bad for the unseen, because there's always every single thing. It always affects somebody and then you can look at it. Possibly it's kind of cold, but you can look at it as an evolution and not everything is meant to last forever. And I think the inventor of white patent leather shoes was happy as shit in the 70s and then suddenly it was like bam, nobody wants to admit that they, if they weren't for photographs, that guy would probably still be walking around hiding the fact that he was the guy that created that to that. But more like, without joking, I'm sure there's somebody that's going to be affected. But by and large I've known people throughout my life. I've seen that bitch about new trends and things like that. Like the old in my day thing, like what's kept me afloat professionally all the years, is not going. Damn, I wish they would only be this or I wish they hadn't done that. And, wow, they just don't know what they're doing today. I'm like, whether I believe that or not, no one cares. You have to evolve. Your work has to continue to go forward. You have to make yourself relevant and if you don't, then whatever it is that you do is going to fall to the side For nobody. No fault of anybody's, really. Just everybody's trying to move forward and there's only so many pieces of the past you can hold on to.
Speaker 1:We have museums, we have what's called workshops for collodion photography, which I took years ago. I know how to do this stuff. It's got a really tiny niche out there. I think it's gorgeous and beautiful. It's not going to be taking over. It lasted with any kind of relevance until, oddly enough, the 70s, like in scientific applications. But that's not why people are doing it. They're doing it because it's old, it's dangerous, it doesn't make any sense, but it's beautiful. So a handful of people are still doing it and, other than that, no one's pining away going. Damn it. I wish it was still the main way to take a photograph. So it's, all these things are just part of the evolution of the whole thing. Now there's a yes. Oddly, there are a couple of my notes over there.
Speaker 1:There are a handful of countries that actually allow for non that are allowing copyright for non-human created content. Now it's different like, say, the US will allow if you can, if you created something with AI. I guess with AI versus like just some prompts, they can separate out your component versus the computer's component. You can copyright the human component and say you had a landscape and you generated a better sky because it was like Paris has been for the last couple weeks, just great. But you almost got something cool. Like Ansel Adams had AI to the rescue, bam, you got the perfect sky. Now you got that you wanted to copyright it. Well, you can copyright the mountains, the trees and all this stuff, but literally you cannot copyright the sky, so you literally only copyright a portion of that thing.
Speaker 1:If you write a book or something else, the parts that are uniquely you are what's called copyrightable and the things that aren't are not, and if there's any ambiguity then everybody's out. There's a couple countries, the UK being the leader of them, but see the UK, hong Kong, india, new Zealand are right now the only countries that are actually allowing copyright by fully generated, artificially generated materials, and so I think it's varying the duration of the copyrights, but I think on some of them it's up to 50 years for certain things. But they're giving the copyright to right now they're saying the company, but I'm thinking they probably mean the creator. So and again to a point.
Speaker 1:I think the US even should get to that point where, once they wrap their heads around, this stuff is again say, like I mentioned earlier, is you want to get out and you're I want to come up with some painting, some amazing I mean whatever it is, and you're sitting there painstakingly inputting however it is they're doing, because I swear to god I cannot get anything that and I try as I've done, I really tried to get this whole photo realistic thing going on in these these. I cannot do it for the life of me. It looks absolutely like cartoonish trash. It's funny, but it's nowhere near what I want it to be. And the more I try to prompt it to do it, better it just it seems to just go farther off topic and I have no idea, and I'm sure there'll be classes for it and certain people are natural and it will become. We'll get to a point where it will be some accepted work of art and at that point why not make it a copyrightable thing If somebody has taken the time and they've used a tool in the same way that you use a canvas.
Speaker 1:Or you use paints, and the canvas makers and the paint makers are not claiming copyright on the paintings, so camera companies aren't claiming copyright on our images. So if you get to the point where you are again not violating somebody else's copyright by saying, okay, I want you to redo Migrant Mother, I'm just going to say it was mine, and that would obviously be bad copyright. By saying, okay, I want you to redo Migrant Mother, I'm just going to say it with mine, and that would obviously be bad. But if you can create a style and do all that stuff, then more power to you. Why shouldn't that be copyrightable? Because you're just using a tool. What do you think? Tanya, I'm sorry to put you on the spot.
Speaker 5:I don't really have a comment about the copyrightability or something like that. I think that my question has always been more, because I'm really new I've only recently started putting any of my photographs out there publicly and there's always a question about you defining whether something is AI generated or not. And my question is where do you draw the line? I mean, I take photos with a digital camera and then I do some post-production work with the normal editing tools that you would do in Lightroom. At what point do you start calling these things AI generated or AI helped, or what point do you start using a label like that and what's considered? When does it become? My question is where do you draw the line? I know there are a lot of purists out there who want nothing touched, want it straight out of the camera, and that's beautiful. If someone can do that, I don't have a problem with editing in post-production but I would like to know where the line should be drawn.
Speaker 1:Well, specifically on that, that's a whole topic unto itself. I think I've addressed it a bunch of times, this idea that straight out of camera is fine. If you wanted to do straight out of camera and beat your chest saying, hey, my image is straight out of camera, fine, that does one of two things, a few things I can think of, one of which is you're just lazy, you just don't want to make it better and so you're like, okay, the thing might be a great shot, but as I learned years ago Bob I know you probably heard this that a workshop I attended it was like a recurring thing that we would go to a monthly years ago back in the Bronx by this fine art printer and photographer and he would say he's like there's never been a photo I agree, 100%, never been a photograph created in camera that couldn't be enhanced to be better in some way, shape or form, with a little bit of dodging and burning. Yeah, just not talking about us going full tilt and changing the entire look of the thing, but some way, somehow there's something that you can do that can make that shot better, and by better. Who knows what that means. That just will get the goal across. Get it across the goal line across, you know, get across the glowing say whatever it is you're trying to focus on, you can do things subtly that will increase the person's perception of that mountain or the person or this or that. We're not even talking about retouching, like pimples off or removing a coke bottle from the street or something like that, literally just in dodging a burner, and that can be bottle from the street or something like that, literally just in dodging a burner. And that can be done in the darkroom, just like, again, pimples and braces and all that stuff were done with paintbrushes and pencils and stuff like that before the days of computers. So these are all things that have been done forever.
Speaker 1:And again the straight out of camera thing, like okay. So in essence, what that person is saying is that I'm better. They're like screw Cartier-Bresson. He's a hack. He had to have what's called. His images were again dodged and burned. Koudelka like his exposures. As those of us that met in the class, we got to see Koudelka's images and apparently some of his negatives were bulletproof. It required an expert printer just to get some kind of detail out of the things, and yet the detail was there and the images were poignant and beautiful. If you were just okay, develop that contact, print it and call it a day, you would have never seen some of the most beautiful works of photography ever, or you might have seen them, but they would have looked like crap. But the image is there Again. Capturing the image is just one step in a process to get to the final, and so you have some.
Speaker 1:Nowadays, you've got ai assisting with things that we have done forever. Again, you just want to spot something, you want to clone something out, or you want to retouch something out, you want to do whatever. Now ai is making that easier. It's this gender to fill thing that starts to get a little freaky and we're going to say, okay, I'm going to take this generative fill thing that starts to get a little freaky and where you can say, okay, I'm going to take this bench out and I want to replace by a pit of fibers. Like, oh, it can do that. Why, I don't know, but again, I just did something stupid like that the other day, just to see, because they got the new trial version of Photoshop that has some kind of crazy generative fill. So I'm like let's see what that's about, because I enjoy pushing buttons and again, when it was just doing something like legit, shocking, like you just literally you can't even tell where the thing was going to remove something and just added something that didn't even exist. But it just looks around, figures, figures, what should, what could be there, and suddenly you've got plants or grass or concrete or whatever in places where you obviously it's making this stuff up, but that's that starts to get gray. Maybe obviously you add something, you have it add something completely and like, okay, you know, know, I want this guy like make this person a twin. Then I think you're now that's no longer gray, now you've completely just screwed with photographic nature.
Speaker 1:But yeah, it's getting the purest thing. I get more power doing it. There's some great stuff out there by people that are still shooting a large format, going into the darkroom, bleaching things and using chemical processes to enhance. Like wow, I'm in love with that stuff. Like more power, please.
Speaker 1:I hope they stick around and do that for the rest, at least for the rest of my lifetime, because after that I don't have anything to say about it, but I love to look at it, but to say that that's the only way to do it is just is wrong, I think. So, tanya, don't worry about what's good. Anybody ever tells you your stuff needs to come right out of the camera. Just at that point, just recognize they're just messing with you and or they think way too much of themselves. Yeah, either way, you've stumbled across the wrong person to have an argument with and it's time to walk away. At that point. So right, let's see what else I have in my. Oh yeah, actually I got. So I was having. I was interviewing a photographer, a Danish. No, no, don't do that. Take that back. And when you hear if he watches this, I apologize for calling you Danish. He is Dutch, and so he mentioned something to me which I hadn't even thought of and I thought it was brilliant.
Speaker 1:So the idea of the prompting AI to create something that wasn't there. So is it the AI making it or is it the prompter? Now think about this is a professional photography thing, but art directors and photographers the art director, in essence, was the person prompting. The art director comes up with an idea, gathers from their lifetime of stuff and other visual clues, maybe makes up a storyboard, gives it to the photographer. The photographer then looks at it and, with their own skills and their own history, creates it.
Speaker 1:The art director didn't create it. The art director entered the prompts to the photographer, who then created an idea that wasn't their own. And then, but the photographer's getting copyright and typically what's good nowadays, of course somebody else wants the corporation to probably create the stuff or wants the copyright on the whole thing. So basically, we're looking at just a really slow AI process, whereas the photographer in this case is the AI. So again, there's not a world of difference between that little workflow than there is with sitting at your computer, except that sitting at your computer is much faster and again, it doesn't cost. Like a buddy of mine literally was contracted to fly to a glacier and I was going to spend a week shooting it, doing a fashion spread where they had to helicopter everything in. Needless to say, the budget on that is going to be far greater than sitting in your pajamas with a cocktail and putting a few prompts.
Speaker 2:I think there's a middle ground that somebody mentioned to me that sounded interesting which is using AI to kind of storyboard or do mock-ups for a shoot that you want to do as as a way to sort of say, is this idea going to even work?
Speaker 1:I think that sounds great, why not?
Speaker 2:Finish product.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, again again, and the only reason if you can probably make it look like, if you can't now, you will be in the future. Make it look like a finished product Again. The only problem with that is the not copyrightable thing, and suddenly everything's going to hell. But I think it's a great idea. To Polaroids Again. Now we've got digital.
Speaker 1:I remember Polaroids being the digital of the day. Everybody, we all remember the ones we had at the house and the the family member pops it out and it's the greatest thing in the world as a professional. They used to put these things. They had backs that you would put on your various professional camera, but from 35 millimeter all the way up to an eight by 10. And you you take. The only reason you're taking the Polaroid is not because it's art in and of itself. We were taking it just to make sure your lights were firing and everything that needed to work in the split second there actually worked, and so that was the only reason for Polaroid in the professional sense was what we have is digital now, and then I used to joke that your best shot of the day might be that damn Polaroid, and then after that, everything else starts to move and just go wrong.
Speaker 1:So the rest of the day is spent chasing that Polaroid Now with digital, of course. Once you've got it, you've got it Now, it's just okay. Now let's play and shoot some more. But the idea of using AI to storyboard, I think, is an outstanding idea. Like, why not? But then you're going to have somebody else who's going to be the guy who's the artist who drew up these storyboards is going to be pissed off that now just any schmuck who can type is going to be able to do it, and that guy is going to be out there having his own Zoom meeting talking about how his career just changed. So he's going to have to learn, unfortunately, to expand his skill set, and this is all hypothetical, but I can totally see Michael that one coming about.
Speaker 3:So yeah, Can I just taking a step back thinking about all the stuff we've been talking about. So I kind of see this sort of as a two-part story. You know, one is the application right, you know how you use AI and I'm less concerned about that because I do see the potential for using it in ways that you know are beneficial to the practitioner that of these copyrighted images and then applies that to AI based technology and and doesn't give proper attribution or proper ascribe, proper provenance for that, for that work. And that's that's the part, I guess, that I I struggle with because, um, you know, I think it's wrong, I think it's, I don't think, I don't think it's right to take someone else's work and by either you know purposeful, um, you know misleading people, or just by not saying it and then other people just making the assumption that that's your work when it's really not your work. That's the part that I guess I have trouble with.
Speaker 1:Let me just see if I'm following. So if the person again this uh, an image, so and they it looks like another image, or are we saying that we're?
Speaker 3:just saying, like, if you have a photograph, they're they're, you know, gleaning from the the vast repertoire of images that you know people posted on there. I'm not saying Instagram themselves would do it necessarily, but I mean you have a repository of work there that someone can take and use that for other reasons. You manipulate it maybe in certain ways without the original creator's permission or, uh, signing off on it. So I mean, I guess what I'm saying is that's, that's the part for me. It's not the application, so much I think I can appreciate the applications for for things I don't necessarily agree with it. I see it in education as well. I I mean you know students who are generating AI essays and they are generated essays and so forth. I mean I have a problem with that, but but I understand that there are, there's potential for, you know, appropriately using that technology. But the the other side of it to me is is the creator rights of the work that's being done and recognizing that.
Speaker 3:And unfortunately, I think a lot of that boils down to something that I think Roger said earlier about the different social media platforms. I don't trust them to to that they're going to be fully transparent and say, yeah, this is AI generated or this is this is from, you know, 35 millimeter Ilford 400 film, whatever. I just don't trust them. I, whether that's true or whether the the techno technological capabilities are cause you've got to screen a vast number of images to make that determination of whether it's AI generated or something else. I realize computers are strong, powerful. They can go through lots of data very quickly, but I'm not entirely certain that that's something that the companies. What's their motivation, and I mean what's what's holding them accountable in that respect?
Speaker 1:Well, I wouldn't even imagine they currently have the uh, the motivation, other than it's a bunch of pissed off people. Do you have a? I don't think they have the technology necessarily to uh to fully. Uh, roger was saying to to fully screens there. So you're right. At the moment we're in the beginning of this Wild West show and they're just kind of like asking people to drop their money in the basket and just take what you paid for.
Speaker 4:I think that's a good comparison. I want to go back to something that you said. I'm talking about attribution. Attribution is critical. If you're going to take my work and do something with it, you have to attribute it to me. But at least in the US, if someone takes copyrighted work and sufficiently transforms it, that can be fair use. So if you sufficiently transform my work, whatever that means with AI, is that fair use?
Speaker 1:I don't know. Yeah, that's exactly where the Lynn Goldsmith thing came in, so they tried to do the fair use thing and also that they transformed it enough and they didn't Again. It was the exact same picture, just it was orange versus purple. It's amazing to me that they thought that that was going to fly. That said what's going on? What made me because I was following the case when it was actually going to the courts because I was like, like, this is going to be, this is a landmark case. And then, uh, I remember years before that and which gave me reason to doubt that when goldsmith is going to win this thing, even though it seemed like it should be a slam dunk is that again involving Instagram as the middleman.
Speaker 1:This had nothing to do specifically with Instagram, but there was some guy calling himself an artist who was selling his art was he would take Instagram posts, literally just take the whole post, and he just like, bam, copy it, not change a damn thing, the word, the comments picture, remove like screen capture it, add some text to it somewhere and then sell this as art. And this guy was making money hand over fist. This guy was a legitimately successful business person. I can't call him an artist, because I don't think what he did was art. Literally all you did was steal literally even the comments and then just add, like an extra comment or some, some text somewhere and they said, well, that was fair use, and they sufficiently, uh, they altered it. I'm like, in no way, shape or form, can you rationally say that that was altered enough in order to change the whole meaning of the thing. No, it was the laziest scam I've ever seen and I was like, yeah, this guy got away with it and again he got sued, he won, and so not only did he was going to again. Luckily I don't remember. I wish I remembered his name, just as I could say it. But on the other side, I'm glad he's not famous enough that we should all know who he is, but you just don't know who you're going to get again judging your case. And this is where the appeals come. That one obviously didn't go up to the Supreme Court, because I don't even think, whereas I have my doubts on the Supreme Court and certain things, I think that one was like, literally, if they were able to get the Lynn Goldsmith one, changing the color of the whole canvas is way more than this guy did and they was good sided with Lynn. So, that said, I'm thinking that was good If the laws were in place and if they were to take yourself.
Speaker 1:Like it comes down to how much you're taking. Again, like inspiration is inspiration. Like, if you're inspiring, say I want to, I want to, uh, create a picture of a duck riding what's called uh, another duck, but in the, in the, uh, in the, in the style of an old, uh, uh, you know, western novel painting theme. Well, whoever it was that did something. Whoever painted those pictures in a novel had that style. And now this picture comes across and, okay, well, I was inspired by that, but in no way, shape or form will somebody say that it was, because there's plenty of painters that were inspired by other painters and you can see the similarity in their style. Again, historically it was going to be the whole movements and that's how these movements are created, because somebody starts it and then a bunch of people go, wow, that's awesome, and then they want to do it and you can see the inspiration. Now, that's not plagiarizing, that's not stealing, that's not. It depends on who you ask. Somebody will think that, like, leave my stuff alone, like, get your own style.
Speaker 1:But Picasso started an entire whole new genre. Like, there you go. He started an entirely different way and then, of course, every bunch of people just jumped on the bandwagon and they started now like, oh, if you know Picasso well enough, you can save it. There's some stuff out there you might go oh, is that Picasso? Oh, no, it's not. So at what point is that different? So it's different with using what's going on, like if somebody's trying to write a novel and I forget, let's get the novel out of it, because that's hard. Somebody's writing a term paper and AI generates their term paper for them. Well, they should get failed Again. There's a client of mine more of my client's husband had come up with software years ago and it was software that was used to determine plagiarism in academic papers, and so he made an awful lot of money off that.
Speaker 1:And it's sick how good these things are at finding out. Which would, I keep wondering, if you read a bunch and you just remember and you start writing what you're gonna. You're not gonna get plagiarized like sued for plagiarism if you read a lot and then incorporate all the stuff, even if you don't attribute, as long as you're not like sitting with your like a paper here, a paper there, a paper there, and literally copying stuff out. If you're just digesting all this stuff and then you basically almost forget where you've heard it and you write it out, you're not plagiarizing and you don't. At that point you don't really technically, we need attribution, because at that point you're not even sure where you got it. You just read so much that you're just spitting it back out in a new soup. Of course, at that point point, you're not going to be taken seriously if you don't attribute. So that wouldn't be considered a true scientific paper or anything like that. So the protections are in place for a lot of the stuff.
Speaker 1:I think, yeah, it doesn't mean just because I think it doesn't mean, I'm right, but I'm thinking it's because of how we all go about our daily lives of creating anything. But because of how we all go about our daily lives of creating anything it was mentioned earlier, in my view, that we're all just creating a stew of all the things, all the experiences, all the things we've seen, we've done, we've tasted, heard. There's no musician that's making a song that didn't have some inspiration by something else, no photographer that didn't look at another photograph and go, oh, even if you, specifically, are trying to sort of not copy, you're still inspired. So, yeah, I don't see that as a major problem. Say again in Instagram somebody wants to lie to you and say, okay, well, this is a photograph and Instagram doesn't catch it. Then he's just lied to us and lied to himself Like, now we're not gonna, chances are we might go, that's great. And then you're not gonna go hire him.
Speaker 1:Like, say, you're skimming through Instagram and you're in search of a photographer who does a certain thing, and this guy comes up with his AI generated content and you're like, oh, that's exactly what I want. I'm going to hire you. But you're thinking this person's, thinking this guy's a photograph, and now this guy is going to get caught in a scam immediately because he can't generate that in real life. Because they're going to want to see that they don't like this stuff being remote. Somebody's going to be there to watch the finger go like that, and so this guy is not going to be able to pull it off. So somebody's going to get fooled, somebody's going to lie and it's going to make somebody feel bad about themselves.
Speaker 1:Somebody's like, oh, I suck, I'm a horrible photographer because look at that guy's work and why can't I do something like that? It's not actual work. Well, this is where it was just the idea of you just have to have confidence in yourself and what you do and recognize it. Actually, a similar thing. They don't do it in the US, but they do it here in France, if you have like an ad. I was walking by a billboard of Lenny Kravitz the other day and in the lower right-hand corner in French, it said basically that this is a retouched photograph, and then I had remembered that actually that's a thing.
Speaker 1:So not just for Lenny Kravitz, but across the board, and it's put in place for the most part because how many people have just thinking kids in particular, who grow into adults, who look at, say, fashion models or whoever, and they think, oh, I want to be like that. Why can't I be like that? Well, they're not even like that and for a long time it's hurt people and people that are that don't have a lot of self-esteem go. I can't be like that. That person's perfect. I wish I could be like that, but I can't. I suck. There should be a thing mentioning that that's not actually even that person like. That's inspired by that person, but again, with all the work done on site, even with the makeup beyond that, they then must have come in long before it's called AI. They're sitting there nudging in with some Photoshop, or even before Photoshop, they would sit there and come in on the waist and so they could do literally. It's amazing what you could do even before computers, and make people look unrecognizable if you ever saw them in person. So it's fine, do it if you want, but it should.
Speaker 1:I think advertising even should be, and this is where I think advertising is kind of well. Advertising would do nothing if it wasn't forced to do it. So advertising is being forced to, uh, disclose certain things. Ai should be. People that use ai should be forced to disclose certain things, and for no other reason than it's yeah, it's the truth, and what? And again, the truth shall set you free. So they say so like the, uh like.
Speaker 1:So the ones that are going to lie to us, the only one they're getting over on for the most part, is themselves. As I see it at this point in time, it doesn't mean it's not going to cause all sorts of chaos. Again, I'm most actually legitimately concerned with the political world of what AI-generated sound and images can do, like, because Entire videos, yeah, it's insane. So, but I don't even want to delve into that because that will make my hair go white right now, and so it's a whole nother topic but, and far more serious than creators rights, but, uh, you know, but we're we're here talking about this, so, yeah, yeah, anyway, I think for the most part, that's my two cents, or, which is awful awesome was more like, uh, a buck 80, but uh, any more topics do you guys want to bring up, like related to?
Speaker 3:I could write it down. I'm going to have to leave, but you've given us some food for thought. Keith, I appreciate that. Yeah, I still wrestle with the provenance thing, but I understand your point and that's going to be something that I just have to work out for myself. I mean, I. It sounds awfully, awfully arrogant of me to think that maybe people want to steal my, my work. I, you know, I I'm not, I'm not going to be like, you know, on that level to to have people worry, you know, to be worried that people are going to, you know, a lot of people are going to want to steal my work.
Speaker 1:So well, your work is beautiful and I appreciate it. They'd be better off stealing your work because it's not as well known. They could eat more easily. Steal your work and then tweak it and present it as something.
Speaker 3:Thanks, yeah, I was just thinking about going back on the instagram. Yeah, thanks for saying that. There there goes. You just burst my bubble.
Speaker 1:Now again they'll get busted. So don, so, don't you worry Okay.
Speaker 3:Anyway.
Speaker 1:I'm looking forward to seeing you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, anybody who's in Paris 24th through the 27th or whatever, yeah, love to get together. I'll reach out again. We've got a WhatsApp thread and stuff like that. So anybody Tanya and Anja, I know, is not with us, but yeah, I'll just let you guys know what's happening once we get closer to the time. But you guys take care. It was good to see you and Roger, it was nice meeting you, nice meeting you too. I'm going to sign off then take care, guys. See you and I think we'm going to sign off. Then Take care, guys.
Speaker 1:See you.
Speaker 3:Bye.
Speaker 1:And I think we're going to. Yeah, I wish you guys had something.
Speaker 5:I think this is a good time to wrap it.
Speaker 1:Thanks very much.
Speaker 5:Thanks, very much.