The new technology we are hearing about is AI, Artificial Intelligence. In the last year I've watched news stories talking about a new software where a person could give the software some basic information about a story and the software would write the story. So, maybe a journalist could use this to write their stories, or maybe students are writing a paper for class, and instead of writing it themselves, they could use AI to write it.  There was one I heard that it could write a resume for someone applying for a job.  This is like when Photoshop came out and people would say we don't know if a photo is real or fake as photographers could manipulate their images, adding or subtracting to the image.

I also saw some members of congress saying this new technology is dangerous and could get out of control.  There was one guy on the news that predicted that AI would get so smart that it could eliminate the human race and we would become extinct, real science fiction stuff.

In the last few weeks while viewing images on my Facebook feed, I saw an incredible landscape image by a photographer (sorry I don't remember his name) who had a huge following, like over 100,000 people, and was getting thousands of likes and hundreds of comments on each of his images.  His landscape subjects are nothing I haven't seen by other landscapes photographers, but his post processing of the images was a level above anything I've seen.  I went through some of his other images in his Facebook page and came across one post that talked about his use of AI software that created the look in his images.  Many people said they loved what he was doing with the AI software, and some were against it saying it will ruin photography, just like everyone said when photoshop came out.

I don't yet understand how it works, but I believe you enter your image into the software and the software takes over the image and does its thing based on what you ask it to do. 

I also saw one lady photographer that had a scene with a beach and water and asked the AI software to add in some dolphins jumping out of the water, and one other photographer had asked the AI software to add some flying birds into the sky of their scene. A photographer could take flying birds out of one image and paste them into a sky of another image, but now with AI the software can create the birds and add them in for you.

A lady in my workshop last week said in her camera club competition that a photographer won 1st place in one of the categories and then after winning came out to say he was removing his image from the contest because he used AI software in the image and now felt it wasn't fair to the other entries. So, the camera club said they may have to now create a new category for AI images. 

Looks like as more photographers start using the AI software, we will have new debates on how far to take our images in this new software.

I don't know enough about the new software to form an opinion, but I also use software and click filters in programs that alter the look of my images, so I guess I'm already doing what these photographers are doing, it's just a little more sophisticated with AI.

What do you think?