Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
It’s getting difficult to distinguish AI images from photos, and it’s getting evident that AI could replace humans in some professions, headshot photography being among them.
Enter HeadshotPro, an AI-based corporate headshot service that could make headshot photography a thing of the past. It takes your random photos, even selfies, and uses AI to turn them into professional corporate headshots. And the best (or worst) of all is: it does a pretty good job!
Do you think you can tell with 100% certainty whether you’re looking at a photo or an AI-generated image? Whether we like it or not, AI is rapidly getting better at generating images, making them super-realistic and believable. So realistic, in fact, that it’s sometimes difficult to tell AI images apart from photographic ones.
So, let’s put this to a test. Answer the questions in this quiz and let us know – are you still absolutely sure you can differentiate between AI and photos at all times?
The invention of photography in 1839 challenged the very idea of art, leaving some painters feeling threatened by a new technology that could capture a portrait instantly. Yet photography also created opportunities for those same artists to express themselves outside the boundaries of reality, and they began to experiment with surreal and abstract styles that were a world apart from photography.
In the 1990s, digital cameras and then CGI brought their own waves of disruption, forcing commercial photographers to not only retool, but to reconsider how they fit into the landscape of creative professionals. Now that AI (artificial intelligence) has splashed onto the scene, commercial photographers and the people who hire them are scrambling to understand the possibilities for this new technology.
To look at Jos Avery‘s Instagram account is to be greeted by a sea of beautiful portrait photographs staring right back at you. The sheer number and variety is staggering, and his 27K+ followers seem to agree, often asking for tips and tricks to emulate the photographer they hold in esteem.
Except that there is one issue. Namely that none of these ‘photos’ were taken with a camera. Avery has recently ‘come out’ and admitted that all of them were created using Midjourney, an AI image generator.
French photography magazine Réponses Photo recently published an issue with a cover that really makes you wonder. It’s a portrait image shot in the evening, or should I say – it was made to look that way?
While this isn’t the first AI-generated magazine cover, it’s definitely the first one that makes you wonder – will AI actually replace photographers in the future? Should we be worried?
AI has been used for all sorts of different art projects so far, but we have never seen an AI time machine. Well, not until now. An anonymous artist has created one using AI technology and paired it with lots of knowledge, effort, and time to create amusing selfies “from the past.” His imaginary persona is called “Stelfie the Time Traveler,” and the artist shared with DIYP a bit about his process and about Stelfie himself.
David Holz, the founder of Midjourney, recently admitted something we’ve already assumed: the company’s AI was trained on hundreds of millions of images without consent from their authors. This revelation has sparked outrage among both artists and privacy advocates. It has raised concerns about the ethical implications of such actions, as well as copyright issues that might emerge.
If you’ve scrolled through any social media feed recently, you’ve probably seen at least 32 AI-generated portraits that look like cartoonish versions of your friends. It’s all because of Lensa, an AI portrait app that surged in popularity almost overnight. And while it’s all fun and games on the outside, the hyped app has a dark side that we’re slowly beginning to discover.
As some users have noticed, Lensa seems to be inherently misogynic and makes women’s portraits overly sexualized, even when they’re created from just photos of a face. But it gets worse. It appears to be easy to trick the app into generating NSFW content. This leads to realistic, nonconsensual nudes of pretty much anyone, including both adults and children.
As artificial intelligence (AI) technology continues to develop, so too does the ability to create realistic images with the help of AI.
I have been spending some time testing out how good this new technology really is, trying to figure out who has the creative control, how I feel about being removed from the process, and how as a photographer, I can take advantage of this new tech while sitting in my living room in the middle of North Yorkshire.
FIND THIS INTERESTING? SHARE IT WITH YOUR FRIENDS!