Artificially Unintelligent

You need not be organically stupid to make mistakes in photography...there are a number of new electronic programs being developed that will make it happen for you.

We've all seen the first examples of the AI botch-jobs being produced where faces are distorted and extra fingers are added to hands. Sometimes architecture edges don't quite line up...though to be fair this can happen in the real-live building game. And after a few years any house starts to have walls that resemble the cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Just this week we read that the fashion magazines are starting to decry the perfection of AI images. This seems odd, as they have been pressing the perfections of others upon the flawed eyes of the average person as a matter of course. Perhaps even they are appalled at the result of machine learning analysing what they have been doing and mocking them.

The desire for perfection might drive a person to send dozens of personal images to an AI generator and to ask for the result back as art. The question would arise whether in their own mind they wanted " corrected " images or " the correct " image...

In any case I think it dangerous, in a way, to supply these. The person looking at their portrait would know instinctively that it was a pastiche, and start comparing it to what they actually see in the mirror. What if it became more desirable to them than the real them? There's enough self-image sadness in the world with a simple bathroom mirror...a website full of the false and unattainable would be infinitely worse.

Okay - I'm an old guy writing weblog essays for the camera store I worked at ( and loving it, I might add ). I am not up with the tech of three years ago, let alone the last three minutes. But I can see the basic difference between the art we love telling the truth and just flannelling us along.

Whether we set out to capture beauties or beasts, we still want to have the result be more realistic than a watercolour done with Q-Tips. And truer than a propaganda rumour.