Read a Facebook comment today, under a post showcasing some basic background swapping on a portrait with some AI tool. The comment was something to the effect of: “It’s all good as long as the average person doesn’t learn to use this. But once every other Joe and his 2 year old with a ’touch phone’ can do background swapping, face tuning, body editing, etc. on images, that’s when photographers will be in trouble. At that point, we’ll be out of business and photography as a profession will be dead.”

I am of course aware that in applied work, in fashion and other commercial genres extensive editing has been the norm forever. But to equate this with “photography as a profession”? It’s like saying that digital photography killed the profession because a professional photographer is someone who can expose and develop slide film correctly. Yes, digital changed the industry and some people, the people whose only qualification was “can operate a stills camera”, were pushed out. Individually, it sucks when a person loses their job, even more so, when they lose their profession. But as a discipline, as a field? I think photography is better off.

I don’t like generative AI too much and find the truth-bending potential of image and video generators to be dangerous. But it’s a danger like the wolves migrating to your forest. It changes things, you’ll have to adapt and they might eat you. They will most definitely eat your sheep. You can lament the loss of the good old wolfless days, but the wolves are here now and you can’t wish them away.

Politically, ideologically I’d love to live in a society that considers people’s interests before some VS funded AI snakeoil company. That would be a better, more just place to live. Practically, however all I can see is small scale wins for the people and large scale wins-by-default for the corporations. If we all somehow banded together, we might be able to push the wolves back a bit. But I don’t think we can bet our lives only on that happening. So organize and try to push back on the wolves, but also, be prepared for what you will do once all your sheep are eaten.

In photography, as in elsewhere in the arts, there has always been applied work. But the heart of photography is no one specific genre or business model. The heart of photography is that it captures light and time. Whatever genre you work in, be it nature, documentary, fashion, weddings, whatever, capturing light and time is what you do. As a field I don’t think we lose too much with some schmock not being able to make a living on photoshopping women thinner. The industry will change, it might shrink a lot, but the heart, that we won’t lose because software can’t capture, it can only simulate. Will anybody pay us to photograph? I don’t know. But if what photography means to you is really the business of photography, then I don’t think we have much in common besides owning a camera.

A long conversation today made me think about deep knowledge versus surface knowledge. I assume this is true everywhere, but in the two fields I’m familiar with (photography and software development) the field has deep knowledge and surface knowledge. The people with deep knowledge are the ones that can create truly valuable, long lasting work but the people with surface knowledge are the ones the market seems to favor.

In photography people with very little understanding of lighting, composition, emotion and little capacity for human connection tend to be the ones doing most of the paid, commercial, “professional” work. They are also the ones that are the loudest and most clueless about trends and changes in the industry, about outside forces like generative AI or high quality phone cameras that are affecting the industry.

The people with deep knowledge might sometimes lack the business sense, self-branding skills and knowledge of fads required to get the shallow but high paing jobs. They tend to be less worried, too. They know that when the industry “collapses”, it only doesn’t collapse for them. The shallow jobs might shrink and disappear, but the core is here to stay and they operate in the (highly underpaid but also intangibly highly valuable) core.

I find the same is true in the world of software. People with very little sense or skill in systems thinking, lacking a deep understanding of real world usage and analytical thought are the ones working in the hundreds of thousands (or maybe millions) of “development” jobs, usually in big multinationals or in enterprise environments. They know the specific features of specific systems, but that’s it. These are the people whose jobs might be in peril from chatGPT and Copilot and similar tools, generating endless boilerplate and basic code for basic functions.

The “true” programmers are not like this. They operate on the level of organizational thinking, designing systems, digging deep into computing (not coding!) problems. Their skills are not in a specific language or toolset that’s in vogue.

There is one major difference however: in the software world, the people with core knowledge are highly paid as well! This industry values them in a way many others don’t value their own “deep knowledge” workers.

My feelings are similar in both industries: I just can’t bring myself to respect the “surface” people in the same way I can respect the “deep knowledge” people. It has nothing to do with market value: I respect people who create true, lasting human value. People who can think deeply, understand human problems and create well fitting solutions do, in my opinion, something fundamentally, qualitatively different from people who can quickly and reliably apply the same solution without any sign of interest in the specific problem or the underlying, deeper human values and issues the problem arises from.

Strive to understand people and communities and how they work. Whatever specific solution you add on top is just implementation detail.

Well, anyways.