TAMING THE AI

It all starts with an article I read about Boris Eldagsen. Up to that moment I had been very creeped out and scared stiff with all the talk of the AI getting out of hand. Rumours on the street as it where, magnified by my own conspiranoic mind, the one that sets in when I don´t sleep enough.

The talk around coffe was exclusivelly AI and how it is everywhere, and where its headed, what the critics say, what the thinkers ponder about, and what the debate is centering around. Art, Science, Social engangement, literature, photography. And that is where the article disrupts the flow of thought. Boris calls it Promptography.

I am a photographer myself. Professionally that is what I do, document reality or interpret it for a client, becoming their eyes. The fact that the generative AI applications that build upon the diffusion model are becoming so scaringly realistic in their outputs was troubling me and many other photographers. You can clearly see how a large company could use a selftrained model to change commercial photoshoots as we know them and replace them by Prompt engineers with unlimited access to everything the company has made in terms of visual branding, and who through carefully directed prompts manage to pull off full campaigns in an afternoon. That is coming, for sure.

I pride myself in being able to stop time and freeze it with some ancient alchemy. Photographing, freezing light as it paints a moment that will never recur, and thus elevating that fraction of a second into something that is beyond us. My work is based on reality, and I rest asured that for now my future in that sense is safe. But the concept of promptography intrigued me, and the diffusion model more so.

So I started to read, stay up late, work, then read some more and think. Promptography as Boris says is the fair name we should give the outputs of all these generative AI applications. Social media is now full of photographs that are not, and that far from being excellent in their concept and execution, skillfully prompted images that resemble reality and add to it the fantasy of the creator, the promptographer. There should be no shame in calling oneself that.

But what is prompting anyways. Boris continues to explain the rules that apply to prompting. Coming from photography, or knowing about the photography is a great help to generate prompts that the AI can interpret correctly. There is a similar thing happening in the head of a photographer as he looks at a scene, and decomposes it to understand the underlying dynamics of the subject of our shoot. And the description is more sensorial, the search for light, angle, movement, composition all happening in the act of pointing the camera and pressing the shutter. Prompting he explains is an art form in itself as it involves a clear direction and a solid concept.

So the idea of creating an image using words, starts to tickle me, and I set out to explore with an idea growing in my head. I wanted to see what it was and how it felt. And at first I tried simple things, but I soon started to use some of my pictures to experiment as a collage artist, by chopping them up, putting them in the diffussion blender and ask the AI to regurgitate something else, respecting the source material in form and composition.

I love reality, and love it as it is. I photograph parts of it, and with the AI, I wanted to tap into a skill I never truly mastered. Illustration. So That would be my approach.