A glowing Autumn sunset on Worm's Head in the stunning Gower Peninsula was a backdrop to ponies peacefully grazing the cliffs. I found myself at the perfect viewpoint with no-one else around. Just me and the ponies, overlooking a vast sea of explosive colour.
A moment of awestruck wonder, greatness and solitude.
Nature offers moments like this on a daily basis. Whether its a sunset, epic wildlife spectacles or just wind rustling through the trees, as a photographer I have the privilege of capturing and sharing a little part of these moments alongside the adventures and discoveries that come with them.
As someone who is excited by photography and all things nature, there has been a question on my mind as I seek to develop a career in photography, an already highly competitive field...
Is AI a threat to nature photography?
The scale of generating fast, cheap images using AI software does seem like a realistic threat. To the untrained eye, AI images look extremely life like and they will continue to improve.
Today, there are numerous, free and paid for, online software packages that use AI photos to create photos. The software is developing and improving at a high speed rate and images are appearing everywhere in social media feeds and publications. Stats from 2023 show that over 15 billion images were created by AI software systems including Stable Diffusion, Adobe Firefly, Midjourney, and DALLE-2, which is more than the entire Shuttershock library of vectors, photos and illustrations (1).
As long as the producer of the image states that it is AI generated, there isn't anything wrong with AI images. AI software does have it's place in the world.
To test out some AI software, I used Canva, a free online software to try and re-create my sunset pony shot in Wales. After a few words, it came up with this image.
It's a moment that never happened made up of unreal horses in a place that has never existed. There is simply no depth to its story and creativity. As a photographer, I would never be able to inspire adventure with the image of a place where no-one can truly visit. Produced by a string of words and a code, this AI image seems cheap and lifeless.
For me, photography's purpose is to capture moments, document stories and showcase natural wonders. Choosing to type in a string of sentences at our computers to save ourselves the time and effort of photography is a sad choice to make as a photographer.
AI simply can't replace the journey, exploration and creative process in photography.
Moreover there is a need and hunger for reality. True images capturing moments are still highly valued in todays society and on social media. Many wildlife photography competitions have banned AI generated images. "Nature," one of the oldest scientific journals has refused to publish images or videos generated by AI due to lack of integrity (2).
Another point is photography helps immensely with learning about wildlife. Watching for, searching for and observing wildlife and exploring sites for long periods of time helps the photographer learn about nature first hand and feel more connected to the world around them. If photography was to be replaced by AI, so many opportunities to learn about the natural world would be lost and society would be come even more disconnected from nature.
What is the driving force in photography?
If the only point of photography is to capture an end image, then AI generated images can do the work for you and skip the long process of planning, capturing, travelling to sites, waiting for nature and editing photos. For me the result is empty. There is no adventure and personality to the image. There is no aspect of humans pushing the boundaries of exploration and creativity. Photography is much more than simply the outputs. It's about exploring the natural world, inspiring others to go see it for themselves, valuing it and protect it.
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