I
make no claim to be an expert on this subject, but I did start dating an art
major when we were both in college, in 1958, and we eventually got married. A
few years later we were both employed at a university, and she was Curator of
Education (or an equivalent title, depending on the decade) at the Sheldon
Museum of Art. As a result, I ended up in the company of artists and art
historians, listening to them talk not only about their work but also about art
in general. Throughout our careers, my wife’s in the arts and mine as a
biological scientist, most of our social contacts were in the art community
rather than the relatively boring and semi-toxic biologist community. So, my
comments about the current issue of content aware fill and other digital photography
wonders are derived mainly from those decades of listening to artists and art
historians address the same questions that pre-Photoshop photographers were
probably asking about darkroom jockeys and post-Photoshop photographers are now
(or still) asking, the main one being “is it art?”
Humans
make art, period. There was a time when the cultural world was asking whether
photography was an art form, and that question got answered in the affirmative,
mainly by market forces that eventually forced us to consider content and
intellectual/emotional impact of photgraphs in addition to their value as
investments. However, in my view, all humans are artists, writers, and
musicians, period, and every time they press a shutter on a camera, draw a
picture, write a letter, or play an instrument, they are indeed playing this
role of artist, writer, or musician. Artists use all the materials and
techniques available to them at the time they are working, so whenever new
materials or techniques appear, and artists use them, that is typical human
behavior. The real question, then, is whether these artists, writers, or
musicians are amateurs or professionals, and if amateurs, whether they are
functioning at the professional level. In my opinion, in the United States, the
Treasury Department, i.e., the Internal Revenue Service, has provided a handy
answer to this last question, and this answer is known as Schedule C.
Here
are my Schedule C criteria: If you take photographs, even if you manipulate
them mercilessly, draw pictures, write all kinds of stuff, and/or play an
instrument, but do not earn any money from these practices, even if you’re
doing them at a very high level, and don’t even try to earn any money from
them, and consequently don’t fill out a Schedule C, then you are an amateur
artist, writer, and/or musician no matter how good you are at whatever you’re
doing artistically. If, however, you earn some income from your art, writing,
and/or music, but not enough to buy food, shelter, and transportation, and choose
to fill out a Schedule C, claiming expenses, etc., then you are still an
amateur but one working at the professional level, i.e., earning some money
with your art. But if you fill out a Schedule C, and the reported income is
enough to provide you with housing, food, and transportation, and that has been
the situation for several years in a row, then you are clearly a professional.
Now,
however, in addition to the Schedule C criteria, there is the Self Employment
Tax requirement for some professionals. If, because of your earnings from your
art, you are required to pay self-employment tax, you are operating at the
professional level and probably are a true professional. Finally, of course, if
you are employed as a photographer, writer, or musician, and paid a salary for
taking pictures, writing stories, and playing an instrument, you are clearly a
professional regardless of how well you are doing these activities, what the general
public thinks of them, and whether you fill out a Schedule C or pay Self
Employment Tax.
Note
that the Schedule C criterion does not include critical acclaim; obviously one
can gain critical appreciation, or even critical acclaim, and not be a
professional. Nowadays, however, there may be some semi-ethical issues involved
in AI manipulations of all kinds of products, including photography, writing,
and probably musical composition. It takes very little messing around with
ChatGPT to figure out that the homework essay as a graded product in school is
a thing of the past. Social media posts from the education community reveal not
only a variety of concerns about this last problem, but also techniques for
ensuring that creative work is original and reflective of a student’s
knowledge, learning, etc. One of these English teacher techniques involves
right up-front admission of AI participation in an assignment, and that seems
like a pretty good approach to all kinds of creative work, including
photography.
So, for
example, instead of saying “here’s a photo of a squirrel in my back yard,” we
end up saying “here’s a photo that just looks like a squirrel in my back yard,
but the back yard is totally fake, made up of a thousand back yard images in
the Adobe picture bank. Oh, and it’s not a real squirrel, either; it’s actually
a squirrel made from a rat sitting on the spilled garbage in the alley behind
my apartment building.” Someone might look at that picture and say: “That’s
really a nice image of a fake back yard and a squirrel made from a rat, but we
were just in Milwaukee where we stopped by a gallery and saw a nicer fake back
yard and a squirrel made from a beaver. Seems to me when you make squirrels
from beavers, they turn out better squirrels than when you make them from
rats.” What we have here is a discussion of how well, in one person’s opinion,
another person has used available techniques and starting materials to construct
an image.
We
also have, in this conversation, the typical talk about “better” but in this
case involving fake squirrels and fake back yards. These fake talkers are using
their subjective judgments to assess the visual and emotional impact of a picture
and the ability of the picture-maker to produce such an impact. It’s also
entirely possible that the person who made this fake picture spent quite a bit
of time and effort taking real pictures of rats in the alley behind her
apartment, and that some of these images produce a serious visual and emotional
impact after only common manipulations such as sharpening, noise reduction,
exposure, etc. If she exhibited those real pictures of real rats in real
alleys, some folks might call her a purist, a word whose definition changes
with the times, technological tools available, and use of such tools by serious
artists, writers, and musicians. We can envision some Cro-Magnon cave artist
with ground pigments, producing images of bison deep in a European cave, coming
out into the sunlight, seeing another individual drawing pictures in the dirt
with a stick, and calling that person a purist in whatever language the
Cro-Magnons used 20,000 years ago to describe one another. So, our general
definition of “purist” is one who uses a minimal repertoire of techniques
available, regardless of the media, and still produces something interesting.
So,
the question remains: What do we do and say about work that is heavily laden
with AI content, as opposed to work that is heavily modified but still
recognizable as a derivative of some relatively pure creative endeavor? That
question is relatively easy to answer for photography: The artist admits their
sources, intents, and tools, and we viewers view the work as a mixed-media
product, judging it, in our minds, in terms of how well the intent was
accomplished, or maybe even in terms of how skillful the artist was in use of
the tools. We do that same kind of judgment with purist work, too, of course,
but mentally put the purist work into a different mental category from the
mixed-media work.
Here
are a couple of examples, based on my encounter with photographers, to
illustrate the paragraph above. In one case, the photographer takes a picture
of some fairly common scene—buildings, vegetation, etc.—then converts that
scene into a relatively striking image representative of a drawing, or an oil
painting, to use a couple of options. We can still see the original scene or
subject, and we can recognize the transformation done by the photographer. In
this case the photographer is doing exactly what a painter might do with the
same scene but using different tools. It’s the scene recognition, and the
message of the image, that survives manipulation. In the second example, a
photographer takes an image of a model in a studio then asks AI to put her in a
Flamenco dance setting. Once he takes her out of the studio, she becomes a
different cultural item, and it’s the choice of where to put her that is a
creative act, the intent to produce a different response from a viewer than
would have been produced by the studio image.
A
byproduct of AI in the arts, of course, will end up producing the exact same reaction
from consumers as so-called fake news has produced in the political realm,
namely, a suspicion that whatever is put before us is a complete fabrication
unless there is some compelling information that tells us it is not, and even
then, we are likely to be suspicious that the so-called compelling information
is itself fake, or manipulated beyond recognition.
