Unknown Subjects
I am writing this on Friday, March 17, 2023, roughly a year since I first used the beta of Midjourney. Since early last year, generative AI technology has been evolving at a blistering pace. Just yesterday V5 of Midjourney was released as an alpha for users to experiment with. I’ve just completed my first paid generative AI gig, and photographers are scrambling to discern how these tools will affect the medium of photography both as an art form and in understanding how these tools change the value of camera created images for both personal and professional purposes.
In July of 2022 I wrote that we were standing on the precipice of something new, and I now feel we are falling headfirst into that chasm with little understanding as to what we are falling towards. But feeling that it is a genie we can’t put back, I am exploring it in ways that are compelling to me. In this light, I’ve been creating a series of portraits of random figures from my imagination, and to see if Midjourney knows what Jennifer Lawrence looks like too.
My series should be titled Mostly Unknown Subjects, since Jennifer looks pretty accurate to me. In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve also run these through some specific Photoshop and Lightroom editing to make them more to my taste. Are they portraits? Do these musings from an unconscious AI exist somewhere in real life? Do the countless images that the AI was trained on appear below in any small way? Do any of these questions matter?
What happens when we can just speak images into existence with nothing more than our voice? Will cameras be obsolete or will visual artists who choose to use physical cameras to make images become like the wet plate practitioners of today, or of the ‘Old Guard’ fine art painters who still put paint to canvas?
