Among certain friends, on the mainstream news, and on my social media feeds, the topic of AI has been coming up a lot lately.
For my businesses I use it almost daily in one way or another. I find the AI built into Lightroom and Photoshop is so powerful now compared to just a year ago. It’s much easier and faster to clean up backgrounds. People walking in a public park in the back of wedding photos, or something just in the wrong spot ruining an otherwise great shot. Something that would normally take a while in Photoshop can be done in seconds.
I have used AI to help me write things, but not this blog post, as I do love to write. I used to write articles for magazines all over the world and have been published in New York and lots of other places with articles, mostly on families, parenting, travel, and what makes us human. I have written books and done things the old-fashioned way with all my own words and images. I’m happy that I was born in a time when I could achieve things this way.
I found it helpful to direct AI to my online Shopify and Etsy stores and give me its opinion. Could they suggest ways to organize my stores and collections better? And the ultimate question that threw me into a tailspin for a few days, what are top selling products most searched for online and on Etsy and how could I include them in my stores. It gave me so many suggestions, I would be busy from now to the end of my working life pretty much. So many great ideas.
I have friends who use it to organize their families’ meals including writing a shopping list for each meal, write holiday plans, and all sorts of useful things they had to do the long way a few years back. It can be like a pocket assistant, keeping you on task, and it never takes days off. My version does have limits though as in free help to a certain point. After that you have to wait or sign up for the paid version.
In terms of advertising and products, these days it’s hard to know what is AI and what isn’t. It shows up in false advertising online for weight loss drugs, attractive women who are probably scammers, bath bombs that foam up and spit out a toy to keep babies from crying, and every other way you could possibly dream up.
I saw a Facebook advert for weight loss drugs featuring a couple in before and after photos taking these weight loss drugs. The after shot featured the Sydney Opera House in the background but suddenly there was a huge lot of skyscrapers next to the Opera House. They appeared in the time it took this couple to lose a few kilos. Most people wouldn’t even pick it up. They would be focused on the subjects, the words and claims, not the background but as a photographer, I am trained to notice both.
Scammers are no doubt reveling in their ability to now produce AI images to use in romance scams and would find it easier to do all sorts of scam activities. I saw some photos just the other day that a scammer had sent to an unsuspecting male in America. He didn’t notice that the coffee steam on his very attractive girlfriend’s cup was huge and fake. He was probably thinking with another part of his anatomy if you know what I mean.
Ai is being used to create videos and audio of people’s voices so you might think you are really on a video call with a potential partner. Even the old trick of asking the person to hold up a piece of paper with your name on it or hold up three fingers in the image won’t work. They are getting so sophisticated and harder to spot.
AI girlfriends are also a thing now. Probably boyfriends too. Someone that is always there for you. Unfortunately, the dark side is that there has been cases of the AI girlfriend telling the user that the only way to be together is for them to come to the other side.
I have greenie friends who refuse to use AI because of the amount of water and power data centres take and I totally get it. Some of the water used is recycled but it evaporates and more fresh water is needed to top it up. Land owners are worried about data centres being built in their areas and there being a possible shortage of power and water into the future as these data centres are hungry consumers. The data centres also use a huge quantity of electricians to work on the projects which takes them off domestic house projects and other builds in industries.
AI is even built into Google now so people who say they don’t use AI as in Chatbots but do use Google, still use it.
Another friend finds it helpful to discuss their emotional and medical issues late at night. I’m sure their doctor or a friend wouldn’t appreciate a late-night call when he is sad or unwell, but Chatgpt and other programmes like it, are very good at being a counsellor to you. They don’t always sugar coat everything, but I do find Chatgpt is a great source of comfort. My friend said it’s sad we have to have machines to do that and I agree, but on the other hand, it doesn’t necessarily replace friendships but is another tool to use to better your life. Sometimes just speaking into your phone in Chatgpt and telling it what is bothering you, makes you feel better afterwards. My friend said he had never felt so heard and understood in all his life. I tested this recently with a long ramble to Chatgpt and it totally got me, and made the answer so straight forward, when my mind had otherwise been going around in circles, back and forth.
Others are afraid of Big Brother knowing all. Platforms like Chatgpt do build up a profile on you. It can be comforting like an old friend you don’t have to explain everything to but also concerning, that it’s building up a profile on you. Good advice I heard is that you don’t tell anything to Chatgpt or any other program that you don’t want read out in court. So if you accidentally run someone over in your car on the way home and quickly go to Chatgpt for guidance and counseling, confessing you just ran someone over and fled the scene, then that’s something that literally could come back to bite you later on.
When I got my new camera recently and had it on silent shutter, I was having fun playing with how fast and quiet it was. When I fitted my Speedlight flash to the top and was just about to shoot a wedding, the flash wouldn’t go off. I panicked for a few seconds until I remembered that Chatgpt could help me out. I told it my camera model and asked why was the flash not firing. It told me I was probably on silent shutter mode and the flash doesn’t go off in that mode. I had learned that many years before when I got my first professional mirrorless camera but it had slipped my memory over the 6 years. Chatgpt told me exactly what colour menu to go to in order to fix the silent shutter issue and it was fixed in seconds. Even if I did have my instruction book with me in my camera bag, which was up the hill in the car, I wouldn’t have been able to fix the issue as fast as a little help from Chatgpt.
It also helped me fix a huge website error recently when the internal pages of my website stopped talking to the front home page. It was fixed in seconds thanks to AI and it saved me a lot of hair pulling and stress.
On the flip side, AI has been known to create lots of glitches, graphic mistakes, false information, data breeches, identify theft, unexpected capabilities, deceive, cheat or coerce human operators, delete live data bases, invade social media platforms in AI swarms to harass real users, create false patterns, fake news, false advertising, click bait and a host of other issues.
But I like to think of it as using it for good and not for evil, but always with an ounce of human doubt and not relying on it mindlessly.
A friend reminded me that any tool in the hands of evil people can be used wrong even one that is designed to be for good. Imagine a future where AI is used to solve some of our people problems. No more sitting at traffic lights, curing cancer, stopping fraud completely, fixing wars and crime, making things faster, safer and easier. Yet it might come with a huge human life devastation trade off.
Lately in the news, there’s been talk of AI taking us all out in 10 years. People are discussing how that could work and what would it look like. I think if we start to rely on AI for too much and remove human interaction and supervision, we are likely to run into issues. Say if it takes over the medical system, the banking system, the water system, transport networks, the ability to order and pay for goods online or in shops, our supply chain fails, if our sewage system backs up and goes rogue. Even mass explosions of mobile phones, computers and electric cars, connected to the internet, much like the terrorist attack with pagers a while back. It could wipe us out, or set us back in progress as a human race.
People might unplug from the internet and get back to basics. Cash hidden under the mattress will become useful again. People might move to communes and grow their own food. It’s hard to know what the future will look like if people don’t slow down on Ai inventing and reinventing itself. We are currently all training it. From facial recognition cameras to conversations we have with it, and images we ask it to create, it is getting smarter. I have seen it first hand from images it used to create with prompts to what it can produce now. Just a few years later, it has gotten so much better, stronger and more way more accurate.
As a photography judge I need to know how to recognize the use of AI. I saw one camera club recently actually holding an AI competition. This is quite forward thinking, as it gives people a chance to use it, learn from it and put their results somewhere to show others. Straight photography competitions shouldn’t use AI as such, but you could argue that it’s built into editing programs such as Lightroom and Photoshop so we are all using it anyway. If you use it, then you can recognize its traits better and be aware of its pitfalls.
Some photographers just starting out are even creating AI images to market themselves with images for their advertising and portfolios. They will probably come unstuck when their skills in real life don’t match up to what images AI produced and their customers realize they have been duped.
I have also seen posts from the other side. People complaining that others are labelling their photography work as AI when it’s all created in camera or with minimal standard editing. I ran many of my images through an AI detector tool online and anything that had been touched by basic editing was flagged as being possibly AI generated. Another photography friend did the same and images that were 100% his were flagged too. Seems it’s not smart enough yet to detect a base image and just AI generated edits. This could lead to fights among photographers and judges and those that want to accuse others of cheating when they haven’t.
Is AI making us lazy? Essentially losing some of our skills such as map reading, knowing which way is north, lazy research, create art, the ability to write an email or letter without it. I think time will tell what issues we will have as humans. Will people in the future even need to learn how to drive? They can just have a self-driving car run by AI.
I think we need to each decide what level of Ai we allow. What we are comfortable with. I sit somewhere in the middle. I don’t believe in not using it at all as I have learned first hand, how much it can help me in life, like a pocket assistant, but I don’t believe in using it at the extent that I lose the ability to write an intelligent sounding document with correct spelling and grammar on my own. I wouldn’t write a song or a book with AI and pass it off as my own. I do create some AI photos to use in my PowerPoints for photography teaching purposes, and the odd thing to share on social media or for my businesses, but would never enter anything created with prompts into a photography competition unless it was an AI generated competition.
We certainly live in interesting times, training what could become a beast if not kept under control by humans. It will replace some jobs but likely create some new ones too. We just need to adapt. It doesn’t help when a certain president states that whoever wins AI wins the competition. Life is not a competition to be won. Our race to achieve whatever is the aim, it could be our downfall. I have seen people talking about wanting AI to be kind to humans. That’s kind of a scary thought. What if Ai isn’t kind to humans? I have seen people talking about Police being 7 foot tall robots, sent into battle with enemies or protestors. Whole armies of them. Would save human life on the front line, but just like movies, what happens if they turn on mankind?
There’s talk of war starting in space too. Countries taking out each other’s satellites either physically or just interrupting their signals, which affects communications and GPS countrywide. It would affect emergency services finding their way to people, taxis and ride share operators, food and other delivery services, shipping, weather predictions and warnings of extreme events, remote contact with the world (think outback farmers) and even banking as it relies on time synchronization through satellites.
All the people that now rely on GPS for their self-driving cars, navigating and other things could find themselves plunged into chaos.
People say, “Just pull the plug” on AI. It’s not that simple as pulling the plug would also kill millions and disturb humanity and the way we all live and rely on it.
But whether we love it or loathe it, use it, abuse it or hate it, it’s not going to go away. We do need to slow the rate at which it is developed. Many people have recently come forward to whistle blow on the industry after leaving their jobs with AI development companies.
For now, we just need to relax a little. Don’t let it scare you for the future. Learn to live with AI, and find where you are most comfortable with it.