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Generative landscape art – a (horror) vision of the future of photography?

P

Paul Spinnler

Well-known member
www.chaipeau.com

Generative AI x Monochrome Fine Art Photography

Experience the beauty of generative fine art photography with »chaipeau« who combines technology and imagination to push the boundaries of traditional photography methods.
www.chaipeau.com

Look at this. Started beginning of this year, sits at home generating unreal landscapes in monochrome with an AI engine, sells it in his webshop. 80k followers within a few months. More than many landscape photographers working their craft for decades.

Could this mean a further pressure point for 45k digital backs, the genre of landscape photography, workshops, etc.? Why travel to Iceland and do the Xth iteration of the icelandic volcano if you can just generate, generate, generate. Insane, a bit, IMHO.

Kind of scary how the concept of landscape photography is turned upside down here – I guess for a lot of people this is good enough to print and frame at home.

One can literally create 100 images per day like this and a chock full webshop within two weeks.

Crazy times. Subversive.

Yet, I feel I have seen all these images a hundred times on instagram already.

Marc Koegel, the P1 ambassador shooting an IQ4, has 27k followers and shoots since 2004 ...

www.instagram.com

Marc Koegel (@marc_koegel) • Instagram photos and videos

28K Followers, 856 Following, 628 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Marc Koegel (@marc_koegel)
www.instagram.com www.instagram.com

His stuff is great, but looks outright boring compared to this generative guy. But does this "unrealness" matter to the broader world? Would you hang something generative like that in your room? I am leaning towards why not ...
 
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JeffK

JeffK

Well-known member
I know Marc. He lived in Vancouver for awhile. Really good photographer and creative. I think if he got into creative landscapes with GenAI he’d take it to the next level!
 
P

Paul Spinnler

Well-known member
JeffK said:
I know Marc. He lived in Vancouver for awhile. Really good photographer and creative. I think if he got into creative landscapes with GenAI he’d take it to the next level!
Click to expand...
Yes, you are right, maybe this is the answer – AI vs. AI powered by good photographer
 
rdeloe

rdeloe

Well-known member
Tim Parkin wrote a relevant bit about this in On Landscape #269. This is quoted from his article:

With AI art becoming more and more accessible to the general public through tools such as Midjourney and DALL-E, people are starting to wonder what this means for ‘natural’ photography. Will people still value the effort taken to produce images from reality and that are still photographically ‘honest’? It’s an interesting question... if you’re going to buy a photograph or artwork to hang on your wall, does it matter to you that it represents a real place or moment in time or that the artist played more than a directorial role in its creation?

For some people it probably won’t. Art may just be something that looks aesthetically pleasing and perhaps creates a talking point. For others though, art is a channel to the artist, it’s also sometimes evocative of a place and time. I think what we’ll see is more differentiation and more discussion of what a photograph means and how it was created. Perhaps people will eventually want to know that their artwork was made by humans and represents somewhere in the real world? We’ll probably end up with just one more type of visual art added to the mix, just as photography was added to painting and sketching. But just as people buying photorealistic paintings want to know that they’re not just photos, I’m sure people buying photos will want to know that they’re not just AI.

When I read that, my thought was "I don’t think he’s nearly as concerned as he should be." To accompany the article, he posted a nice picture of Bidean nam Bian from Sron Garbh, Highlands in Scotland. I can't post the picture, but if you have a subscription, check it out. If you don't, imagine a lovely mountain range in the distance, snow covered meadows, clouds looming over the mountains, illuminated from behind by sunlight. The problem with this example is it looks exactly like what generative AI would produce!

Bottom-line: if you're making images that already exist in vast quantities because it's a popular subject, generative AI has your number.
 
P

Paul Spinnler

Well-known member
Exactly, agree. Basically "workshop landscape photography" will be completely owned and devalued by AI. All that Iceland stuff one has seen so many times.

Last weekend I went into the "Lumas" store here in Zurich – it is a "gallery" that sells "cheap" photography nicely printed, ie anyone can sell their art through their print and gallery network. When entering the room there was a big discussion between the person managing the store and some guests relating to some AI art that they had put up. Literally, it was about "is this still photography", etc. ie a full-blown discussion about the philosophical merit of these pictures hanging there. I think 1k a pop for medium size (AI generated).

Other genres will be less touched, I suppose: portraiture, documentary, etc. But landscape ... the endgame vs. AI is already here.

If I find time I'll try also some "prompts" to create some fancy monochrome nebulous mountainscapes.
 
rdeloe

rdeloe

Well-known member
Paul Spinnler said:
Exactly, agree. Basically "workshop landscape photography" will be completely owned and devalued by AI. All that Iceland stuff one has seen so many times.
...
Other genres will be less touched, I suppose: portraiture, documentary, etc. But landscape ... the endgame vs. AI is already here.
Click to expand...
Unfortunately, that's the conclusion I came too as well.

Here's a test (if you can stomach it): use keywords in Flickr that describe the kind of photography you love to make, ideally at great expense. What comes up? Here's an example to get you started: mountains clouds lake reflection This is where we're at before generative AI has fully colonized Flickr.

I think we're already at the point where the general viewing (buying) public has been trained on a particular aesthetic for landscape photography. Rodolfo Canet Castelló puts it better than I can: "If your local landscape don’t look like Rivendell or the Pass of Caradhras nobody will look at your dull pictures." Generative AI can do Rivendell... [These are places in Lord of the Rings if you're not up on that stuff.]

So where does that leave the human photographer? There's no easy or canned answer for this. If art involves humans talking to humans, then I think the only port in this storm involves finding something authentic to say that isn't already part of the training dataset for generative AI systems. Maybe less "Iceland" and more "that little bog near my house". ;)
 
P

Paul Spinnler

Well-known member
rdeloe said:
Unfortunately, that's the conclusion I came too as well.

Here's a test (if you can stomach it): use keywords in Flickr that describe the kind of photography you love to make, ideally at great expense. What comes up? Here's an example to get you started: mountains clouds lake reflection This is where we're at before generative AI has fully colonized Flickr.

I think we're already at the point where the general viewing (buying) public has been trained on a particular aesthetic for landscape photography. Rodolfo Canet Castelló puts it better than I can: "If your local landscape don’t look like Rivendell or the Pass of Caradhras nobody will look at your dull pictures." Generative AI can do Rivendell... [These are places in Lord of the Rings if you're not up on that stuff.]

So where does that leave the human photographer? There's no easy or canned answer for this. If art involves humans talking to humans, then I think the only port in this storm involves finding something authentic to say that isn't already part of the training dataset for generative AI systems. Maybe less "Iceland" and more "that little bog near my house". ;)
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My answer to this has and will be that I only photograph for myself. I would never dare to go down the road of getting into any financial dependency relating to photogrpahy. This doesnt mean that I wouldn't try maybe at one point to go a more public or commerial road even, but I always felt the happiness and joy I have from photography is best left completely free of any need to please anyone or to make money from it.

I only started to post a bit because of a taunt by the mod, lol, but IMHO photography is most enjoyable if you do it for your own enjoyment.

This said, I wouldn't want to be a commercial landscape photographer in this day and age. Also this guy doing the wild animals with celebrities - that's for sure an easy target for AI. Forgot his name. He does wolves with models in bars, etc.
 
rdeloe

rdeloe

Well-known member
Paul Spinnler said:
My answer to this has and will be that I only photograph for myself. I would never dare to go down the road of getting into any financial dependency relating to photogrpahy. This doesnt mean that I wouldn't try maybe at one point to go a more public or commerial road even, but I always felt the happiness and joy I have from photography is best left completely free of any need to please anyone or to make money from it.

I only started to post a bit because of a taunt by the mod, lol, but IMHO photography is most enjoyable if you do it for your own enjoyment.
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There's the key to happiness right there.
 
P

Paul Spinnler

Well-known member
JeffK said:
Or fight back

https://venturebeat.com/ai/meet-nig...ZWD-6Lx9gZBonBaaZrcDDfAwH_cXGojbF_ldvjy8G9vSg
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But this doesn't work for the "workshop" photo stuff. The Scotland, Iceland, Tuscany places have been photographed so many times the AI bots can find a gazillion variants already on Flickr, etc. and then recombine them many times.

Here's my Dall-E 3 version of a Tuscany landscape. No XT32, IQ4, workshop, plane or train ticket needed. Just 30 seconds on another browser tab.

Drop it in Gigapixel AI and add some fancy noise on it.

1698715112474.jpeg

"MacBook Pro, web browser, 30 sec exposure." Thank you very much all landscape photographers before me.
 
P

Paul Spinnler

Well-known member
The guy I linked up above first – I think he sells his pics for 29 bucks a piece. He was featured on IG by the algo a lot, so if he sells 1000 of these gen AI pics across his gazillion variants he made a princely sum on the previous work of all the photographers. But no copyright of course on workshop landscape pics.
 
JeffK

JeffK

Well-known member
Realistically this is no different than clip art that you could buy and and add as Paste up to create a composition decades ago. It’s a new tool.
 
JeffK

JeffK

Well-known member
Paul Spinnler said:
The guy I linked up above first – I think he sells his pics for 29 bucks a piece. He was featured on IG by the algo a lot, so if he sells 1000 of these gen AI pics across his gazillion variants he made a princely sum on the previous work of all the photographers. But no copyright of course on workshop landscape pics.
Click to expand...
I really doubt he sold more than a few if any.
 
MGrayson

MGrayson

Subscriber and Workshop Member
Paul Spinnler said:
But this doesn't work for the "workshop" photo stuff. The Scotland, Iceland, Tuscany places have been photographed so many times the AI bots can find a gazillion variants already on Flickr, etc. and then recombine them many times.

Here's my Dall-E 3 version of a Tuscany landscape. No XT32, IQ4, workshop, plane or train ticket needed. Just 30 seconds on another browser tab.

Drop it in Gigapixel AI and add some fancy noise on it.

View attachment 207642

"MacBook Pro, web browser, 30 sec exposure." Thank you very much all landscape photographers before me.
Click to expand...
Needs more dragons.... ;)
 
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