Photos by ChatGPT

When Gabriel Rifilato, director of this magazine, asked me to edit a column with my reflections on photography, I thought that talking about Salgado, Doisneau, Cartier-Bresson would be boring as well as useless. These are images that we have seen and commented on many times and that use expressive forms already explored in depth. On traditional photography, in fact, that photograph that we see in newspapers (which almost no longer exist), or that affixed on the walls of the exhibition halls (even these quite out of time), there is little to say again. And even more recent phenomena such as “selfie” and “social photography” have now been explored in all technical and emotional aspects. What instead convinced me to write, and that I find very intriguing, is what is happening today with images generated by Artificial Intelligence: a real revolution, whose evolutions are still to be discovered, for better or for worse as we will see.  Let’s get into the topic by asking ChatGPT, the most famous AI platform capable of generating texts, to write this first article for you, explaining to people who are experts in photography, but who know little or nothing about artificial intelligence, the relationship of the latter with the images. Here is the result.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a field of computer science that deals with developing algorithms and computational models that mimic human cognitive abilities such as reasoning, learning, perception, and creativity. The goal of AI is to create systems that can solve complex problems autonomously, without human intervention. Among the many applications, photography: helping photographers improve the quality of their images, saving time in the post-production process. With AI you can create software that can recognize objects and people in an image and correct any defects such as “noise”, under and overexposure. Improve sharpness, saturation, shade of the image, remove unwanted objects. But AI can also be used to create new images: completely synthetic that look real. Actually created by an algorithm from a text request.  For example, we might ask: I want a photo of an astronaut riding in a photorealistic style. Artificial intelligence will then take these instructions and use data and codes to decipher how an astronaut should be riding a horse, and create the photo. AI is becoming increasingly important in the world of photography as it allows you to get high-quality images quickly, opening up new creative possibilities. Despite its potential, AI will never replace human creativity and sensitivity in the creative process of photography.
Maybe… but, as we’ll see in the next few issues, a little fear, come to think of it, comes.