Street Photography in the Age of AI
Having worked at marketing agencies for my last two jobs, I saw firsthand people who should know better falling for AI hype. You’d think marketers would be able to sniff out marketing bullshit from a mile away, but that would be giving them too much credit apparently.
The issues I faced in my jobs was having management who completely overestimated the capabilities of AI. They thought was something magical that was going to massively increase the productivity of their employees, sending their profits through the roof. As opposed to a tool that can increase your productivity and idea generation, and that everyone else also has access to.
What I want to talk about here, though, is more about AI’s content theft and lack of originality.
I also talk about this in the video below:
AI Companies Have Scraped the Web without Compensating Creators
The way that these AI tools work is by scraping the web. They go to every website they can find and take the data they find, and create a copy in a database, which the AI is then trained on. So text, images, and even video - all that is used to train these models.
This isn’t really like how artists take inspiration from artists who came before them. The AI tools often output paraphrased text with just a word changed here and there. It’s similar with AI-generated images. Some images come out looking extremely similar to the source the AI was trained on.
Are photographers compensated for this? Of course not. These tools are essentially stealing your photos to create a massive plagiarism machine.
Street Photography Is Real - It Actually Happened
What I like about street photography is that the photos come from real, candid moments. They were moments in time that actually happened. Compare that to AI-generated images, which are fake.
AI images are making it harder for people to discern what’s real and what’s fake. It used to be that you could trust most photographs you saw. Now, you have to take every photo with a grain of salt and be skeptical. It’s ripe for spreading misinformation.
Authenticity
The images coming out of these AI image generation tools are overly polished-looking. You can’t always put your finger on what’s wrong about them, but usually something is off.
With street photography, I appreciate how the photos are real. They’re not perfect down to every pixel like some sort of mutant advertisement.
Street photographs are gritty, raw, and sometimes dirty. You can almost smell the stink from the street. They sometimes cause me to feel a combination of fear and comfort.
Documenting people and moments in history in an authentic way is one of the reasons I do street photography.
With Street Photography, You’re Not Stealing Anything
I work for my photos. I get out and walk on the pavement in the sun and fresh air. Street photography makes me live my life out in the real world.
I put in the effort to make art. I don’t steal from others. You can’t say that about AI image generation.
AI Makes Me Appreciate Real Photography Even More
With all of the slop created by these AI image generators, I feel even more appreciation for street photography. Same goes for all the other street photographers out there - I appreciate them more for pounding the pavement and putting in the blood, sweat, and tears needed to create art out of the streets.
Long live real street photography!
