AI, a revolution in image production that raises questions

The more human a robot seems, the more monstrous it appears to us: this is what the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori called “the uncanny valley phenomenon” in an essay published in 1970. A concept more relevant than ever in the context of surge of generative AIwhich shakes up society as a whole and more particularly our relationship to images and reality. Everything accelerated in 2022, when the programs multiplied, becoming easier to use and accessible to everyone. As new versions of Dall-E or others Midjourneythe images have become more perfect.

A few quick words [l’équivalent d’un brief] and now they appear, more and more “true”, to the point that we now speak of “photorealism” or“hyperrealism”. Hence an expected debate: can we still consider these images as photography – the word literally meaning “to write with light”? The adage that photography is being there in the right place at the right time may no longer be true…

The era of suspicion

Because this is one of the most disturbing aspects of this revolution in progress: the production which results from generative artificial intelligence is not the only result of a human experience but the result of calculations resulting from the synthesis and interpretation of billions of images accumulated on the Internet – ours, those we exchanged on social networks, but also those of professionals and artists. Remember the pope in a down jacket or the found portrait of Arthur Rimbaud – of the deepfakes quickly stale. But it is a safe bet that sooner or later our common sense and our attention will no longer be enough to detect the small details betraying the use of AI (and disentangle fact from fiction), so rapid is progress.

Allowing considerable savings in time and money, the practice of AI means the erasure of certain professions including the photographers themselves who no longer have their place in this new model.

The proof with the German Boris Eldagsen who fooled the Sony World Photography Award jury and won first prize with an image produced by artificial intelligence, explaining afterwards (while refusing his prize) that he “wanted to do a test to see if the world of photography was ready to manage the intrusion of AI into international competitions”. So here we are in the era of suspicion.