It will be non-technical, but we need enough technical detail to ensure you don’t stumble into the misconceptions that are hobbling many discussions.
We’re at the dawn of photography’s Second Digital Revolution. It’s exciting, it’s scary, but the future is here. How it develops depends on how we handle it!
Background
We start with a little ramp on: from integrated circuits in cameras to the grunt work that led to ‘intelligent metering’.
After that, only 20-odd years ago, came the first digital revolution that you know all about it. Now, today’s use of machine intelligence in picture-making is so ingrained, many don’t even realise much of our photography depends on high-level computing.
Now, the photography boat is in the rough seas of a Second Revolution. It's the rise of deep learning and amazingly rapid spread of generative models giving us synthograms of a variety and quality that – only last year – were considered impossible.
Twenty-five years ago, I was one of the first to adopt digital photography in professional practice. Who wrote some the first books to popularise digital photography? Me; guilty as charged.
For the more than a year now, I’ve been on Artist Support and a tester for OpenAI on DALL-E, I’m represented in curated NFTs marketplaces and write on AI in photography and other topics in my Substack: tomang.substack.com (click on link: you can subscribe for free with your email address).
