Should I treat AI as a Friend or Foe to my Photography?

In the field of photography, it sometimes feels like every product launched in the last year has had the acronym “AI” stuck into its title. Added to this, we have AI image generators like Midjourney and Dall.E2 to contend with. Artificial Intelligence is probably a marketing-inspired stretch for some of these products. However, I concede it sounds a lot cooler than Machine Learning — Kubrick and Spielberg never made a film called ML! <img alt="" src="https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:700/1*N-_w8MM9dBKp7AjUGrPNbw.png" style="height:287px; width:700px" /> My career took a winding track through Finance and IT into the rather unlikely destination of Video Production. This unconventional history gives me a pretty reasonable grounding from which to assess these new developments. The technology geek in me is fascinated by them and their potential. However, I also have an underlying emotional reaction to them that sometimes borders on resentment and distrust. I am not going to dive any deeper into what AI is or the impact it might have here. There have been a number of excellent recent articles on different aspects of AI from my co-writers on <a href="https://medium.com/live-view" rel="noopener">Live View</a> which I urge you to read. I am instead going to take a very personal view of how the impact of AI and my recent retirement have led me to reassess why I take pictures. Except for a bit of dabbling in stock photography, what pictures I take now are purely for my own purposes. I see myself again as an amateur photographer and enthusiast. The etymology of the word “Amateur” is interesting. It comes from the French for “one who loves”. Fairly soon after it appeared in common use, it developed a second connotation as something or someone sub-par. For myself, I cling to the original meaning. <a href="https://medium.com/live-view/should-i-treat-ai-as-a-friend-or-foe-to-my-photography-78c585299ba0">Click Here</a>