2024 01 09

Composited image of house on street in Chicago. December, 2023. © Clayton Hauck

Enter: Artificial Intelligence

Surely, I’m going to talk about AI quite a lot here in the weeks ahead. It’s a subject that takes up a lot of my brain space yet still don’t quite know what to think of it all. One real world result has already been an attempt to diversify my income away from strictly photogrpahy, as I do feel relatively pessimistic my job will still be around in a few years time.

Imagineers!

I moved to rebrand “photographers” to “imagineers,” largely because I wanted to be an Imagineer when I was a kid. Seriously, though, humanities’ relationship to The Image has been evolving drastically over the last few decades and there’s no telling where it will be in two decades more. My hunch, is that we’re fucked.

So how does AI relate to this image?

I like this photo! It does lack a little bit of detail, some humanity perhaps, to really make it sparkle, but it’s nice. Part of why I like it is a bit behind-the-scenes.

Firstly, the image was made with a ~20mp digitial RicohGR3x, however, it is stitched together from 4-5 captures (pano-style), thus giving it resolution and perspective that isn’t typical (and kind of looks a bit more like a wider lensed-medium format camera, partly because of the square crop).

Secondly, I used the Adobe “generative fill” aka AI to extend the top and bottom portions of the frame, as there was no information there. While this is a boring example of what’s possible with AI, the texture on the street doesn’t exist in real life and was a choice made mostly by the computers based on thousands or millions of other images and then partially by me, in choosing one of three I most liked.

Soon, 100% of images will be fully generated by AI and humanity will live in peace.

Enjoy!

-Clayton