Will AI take over photography?

 Will it?

Well, silly question, sure it will, in some areas, other areas will still have value as shot and produced by a human.

Where does AI in relation to photography and videography stand today?

Well, a year ago, we had this: 

And now, with SORA, we have this:

Kudos for showing the weird fails as well in this video.

And, what about this?

Sure, you might say, I have that on my phone today. Well, you do, phones already use AI for real-time AI processing and replacement of faces, however, this is quite a few steps up from that.

- Those are some examples of one year of incredible progress in the field, there are also AI's for voice mimicking, needing only a few lines of spoken words, to be able to mimic the voice of the original, perhaps we will soon see a new album from Elvis or Queen, or see beloved actors and comedians that have passed away?

I am sure that within 5 years and even 10 years, the power of AI in photography and videography will be the norm in relation to commercial photography, like fashion, commercials, stock photography and videography and movies and just about all aspects where photo and video and the commercial market meet.

Well, then photography is over with then?

Not quite.

There is still the photojournalism area and works created with new models, unless the future is that all new models get their own commercially created LORA, or similar, that they can ship to model-agencies. ^^

There is also that other factor that gets in the way, the human factor as well as the limited availability factor, this has always driven price and demand and also trends.

We can see it today, where analog works (film-based), and the related silver-print, already tend to cost much more (usually 10x) than a inkjet print of an analog scan or a digital camera, at least for the more established and well-known photographers here.

AI-"art" and AI produced works are just that, AI, digital, unlimited copies.In addition to that, there is no human touch behind this, other than prompt engineering and possibly post production. Sleek, stylish, and unexpectedly beautiful, "perfect" or even imperfect, and may even seem to be creatively made, but, in the end, the value.....knowing it was generated, well it drops fast towards pennies and pocket lint.

AI, at the current moment, does not consist of a sentient creative entity, it is training-sets and calculations, noise and denoising, the AI has no particular opinion or knowledge or creative force behind the creation.

I believe that artworks created by humans will possibly be more sought after, as we are saturated by AI this and AI that in the coming years, and possibly, especially manual and analog processes that produce a limited number of works in the end, like a silver-print or other types of manual print media.

With that said, I do love the power of AI in my digital photography a lot, things like generative AI and AI-powered selections, as well as AI powered noise reduction and AI powered upscaling, really speeds up the processes in Photoshop with several hours worth of painstaking editing, now done in mere seconds.

Right now, the open source AI models, and SDXL and Flux, with specialized LORA's, can already create commercial grade results (albeit with quite a lot of work behind the scenes at the moment and you need serious hardware, which I certainly don't have). 

But, it is still a bit left until they are tools that can crank out and replace things like stock photography completely autonomous.

Commercial AI photo and video solutions tend to be better out of the box, perhaps, but they have their own limitations, and they also come with a bunch of licensing issues and the money will be in licensing and rental software/cloud services, rather than in the works themselves, possibly.

Also, AI models, currently, needs training-data, which is usually scraped off the public side of the internet, and companies like Microsoft, Google and Facebook all want your photos, to train their own AI models. 

Should it be free? Option to opt out? Should the users, who's photographs were scraped and rehashed to create an AI model, be compensated, or was that consent given within some 500 pages long user agreement?

What if someone create an AI generated photo or video, with an uncanny likeness to you, because those 300 instagram-shots you took on vacation was scraped and used for training? (not very likely, but then again, it may happen at some point, not really you, but uncanny likeness).

I suppose we have to cross our fingers that film will still be produced in 2030 and beyond, I still shoot it and enjoy it, despite the price increase.
 

And in any case, we can still enjoy the art of photography on our own, regardless of what state the AI world is in, and regardless of the medium we choose, AI/Analog, Digital/AI, Hybrid + AI + reverse negative print and analog darkroom contact print.

The options will still be endless, at least if you don't try to make a living making stock photography, that area will most likely be the first tree to fall in the forest, and it will most likely not make much sound when it does either.