One of the worst (but by far not the worst) effects of genAI as technology: Seeding doubt & distrust in the last remaining parts of shared reality and in people's creativity or their skills... So much brain rot and cognitive bias!

Having just spent half a day in the darkroom yesterday, mixing chems, preparing emulsions, test strips, refining tone curves, making prints, experimenting with toners and sharing some work-in-progress shots — this morning I was waking up to an accusation that I keep publishing AI generated images (this time supposedly the one below) and not label or CW them as such. WTF! So much for trying to hone an actual wetware skill/craft...

Apart from feeling pretty offended by that comment, I wonder how are makers supposed to address these insinuations? How many people are already sharing these doubts and how do they change perception and value/role of art in general? Do we need to document our process in ever greater detail as some form of "certificate of authenticity"? I feel the urge to upload more timelapses of my processing (analog and digital) or even RAW camera files to prove AI-free workflow or source materials... Some receipts are here (but also in my TL):

https://makertube.net/c/noircountry/videos

For my color photography, my editing is purposefully very lightweight and mostly limited to adjusting levels, minor color adjustments (e.g. for shots taken with polarization filter), cropping, resizing with sharpening (unsharp masking or Lanczos kernel). Since some of my older lenses have auto-focus issues, I use an old version of Topaz for denoising/sharpening, but only rarely and as subtly as possible. For B&W there's usually more layered/refined level/contrast editing & some masking... In general my mantra is to "get it (mostly) right in camera" and also have written about this previously:

https://mastodon.thi.ng/@toxi/116635793094198883

#AI #Photography #Darkroom #PrintMaking #FineArt