AI: Tools vs Vision. What will us creatives do as AI gets better?

A quick and dirty photo I didn’t take. Generated with a prompt from an idea that appeared in my head box.

This won’t take long

I’m a photographer normally. I was full time either taking photos or teaching people how to take photos for the last twenty years or so. I stopped because of SARS CoV2 running around. About this time I started playing with Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT, reading about the technology, watching vids on the YouTwitFaceGram. I’ve been thinking about the future for us creatives and I’m not too worried.

Some context first.

Taking photos has three parts to it:

1. The gear you’ve got.
2. The skills to drive the gear. What I call camera operator skills.
3. The vision to know what image you’re trying to produce.

The gear is just money. Better gear is coming all the time. The thing about the better gear though is that it is incorporating some of the second point, being skills to use it.

When I started I didn’t have a light meter in my camera. Next camera, I did. Then I moved to digital (2001) which meant I didn’t have to change rolls of film to change my camera’s sensitivity to light (the ISO setting).

I still needed to focus my camera, and set the shutter speed and aperture and select the right focal length. Get some reflectors etc…