13th November: “What is Photography in the age of AI?: An exploration” by Mariam Mathew and ‘Photoshop and Generative AI’ by Avril Candler
Very many thanks to Mariam and Avril for a an excellent evening venturing into the world of AI and its application in competitive photography.
Mariam highlighted a number of burgeoning generative AI platforms showing a number of ‘text to image’ applications including Adobe Firefly. The latter is an integral part of Adobe Photoshop which Avril demonstrated in the second half of the evening. Mariam showed us how her young students (9-12 years) are developing their text to image skills. Mariam put us through a quiz to spot the AI generated images vs the originals. We weren’t that bad at it either! Try for yourself – just click the links below.
Avril’s presentation looked at the ‘legitimate’ use of Generative AI in competitive photography such as ‘Generative Fill’ to remove unwanted artefacts and ‘Generative Expand’ to enhance the composition (we’ve all heard that dreaded phrase ‘x is too tight in the frame’!). Following those examples she highlighted the unacceptable AI use (within the competitive photographic world) of ‘text to image’ – great for illustrative purposes such as birthday/anniversary/Christmas cards………..and even Halloween cards with witches on rooftops…….you had to be there to see it!
The evening was rounded off with a general discussion and Mark Buckley-Sharp explained the PAGB stance on the use of AI.
A very topical, fascinating and excellent evening with grateful thanks to Mariam and Avril for their informative, interesting and thoroughly enjoyable presentations.
Next week we are back on Zoom for a talk by Harry Kingman ‘Antarctica’.