Battling the malaise induced by recognition of the oncoming Robot Apocalypse. Or how I learned to be happy while generative A.I. disrupted white collar jobs.

 A quote from Greg IP's article about the ramifications of generative A.I.,  in the Wall Street Journal:

"To paraphrase the old saying about recessions and depressions, technological disruption is when your neighbor is automated out of a job; the robot apocalypse is when you are automated out of a job. Professionals, including people who write columns for a living, now know the fear of obsolescence that has stalked blue-collar workers for generations."

Just hanging out with a Leica CL waiting for the Terminators

"Help me Sarah Connors!"

Photographers are at an interesting spot in their collective history. We're either headed out the door of commerce or we're working at figuring out how to stay relevant in a quickly changing world. The disruptor this time is generative A.I. Software that can create written material such as blogs, reports, proposals, books, articles and reviews (I wonder when the first A.I. critic will disparage the first fully autonomous A.I. novelist). Powerful software that can aggregate immense amounts of data, digest it, and then present it with a high degree of accuracy and clarity will almost certain cut huge swaths through the ranks of our current white collar, college educated workforce. The ripple effects will be enormous.

But it's equally effective at creating photographic images from scratch. Or from suggestions. Or from source materials such as snapshots or drawings.

What I hear from people outside the tech industry and outside the photo industry is that this sort of rising autonomous ability on the part of machines is creating overblown news stories and that the sort of capabilities required to replace trained, human professionals is years and years, or decades away. But when I look at tech resources and even at the cutting edge of my own industry I can see that this will be like the "Kodak Delusion." 

The Kodak Delusion was the belief, supposedly supported by rich data, that the world's biggest imaging company would be able to rely on film sales for decades past the nascent introduction of digital cameras. Dozens of Kodak PhD, economists, on the payroll, assured the board of directors that progress would be slow and linear in the digital field and that the slow and steady progress Kodak was making toward sliding into the digital market was right on the pace. Right on the numbers. And then everything went to hell as the acceptance and demand for digital products skyrocketed and accelerated logarithmically and left Kodak in the dusty museum of once great companies, sidelined within a small handful of years. Film, for the most part, just vanished. So did labs. So did processing chemicals in nice yellow envelopes. So did support for hundreds and hundreds of college and vocational photo education programs. So did their valuable professional support programs.

I wrote earlier about how quickly I thought the new tech would disrupt the market for business portraits; headshots. I've now, at last count, had about 45 people email me links to a number of ads offering the following service: You take a group of selfies with your phone. You choose a style and a background you like. You upload these files to the service which puts your images into a source file which software deconstructs using standard face recognition techniques (space between eyes, height and structure of cheekbones, nose structure, mount structure, etc.) to build a "new you" from all the parts. The new you is enhanced, cleaned up, rid of scars, acne and rough skin. Stripped of your previous double chin. And output as a series of new "candidates" for you to choose from. All for about $29. Turnkey.

The slower thinkers among us reflexively say that there isn't enough "resolution" on the phone selfies to make great images and so current professional headshot creators needn't worry. They totally miss the point that the supplied photos only supply the framework or the overall facial grid coordinates for the final digital portrait construction and that the appearance (and reality) of detail, texture and overall resolution and sharpness are made when the program "skins" the "frame". The resolution of the source material is immaterial to the final quality of the images; as long as the source images (selfies) provide broad information (hair color, facial metrics, complexion tones). To put it simply, the A.I. programs are looking at your supplied selfies the way a painter might look at a model or source material when doing realistic painting. They get the broad strokes from the small photos and then paint large. As large as you might want. And with as much fabricated but apparently real detail as you might want. 

I have a few friends who understand this new technology very well and say to me that the sky is the limit, that we are at early days in the "takeover" and that this will free up mankind for more leisure. Neglecting to acknowledge that most of the off-boarded knowledge and creative content workers will need to find new sources of income to replace their existing salaries. I guess the counter argument is to not worry about it if you are a stockholder of a company that benefits from endless, free content creation by machines because the embrace of the robots will reduce operating costs and raise equity value... An argument that brings little solace to those made redundant....

So, the sky is falling. The robots are kicking down the doors. bullets bounce right off their titanium alloy armor. Why don't I care?

Hmmm. I guess it's because I am confident that most bright people who are temporarily displaced will find a new way to make money and thrive. I'm also of the belief that a certain percentage of the population doesn't read the news, doesn't understand the coming changes and the ramifications, and that they will continue on doing things the way they have been until forced to change. 

I did some work for a large, regional advertising agency last week. We made portraits. They have a burgeoning I.T. department filled with very bright young people. To a person they found the new tech "interesting." But, importantly, they weren't rushing to adopt it in their own work. The portraits I was shooting were for use on their website. If a progressive (in terms of development; not in the political sense), tech forward, young company isn't rushing to use these new resources then there is some breathing room for current photographers. At least for now (but see the Kodak Delusion above...). 

Last weekend I needed to get out of the office and away from the computer. I walked downtown through familiar territory. Everywhere the trees, lawns and gardens were green and growing. The weather was textbook perfection. And all over the touristy spots of downtown Austin the landscape was busting with portrait photographers taking graduation portraits, engagement portraits, model portfolio portraits, family portraits and even portraits just for fun. All of the customers, if they had deeper knowledge, would be perfect candidates for much cheaper, retouched A.I. images --- if they were aware of the existence and value proposition. But they seemed happy to work with photographers who were working exactly the same way they did last year and even a decade before. The majority of photographers I saw were Gen Z and Millennial females, almost all wielding the almost cliché Canon DSLR and one of two zoom lenses, The venerable 24-70mm f2.8 or the 70-200mm f2.8. Some used flash but most were just winging it in the shade of the tall buildings. Gotta like open shade. It's the best. 

Here's my take. I think there are a lot of guys like me who really get into the technical stuff. We're on top of the latest gear and the latest techniques. We can imagine, clearly, the consequences of this sort of evolution.  But it takes a lot longer for people who aren't welded into the industry in the same way to "discover" the value of new technology. 

I remember years after I bought my first two wildly expensive Kodak digital cameras running into a friend/peer/competitor at one of the local processing labs (we still needed prints back then for clients) and he was asking me if I thought digital would ever supplant film-based commercial imaging. This was in 2004. He thought not. He thought his Hasselblad film cameras would be adequate for at least a decade more. And then, BAM! He was thrust by his own clients into the fast learning curve of digital at the time and a year later sold his last film camera to retool. It took the lab a long, long time to convince him that sRGB files were, indeed, what he needed to output his files as for printing. He tried to get good results giving the lab ProRGB files (incorrectly rationalizing that the wider gamut would provide better quality) for a long time before he understood. But eventually he came around, shoved along by the momentum of commerce. 

We're at the same kind of inflection point right now. We might be able to adjust in a number of ways. We can learn the new software and try to add our own value to it. We might pivot to a different specialty that values primary, human interpretation. We can delay the invasion of automation for a few years more by turning to video production instead (but the writing is already on the wall there too...). Or we can find the clients who don't want to change, don't know about the new tech, or just don't care how we do the job as long as it gets done. 

As an older generation (our demographic here trends "over 40") we have two real choices. We can learn as much as possible about new innovations, new trends and new tools like A.I. and incorporate them into our creative existence/workflow or we can hide our heads in the sand, deny that anything has changed, soldier on with an ever decreasing market share for our traditional wares until we are left barren of customers/audiences and distraught. 

There is a third option. We can just exit the market. If you don't need the income you can choose not to choose. But if you do need continuing income from creative content then you'd better get busy learning new ways. 

Sad to think that my old laptop and ChatGBT might just be the next Vladimir Nobokov. Or Richard Avedon. Now where did I store that cache of EMP weapons? Currently baiting the robot traps with lithium batteries....

Time elapsed concepting, researching, writing and editing: 1 hour 30 minutes. I owe it all to my typing teacher at high school... 

"Happiness is a learnable skill."  -Jewel