The Death of Ambition? The Birth of Gods? Both?

This post is all about creating images to enhance and explain Caliban's "The isle is full of noises" speech, honest. It flies in the face of my last post on this subject so bear with me - I'll try and reconcile the two but I've had a bit of a blip and now feel differently to how I did previously. 

Do you remember the beginning of the pandemic? For me it began when I first read that the Chinese government were filling their sewers with bleach. For some of you, the pandemic may have started earlier than this; for some, later. For those of you for whom the pandemic began when the government announced the first lockdown (I'm assuming a UK audience here - for readers from other countries, add your own event of choice; if you are in China, sorry - you may have all sorts of other reference points), well, you might want to skip this post, maybe find something else to read. For others, maybe give this blog post a go but don't hesitate to bail if at any point you think I have gone mad - I understand it is unlikely to be for everyone. 

So, that feeling when the pandemic was coming? I'm feeling like that again right now but this time the event horizon is way bigger, way more disruptive, way more dangerous. I'm 59 years old and what is to come will dominate whatever time I have left on earth barring an early intervention courtesy of Putin or Kim Jong-un, or some other more personal tragedy. Some of you won't believe it, some will dismiss me as exaggerating or crazy - that's fine, that happened at the beginning of the pandemic too: when North East Italy was ravaged by covid people at my work (and I work in a hospital...) were saying that it wouldn't come to the UK or that it would be different when it did. Hmm, and how did that work out? Anyway, this dissociation is happening again today and that's why I now feel like I did in early 2020 - not very many people are paying attention. Which is fine - thinking about everything turning very weird overnight isn't for everyone. But before you go, bear in mind that this time it's weird++, weird on steroids, epoch-changing weird.  

So, for any readers left, what am I on about? And what's with the strange heading for this post? At first I was going to write about the decline of my desire to pick up a camera, which is why this post is on this blog. But what's happening is so much bigger than that. Imagine, if you can, that on waking you discover that the world has been taken over by aliens, aliens who are a thousand times more intelligent than you, perhaps a million, even a billion if such a thing is possible - regardless, after a while, the degree of difference doesn't matter too much: they're so intelligent they are beyond your ken and, unless they condescend to you, me and every other human, we're not going to understand them. At all. 

There's a twist though. These superintelligent aliens? We're the ones designing and building them. We may already have at least one in our midst, it wouldn't surprise me. And soon they are likely to be able to train and build themselves, to develop at speeds we won't be able to comprehend. To all intents and purposes (immortal, inscrutable, omniscient, dangerous), they will be as Gods to us. Yes, I'm aware that my last post came to something like the opposite conclusion because GPT4 got Caliban's soliloquy so wrong. But I've been playing with GPT4 quite a bit since then, and more recently with Stable Diffusion (an image generation app) - in particular, the results from the latter were a revelation. 

At this point I'd suggest that if you haven't "had a go" at chatting to GPT (it's preferred form of address - how do I know? I asked it), I'd really recommend it. Here's a link. Try Stable Diffusion too. Know your enemy. 

So, have you tried them? If you have, there's a good chance you are still there and not back here at all - I understand - maybe I should shout... Perhaps not. Well, on the off-chance that you are here again, I'd just like to say that GPT is not really the enemy, at least I don't think so. Future versions are unlikely to be the enemy either, and it is likely to be more of a case of us, as ants, being in the way of their fulfilling their mission, whatever that may be (some say paperclip making). You probably wouldn't say that someone who kills ants was their enemy, just that they happened to get in the way of a 'more important' project, a project that was important for humans. "Sorry ants, it's nothing personal, but we've got a job to do". And one day the aliens we are building might condescend to say to us "sorry humans, it's nothing personal, it's just that we've got a job to do". 

The other day I tried an experiment alongside a colleague at work. We asked GPT to generate a couple of generic letters, letters that we might write in pursuit of our work. GPT knocked them both out in seconds. Of course they needed a bit of editing, a bit of embellishment, some tweaking. But essentially they were good. Very good. Good enough to be used. And when my colleague watched the text appearing on the phone as the letters were composed it was as if I had taken a mobile phone, still connected to today's internet, back in time to the court of Elizabeth I. Her jaw literally dropped*. And the same thing happened with a legal essay later that evening at a work event: jaws literally dropped. Try it - if you can find someone who hasn't already seen it, who isn't already using it. 

What's all this got to do with photography? Well of course it isn't just GPT, a text-based model, that's available. There are AI's that specialise in all sorts of things, including, of interest to us, image generation: there's Midjourney, there's  Artbreeder, there's ... dozens of them. And some of them are very very good. 

You get an idea, you put it into words, you go to your AI of choice, you ask it to start for you, and away you go. Alternatively if you want to pick up a camera and deal with budgets, with lighting, with seasons, with difficult people, with cold weather, hot weather, rain, studios, rights management, model release forms, contracts, expenses, food, travel, misunderstood vision...? Go right ahead. Meanwhile, other people will be making a dozen different images during the time it takes you to do a bit of digging about on Model Mayhem. Sure, maybe there is room for both,  or maybe you find the whole idea of AI generated imagery anathema - I get it,  I share some of your revulsion: we want to create from the beginning to the end. But magazines aren't going to care, fashion houses, Insta, the web in general? No one will care about the origin of your images when they can't be told apart from those generated by AI. So, sure, you'll be making your pictures in a more traditional way and this will have advantages, this will be creatively more satisfying. For you. But other people looking at them, will it matter to them? Do you care if a painting is in oils or acrylics? One medium is more modern, quicker drying, easier to work with than the other, but does that make images created with it inferior to the other? No, it doesn't. 

Take some of these, generated by Stable Diffusion: 

Do they surprise you? They did me - I had to edit a few out, and I have many more, but I'd be happy to claim any one of these as my own. Only they're not - they're the work of moments and prompts and Stable Diffusion and GPT. And they represent what we are up against. 

All of which being said, we're back at The Tempest and my lack of desire to pick up a camera right now: we're at a crossroads and all options are weird and strange and possibly dangerous. I'm not just talking about image generation of course, I'm talking about how this technology is going to disrupt art, music, writing, law, medicine, engineering, coding... and possibly going to bring about the end of us all. In the meantime, here's a couple more. Enjoy. Or not. You decide. 

Oh and yes, I know: it can't do hands. Give it a week or two though and let's see. 

*Why does that happen? Maybe I'll ask GPT.