Hey stranger!
These last few days AI-Generated Art has been trending everywhere! From all of our social media feeds to Google searches, it’s undeniable that “AI” has been the most sought-after topic this week. After the now famous app “Lensa” went viral with the easy-to-use user interface to create AI-Generated profile pictures, the one thought that came knocking on my door was: Will AI technology replace my work as a Professional Portrait Photographer?
Portrait Photography generated by Artificial Software using one of my Portrait Photographs.
If you haven’t caught up with this topic yet, you should definitely spend a few minutes googling the term: AI-Generated Art, and then learn a bit about what the Lensa App is doing. In simple terms, when you download the Lensa app you get asked to feed the system a few selfie photos of yourself and then… like magic, the app will deliver you a ton of portraits in a significant amount of different art styles. And this by itself, for someone who’ve never experienced AI before, is a work of magic.
But, like so many artists, this raised many questions and ethics discussions in the art world and human development. These ranged from stolen artist’s data being fed to train the AI models to the end of human artists and creators as a profitable business itself. So, this left me thinking: Will I be out of Portrait Photography work in the future?!
What do we do when we have these questions? Well… we ask an AI! I made a simple question: Will AI replace portrait photographers in the future? And its answer is something you don’t want to miss:
“It is unlikely that artificial intelligence will completely replace portrait photographers in the foreseeable future. While AI technology is advancing rapidly and has the ability to automate many tasks, it still lacks the creativity, intuition, and emotional intelligence that are essential to creating great portraits. Portrait photography requires an understanding of the subject and the ability to connect with them and capture their unique essence and personality. These are skills that AI technology is not yet capable of replicating. While AI may be able to assist with some aspects of portrait photography, it is unlikely to replace human photographers completely.” - Open A.I
Black & White Portrait for Influencer & Actress Larissa Dones. Photographed by Yeya Monroig.
I’m not going to lie; I felt a huge relief when I received this response from the AI. It confirmed what I’ve always thought about human art creation and photography in itself, art is much more than a technical aspect, art is the combination of human experiences and emotions transferred into a medium, in our case portrait photography.
While it is difficult to predict exactly what the future holds for portrait photography, we can confidently say that human emotions and perspectives will never be able to be replicated by Artificial Intelligence, for the simple fact that AI, for now, cannot live a human experience in this existence. We are safe guys!
Thanks to this exercise I kept thinking about how we can collaborate with AI through our portrait photography and find ways to keep ourselves competitive even when technology keeps advancing and artists begin to feel the threat of automation getting closer and closer.
Thank you for taking the time to read this blog! I look forward to sharing more and go deeper into these concepts.
Stay tuned for the next blog post!
Xx, Yeya