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Reader Comment: AI Midjourney Imitates My Photographic Style (+ Reader Comments)

re: Michael Erlewine

The topic of Michael Erlewine’s essay below is the Midjourney image-creation AI. There are similar AIs for video, audio (think audiobooks in your own voice or anyone’s, done in minutes), ChatGPT and its ilk, and every other conceivable area and many of them in every area, not just one. A new confusopoly has lready emerged when choosing an AI to get something done.

AI Midjourney Imitates My Photographic Style

By Michael Erlewine. Michael’s blog page is at https://www.facebook.com/MichaelErlewine. Emphasis added.

Hold onto your hats, because here is an innovation in AI technology that took me by surprise.

As a system programmer by trade, learning some of the new AI programming languages is easy, since they are just a prompting language to the AI software.

Flower 7, by AI via Michael Erlewine

I have been working with Midjourney AI since it first dropped last summer (2022) and liking it. I have never spent any time complaining about what we as photographers will lose, but instead what I wanted was to learn how to use this new interface for my purposes as an illustrator. After all I have been writing blogs to around 11,000 people each day, and doing this for over 15 years.

And while those I know around me who are interesting in exploring Midjourney and creating ‘Art’, I never blinked an eye in that direction, and immediately set about illustrating my blogs, and canceled my subscriptions to various stock image sites within hours of starting Midjourney.

I have not licensed one single image from photo stock companies since then. All that I wrote above is what other folks like me are doing all over the world. Yet hold on. Here comes what I did not expect to come down the pike, and, as mentioned, it took me by surprise. I didn’t see it coming.

Midjourney just added a new command called “/Describe” which allows me to input my own art, and in this article, I will used my own stacked photographs of flowers, which some of you reading this are perhaps familiar with, my style of close-up flower images.

And all I can say is “Whoa!”

In a matter of seconds, Midjourney accepted an image, one of my stacked flower images, and output to me four numbered steps in breaking down my style, each step containing a paragraph or two describing how my style works.

And then, to top it off, it Midjourney shows me four examples of the “Michael Erlewine” photo style, and I was stunned. These photos look like my stuff, yet are not copies!

Now, I just did this minutes ago, and I can only imagine what will happen if I tweak these photo-descriptions, which I probably will. Many of my family and friends will not be able to tell the difference between my own photos and these AI productions, using my style.

I just wanted to share this information at once with the group here, so that we can get some feedback here perhaps have some meaningful discussions.

These are not produced with any of my cameras, but only by Midjourney AI software. My sense is the AI is moving ahead not just exponentially, but at warp speed. Your thoughts?

...This is before I even tweak the style one iota, and ask for greater resolution, which I may not bother to do.

The idea is one of recursion, applied to our own work, which I would be will lead to innovations and reflection by us on our own style. And these are just photos. I am also going to look at the illustration, logos, and other graphics I do and see what I can learn.

DIGLLOYD: uh oh.

For me, the photography has always been about wanting to experience the outdoors, and no AI can replace that.

The thought that comes to mind is the mind illusions of The Menagerie, the key point of which is illusions indistinguishable from reality. Are we going to substitute the hard effort of the physical world for an agent that does things for us? And is that OK once age and infirmity leave little else to us?

I’ll stick to reality... for now... until and unless I become disabled and unable to experience reality in the outdoors. Then, who knows?

I 'get' the part about using AI to hone one’s one work. It’s a legitimate argument, perhaps analogous to having other photographers critique your work. But I’m not sure if it frees the mind or entrains it.

Does this lead to personal disaster?

Many things in life can be valuable if used appropriately, or disasters if used badly. It seems unlikely that AI will be any different. It might just get outlawed in most realms of life, as it could destroy all prior human systems, not the least of which are the shared lies we all live by.

Nothing that is easy is worth doing”... (as any challenge in life)—yes, absolutely. If AI makes it trivial, is there any value in it? Or is there something sophisticated that has to occur even with AI thus making it “hard” and thus worthy of pursuit. But how could anyone possibly remain objective if the results are more satisfactory than the hard efforts in the physical world?

Flower 6, by AI via Michael Erlewine
Flower 4, by AI via Michael Erlewine
Flower 3, by AI via Michael Erlewine

Jason W writes:

The situation is Baudrillardian. It's hard to decide where Michael's images fit into the order. I think you'd have to ask people how they felt. To me, it would seem to be the third stage, the order of "sorcery", where something pretends to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no original.

For what it is worth, ChatGPT agrees with me that the 1st iteration of flower images generated from real photos would fit into Baudrillard's third order.

However, if you fed the generated images back into MidJourney again to create a 2nd iteration based on pure AI sources this would go to the 4th order and be pure simulacrum, the thing based on the thing that was never.

People freak out about this, but arguably, 4th order stuff has been around. The example Baudrillard gives is Disneyland, which is a false world based on a false notion of idealized America. As the real world becomes increasingly shitty, people find virtual reality more palatable.

DIGLLOYD: I had to look that one up (Baudrillardian). What if we are all copies, with no original, in everything we already do? I don’t think so, but some people do.

Claude F writes:

Hard for me to see what AI means for photography. Another paradigm shift perhaps. My gut feeling is not a good one.

DIGLLOYD: from cave art to sculpture to painting to photography, human expression in visual art has always been physical in some way. I do not understand the implications, except that I am a physical being and the older I get, the more I value simple everyday things like real physical sensations I have in life—visual, auditory, along with direct human interaction—and the more I dislike technology and the artificial. Does that make me a misfit in the age of AI? Is it better to have one’s brain hijacked by a more pleasing fake? There is something disturbing and sanity-undermining about substituting a fake thing for a real thing and not being able to tell the difference.

AI is not photography or even computational photography, but computer-generated imagery that mimics it, and which might ultimately destroy photography as we know it, undermining our tenuous hold on reality by hijacking our key sensory organ, our eyes/brain. The eye/brain is already subject to manipulation by numerous optical illusions, and now (or soon) it will have no means to detect or deal with with the non-real, the fake that was never real. It is a hijacking of perceptual mechanisms in which a non-real world can only be perceived as real. Virtual reality goggles rely on that principle.

I want real stuff. But in a generation or two, maybe fake will be what everyone wants and is taught to want. Sex with robots instead of humans, and visual enticements everywhere more appealing than reality—is that the future?

The psychological implications of never knowing what is real and non-real might appeal to philosophical Kantians (everything is rendered relative and thus meaningless). I find the implications horrifying: the destruction of credibility for visual evidence anywhere for anything. Only the immediate personal testimony in being there right now can be trusted—everything else becomes a potential fake/illusion/fraud.

Maybe I am an aging misfit unable to see that it’s all going to turn out just fine, just one more step of human experience no different than past developments. But AI doesn’t seem that way to me, because when we go from physical to real-time hijacking of the human perceptual mechanisms, that is something we’ve never remotely approached before. See The Menagerie.


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