Page 15 - Cape-Camera-October-2023

Cape Camera October 2023

Exploring AI Images

Karin Retief is a former chief photographer at the Cape Times in Cape Town,

where her job was to shoot sport and photojournalism images. She now lives
in Namibia, where she discovered the pleasure of having the freedom to create
fantasy-style images using AI. She shares some of the strangely beautiful AI
images she created and explain her views on the role of AI in photography.

Images created by AI are not photography. Well, that is images may sometimes contain strange or physically
my opinion. As a photographer, though, the knowledge impossible elements, especially when it comes to unu-
you’ve acquired, including your understanding of light, sual-looking fingers! But in the last three months, you
composition, focal length, and depth of field, as well rarely see these abnormalities anymore.
as your grasp of how the software works, will all play a Advertising billboards using AI-generated images have
significant role in how successfully you create comput- become common, as it’s much cheaper and quicker,
er-generated imagery. sometimes at the cost of quality.
Or maybe the word successfully cannot even be used in Just to complicate the debate even more, can we actual-
this sentence, as it’s just about impossible NOT to create ly say that images made from smart-phones are photo-
something stunning with AI! graphs, given that phones also use AI image generation?
AI art looks so real, you will not be able to make the dis- My feeling is that AI-generated images represent an evo-
tinction between real and fake unless you check the me- lution and an exciting expansion of the field of image
ta-data of the image (or lack thereof). Also, AI-generated creation. Different audiences appreciate either tradition-

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