Little did I realise when I shot some imagery last year to publicise a new AI course for Te Herenga Waka- Victoria University of Wellington, that AI would so rapidly shift out of the shadows and into the wider public imagination.

The recent giant leaps forward by the likes of Midjourney and Photoshop have put AI into the ‘ignore at your own peril’ category for those in the creative sector also.

On the plus side of the ledger most of my work is what you could loosely describe as photographing ‘specific people in specific environments’, but like the shift from analog to digital, it would be naive to think this new tech won’t affect me.

My current (and rather unspectacular) plan is to stay conversant with the technology and to ‘keep calm and carry on’. I thought as an exercise I could revisit a few of the images from this university shoot, as well as Destination Mars, and see what Photoshop can offer now.

Our first location was at Niwa’s High Performance Computing Facility– aptly named as the supercomputers housed there can process an impressive two thousand trillion calculations per second.

Above is one of the original images I shot- if we wanted to change the dark area on the right side let’s see what Photoshops Generative Fill can do if we select that area and type the text prompt ‘Super Computer’.

Here are four results and you can see the top left image looks particularly good. A significant change like this could be ok for a different client, but in the context of being at a crown research institute and shooting for a university it most likely makes it unusable.

No doubt I’ll be having discussions with clients as to what is and isn’t acceptable in terms of fabricating completely new elements and other changes like this for their images. As the technology speeds ahead I can imagine businesses and government organisations having to play catch up to determine and formalise their own specific official guidelines and policies around AI.

This next image I photographed was back in the city, let’s see what Photoshop can do with the rear wall if for instance we wanted to change that.

Using the lasso tool to quickly select the background and then typing in a prompt of ‘building interior with large windows and blue sky’. Thirty seconds later a few iterations are offered of mixed quality but this particular one is a good result for such quick work. Again, in this particular instance another case of going too far- but it does give you an idea of what the technology can do and there would be plenty of situations where this would be really useful.

And pushing it to the extreme – how about trying to add a female student in the group as well?

About 20 iterations later there were plenty of rejects before the option below came up. The face and the hand isn’t perfect, but overall it suggests that we aren’t too many Photoshop upgrades away from getting consistently good results.

As well as creating AI generating software, Adobe is also involved (along with a wide cross section of companies like The New York Times, Nikon, Reuters, BBC and Microsoft among others) with creating software that enables you to check the authenticity of images on the internet at the Content Authenticity Initiative.

Whether initiatives like this, or law at a Government level, will be able to stem the growing tide of fake imagery generated by AI and used for for manipulative and dodgy purposes will be interesting to see.

Serious ethical questions aside, it is actually really fun playing around and experimenting with generative fill on the right project. Here are a couple of results below for a studio shoot I did for Destination Mars after typing in various prompts like ‘martian landscape’ and ‘space station interior’ .

These are by no means finished images but it gives you an idea of what can be achieved when you have your models well lit to begin with.

So, just another creative and highly useful tool to to be applied when the context is right- or a portent of the end of times?

I cross my fingers and hope for the former as I think the need to take to specific photos of specific people in specific places will ensure our survival for at least a while yet.