From ChatGPT to MidJourney, AI has amazed and taken the world by storm with its powerful machine learning abilities. Its influence on art is unprecedented, since it challenges the concept of originality, authorship, and is considered a menace to human creativity and craftsmanship. There are more and more AI-generated ‘photos’, and some street photography accounts or publications promote them as street photography, which have caused quite a stir. There have been quite a lot of discussions on whether AI ‘street photography’ is street photography, and I’d like to share my take about it in terms of the creative process and approach, and why it is important to differentiate the two.
The polar opposite nature of street photography and AI ‘street photography’
Let’s start with what street photography is. It can be a broad concept, but it eventually boils down to a few things, the medium, the environment, the degree of control to the environment, and the purpose of the form of art. First the medium, this form of art must be created with a camera (obviously a device that can record the image with the interaction of light, whether it is in digital or analogue format), which is how all kinds of photography is created. Second, street photography is taken in the public space, that means the image making has to go outside to take the pictures, instead of at their home or studio. Third, it has relatively low control of the environment or the subject. Photographers don’t get to decide the design of the environment, or do precise arrangement for the people to be captured in photos. Finally, it aims to document the daily lives of common people in the period of time the photographer lives in .
When taking street photography, the photographer captures the coincidences and random acts of the people, objects, and the surroundings. Everything is constrained by the uncontrolled environment. One split second can make a huge difference in the lighting and composition of the photo, so photographers have to be decisive on what to capture. Moreover, there are so many things going on in the streets. The photographer is offered countless subjects for the image, and they need to choose what to capture onsite and what not to capture. It is a subtractive approach.
On the other hand, AI ‘street photography’ is created by inputting prompts to the AI app of the person’s choice. It is not constrained by the actual environment, and no cameras are needed in the whole process. There can be a lot of trials and errors, and the person keeps refining the prompts to get the image they want, so the time-constrained element in street photography is removed. The image created is not based on the actual environment, but directly on thousands of images that other photographers and artists create, and the AI app generates one based on machine learning. Since the images created are not based on the real-life environment, AI ‘street photography’ doesn’t serve the purpose of documenting daily life of a place in a certain period of time. Also, the person is offered a blank canvas instead of a busy street when creating the image, that means it’s more like thinking about what to add, it’s a kind of additive and staged approach.
The implications and the why
Based on the comparison shown above, the AI ‘street photography’ is drastically different from street photography in terms of the control of surroundings and subject, image-making process, and the purpose of the form of art. This article is by no means rejecting all things AI image-making, it is about the clear differentiation between two media. Also there is the problem of originality and authorship. I know there will be people saying nothing is new, and all artworks are inspired by one another, but being inspired and then taking photos yourself is one thing, letting AI generate an image based on your prompt and other artists’ works is another thing. Not to mention the protection of copyright of the artists’ works used in the apps. It is an ethical issue that’s begging to be solved. AI image-making can serve as an inspiration and provide an initial direction of a project and acts as a playground for imagination, but the craftsmanship needed for photography isn't here.
Some may argue that photographers nowadays are just like the painters more than a hundred years ago who were afraid of the invention of photography making the medium and form of art obsolete. But this is definitely not the case. To defend the boundaries of a form of art, here the street photography, is to preserve a way of thinking, expression, and craftsmanship, human’s desire to create art and document our daily lives. There are nuances in the thinking and process between street photography and AI ‘street photography’, in which one plays with the values of shutter and aperture to create a certain effect onsite and tries to be decisive and adaptive to the surroundings in the former, and one relies on the precision of describing an image in the latter. The process of creation determines the way of thinking. Only when we differentiate two clearly can we have a clearer view and judgement of two forms of creation. To preserve the craftsmanship is to celebrate the desire to create in human nature and the capability, that the joy and thrills it brings can’t be compared and found elsewhere. And the pursuit of realness of history and emotions in street photography needs to be treasured, especially in an age of misinformation, fake news, and confusingly ultra-realistic AI images. It offers us a glimpse of the other side of our history – the mundane, the festive, the melancholy, the humour, apart from the decisions of world leaders and the aftermath. By documenting the real life of people, and raising questions based on it, can we understand and reflect on our lives more comprehensively.
So no, AI ‘street photography’ is not street photography as it fails to satisfy the pursuit of authenticity in the latter, and the process of creation is completely different from street photography. To put two forms of art together is to sabotage the affordances of the two categories and the meaning of documenting people’s lives in a real setting.