WHY I DON’T USE AI FOR CULLING OR BATCH EDITING

AI has hit the world harder than any other technological advancement in modern history. With billions of dollars and a tonne of finite natural resources being poured into invasive data centres, driven by nothing but the unreachable goal of infinite productivity.

I see myself as anti AI for the most part. I believe that this technology in the right hands and fields has numerous benefits to humanity under far closer supervision and regulation regarding its development in areas such as search engine accuracy and medical research, however as with all new technologies the greed of capitalism and the never-ending desire that certain groups have for more without stopping to think why or at what cost, its implementation has sharply turned for the worse for both our environment and the creative arts industry globally.

None of this is probably new to you, nor is any of it directly relevant to the reasons you have likely visited my website. This being said, a number of artists and specifically photographers have turned to using AI assisted culling software or AI editing of RAW image files “using their editing style” from several example images that the photographer can supply, and I want to touch on my personal opinions on this topic and be open regarding what workflows I use day to day in my photography with both existing and future clients.

Anyone that shares my sentiment regarding AI can see the many flaws associated with the handover of creative control, and personally I believe that AI assisted culling tools and editing software takes a lot of the art out of photography altogether.

For transparency, I use local computer processed AI removal and denoise tools within Adobe Lightroom to reduce grain in really low light conditions or to remove some background distractions or objects in post if it wasn’t possible to do so during the shoot, some may think I am a hypocrite for what I have said above then regarding AI and I wouldn’t entirely blame them. However, running these basic utility tools locally on my own computer uses far less power than sending tasks back and forth to cloud data centres.

My ethics regarding AI for editing break down into two distinct categories, the amount of artistic and creative control that specific tools hand over to the software and importantly, the environmental impacts of running labour intensive tasks through data centres. From my understanding, many of these AI culling and editing tools are run locally on the photographer's computer, however that only ticks one of the boxes. The amount of creative control that is handed over by supplying some reference images of how you usually edit and allowing the software to cull from raw images and edit accordingly not only takes away drastically from the creative process but also (at least in my case) would stunt growth and creative development within the artform, keeping you locked into a specific style in the name of convenience and not allowing for experimentation within your work.

I am not writing this to get up on a high horse and say that photographers who use these tools are any better or worse than I am, I just want to lay out what I have observed within the industry in recent months and my reasons for not using them.

To summarise, I have made the conscious decision to not use AI culling or automatic editing tools in favour of retaining complete creative control over my work, while still using some features such as AI denoise and remove functions for small tweaks when fixing the shot in person wasn’t possible.