This sort of conversation is hilarious.

We have a few extraordinarily capable individuals on the site who produce superlative images. That said, most of the photography we see here is done by people using very expensive equipment to produce decidedly mediocre images which are photoshopped to make them less awful.

Why is image editing software so worshipped and AI so demonized? Just different levels of the same thing.

A photograph surely is a slice of time, preserved as an image, then modified to either make it "better" or simply fictitious. This editing either compensates for the camera operators incompetence / inability or changes the image into something unreal.

Sky replacements, anyone?

How many of you can see your photo club heading toward a spit?

More and more people who know nothing about photography, and don’t want to know about it because they have an AI Phone that does everything for them, are joining clubs.

I see a not too distant future where clubs are going to specify that people can do as much editing as they want, but they have to show that they actually took the photo, and used the tools to take the photo(a camera not an AI Phone), and the editing tool brushes and app, not Mid-Journey, or completely with their iPhone.

People will get together to show the photos that their AI’s made for them.

I saw a recent show by a person who may know nothing about photography or editing. She/he/it took everything with his/her/their iPhone 13 and then printed the photos and called them their own. Realistically they were not their photos, they were images that the AI phone made when they pointed it in a certain direction.

This is troubling to a geezer like me. But it's endemic of a lot of areas where creativity is being given up because it's too much work. And it's too much work because AI’s have taken over and are doing things for them.

One is a tool that you control. The other is a tool that you have no control over. Its not creativity if you have a robot following you around, and you point out a scene to the robot and say, “Take that”, and then sell them as your work. It’s the AI’s work. It not your work. You did not decide on the aperture, the shutter speed, and the ISO combination. You did not decide how you wanted it printed.

This is a major reason I am very pessimistic about humans staying around much longer. They don’t understand how their ability to do all aspects of a process is what makes them creative about it. It's not creative if you walk around and point to things and say, “that looks nice”.

When I was a wedding photographer, I could take 140 photos, with film on a 220 medium format roll, having to change the film every 30 photos. I needed to know enough about the process to take 140 great photos. With digital tools now, wedding photographers take three thousand photos, and hope they got 140 good ones.

My bottom line is that if you have a tool you use it. I have problem with some tools which I can’t use because I have no control over the outcome.

But I just had the same argument with my family. They believed that they were photographers because they pointed their robot at a scene and it took a great shot. Are you a doctor if you have symptoms that don’t have a drug for them or surgery for it, and then the “doctor” can’t help you solve the problem because they have nothing to make the symptoms go away with. Photographers are people who know enough about the subject to modify things when its not the way they wanted.

So we will have groups of people who call themselves photographers, because they get together to share the photos that their robot took for them.

Pretty soon there will be robot painters. You go to a scene with a robot and it paints it for you. People who do that will consider themselves painters.

Your definition of a photographer seems rather narrow and dated. By your definition, all Top of the line cameras are potentially AI cameras, depending how used. By your definition instamatic camera that have been around for decades and used by millions, are AI cameras. By that definition, camera phones are sophisticated instamatic cameras.

My definition of AI work is anything that is totally computer generated by instruction only. For example, if you tell the computer that you want a picture of a pink elephant and it generates one. It needs to be labeled as AI.

Fighting change tends to be a no win situation whether we like it or not. If your a traditionalist, then change is a curse.

How many of you can see your photo club heading toward a spit?

More and more people who know nothing about photography, and don’t want to know about it because they have an AI Phone that does everything for them, are joining clubs.

I see a not too distant future where clubs are going to specify that people can do as much editing as they want, but they have to show that they actually took the photo, and used the tools to take the photo(a camera not an AI Phone), and the editing tool brushes and app, not Mid-Journey, or completely with their iPhone.

People will get together to show the photos that their AI’s made for them.

I saw a recent show by a person who may know nothing about photography or editing. She/he/it took everything with his/her/their iPhone 13 and then printed the photos and called them their own. Realistically they were not their photos, they were images that the AI phone made when they pointed it in a certain direction.

This is troubling to a geezer like me. But it's endemic of a lot of areas where creativity is being given up because it's too much work. And it's too much work because AI’s have taken over and are doing things for them.

The Baltimore Camera Club had a presentation a while back entitled "The Art of iPhone Photography," by Karen Klinedinst. It was a zoom meeting, and I signed in, fully expecting to check out shortly after the presentation began, as I was about as dismissive of iPhone photography as you seem to be. Then I saw the lady's pictures, which blew me away. Yes, they were captured with an iPhone - and pretty beautifully composed, if you ask me - and then processed with any number of apps. I don't know how many of us could match that lady's images. Check them out for yourself at https://karenklinedinst.com/