This is such a poorly constructed hit piece, it almost doesn't warrant an investigation.<p>... almost...<p>But! we're here, so let's dive in.<p>| Oftentimes, Avery provided the subject’s name and a cutesy anecdote about their life, such as Lucy, “a strong woman from the Bronx,”<p>sure, also a bio that is obviously made up, even if he <i>hadn't added this</i>:<p>| (Fictional story. Let us know in the comments if you like a tale in the caption.)<p><i>which the post includes, right after making that statement</i><p>... then there's this blatant gem:<p>| among the myriad hashtags that accompanied each image, not one mentioned A.I. art or generative art.<p>.. so okay, there's no hashtag, but a number of his posts have<p>| Photo? AI-generated? Both?<p>So, to believe he's trying to hoodwink you into thinking it's <i>just photography</i>, when the <i>completely obvious</i> point is to create a discussion, you'd have to be lazy, not paying attention, or trying to sell me on a piece of ragebait. Or all of the above.<p>This just in: fake generated rage posted under the guise of journalism.
I admit to having had him on my IG for several months together with other portrait photographers as an inspiration and a way to improve my own portrait skills.<p>I had no idea. And thinking about this now, I find what he's done brilliant. It shows in a very simple and concise way how far the generative AI has been for months now. And it shows (and proves) this to people who otherwise wouldn't be playing with any diffusion models otherwise.<p>In a way it blows your mind. If that's not art, I don't know what is.
> Lucy's Love
Lucy is a strong woman from the Bronx - she is unapologetically herself and she loves it.<p>> Every morning she wakes up at the crack of dawn and takes the subway to her job downtown. She works for a big law firm, and she knows the ins and outs of the courtroom like the back of her hand.<p>> But on the weekends, she's a different person. She loves to explore the streets of the Bronx with her girlfriends, and they always find something new and exciting to do.<p>> Today, they've decided to take a trip to the Bronx Zoo. Lucy loves animals and can't wait to see all the different species. She's especially excited to see the giraffes - she's heard they have the most beautiful eyes.<p>> The day passes quickly and they spend hours exploring the zoo. They laugh, they talk, and they take lots of pictures.<p>> When it's time to go, Lucy feels an overwhelming sense of happiness. She loves the Bronx, and she loves the people in it. She's proud to call it her home and she wouldn't want it any other way.<p>> Lucy takes the subway back to her apartment and smiles as she remembers the day.<p>Surely these descriptions are also AI generated?? I actually got angry reading this at how bland and "non-offensive" this story is, lol. Is there a word for that?<p>Also, which part of this made up story should Lucy hypothetically feel apologetic for (as suggested in the opening sentence)? Loving animals and the Bronx?
I was in the first cohort of the first digital imaging and technology program in Canada, almost 20 years ago. Our final year "Salon de Paris"[1] the short that won was a young child playing in a puddle in front of an anti-abortion protest, it was great, thought provoking, and really well timed... we thought. After it was announced as winning, we found out that the creator had gone out and shot the protest, and then the next week gone out and shot a toddler playing then digitally combined them. There was an outcry from my peers who thought it was deceptive, but our dean said:<p>"The most creative people simply to the best job of hiding the source of their creativity".<p>AI or not, they're good images, "deception" in art has been going on since forever.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salon_(Paris)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salon_(Paris)</a>
His descriptions of the people are so floral that it makes me wonder if the whole thing of "portrait photographer on Instagram" could itself be considered a piece of performance art
I wonder when they invented paintbrush, did all the people using fingers to draw called the brush-painters, posers.<p>Cave painters said "You can't capture the beauty of fingerpaint as you drag our fingers against a chunk of rock. The virgin rock was porous, your paint smooths it and creating impression that lasts for centuries. You leave your mark, your identity, your fingerprint with the art. That is what makes it authentic." He added, "Painting with brushes creates a barrier with the art and the human. It can never be true art. It will never capture the painters mark and your soul in it."<p>---<p>That was a poor attempt at making a joke. I think, over the years, most people just stopped caring about the origin and process of scrollable things. You just don't have the time or energy to validate everything's source or process. You take nano-dopamine hit by seeing something, and move past that. Trying to label things to be "pure" and "authenticate" and asking the merit to be determined based on this "purity" is a thing of the past.
So he's a writer. All righty then…<p>What I'm seeing is, he guided the construction of an evocative face, and then told an effective story about it, and THEN put it forth. It looks like he habitually adds 'fictional story' to the blurb.<p>The guy is a writer. If his stuff is taking off (or was), it's on the strength of his characterization, and that's perfectly legitimate. It might also be taking advantage of a hidden strength of AI: it's only us, it's only a mass-appeal take that much like ChatGPT goes for common knowledge and isn't interested in truth or novelty, and that is a way to hit an artistic mass audience with something they respond to.<p>The guy's a writer with a reasonably good artist's eye and the ability to see a resonant character, perhaps not a particularly deep one. There's gonna be lots more of this and one thing you'll eventually see is that these folks are as interchangeable as the AI works they produce.<p>If you don't like him there will be another.<p>There will also be people using the technology to carve out a more interesting spot for themselves that will NOT hit the mainstream, because they're not pandering half as much. But for every one of them there will be 99 folks with computers and a decent eye, who hit much bigger because their pandering is perfectly sincere. What they like is typical and common, and they'll go for the low hanging tropes and hit it really big by sincerely pursuing unambitious goals with some degree of skill and tenacity.<p>Worked for JK Rowling.
Two points after reading both the comments in this thread and the article itself:<p>First, it's amazing how many people on this site have no bloody notion of what the artistic, compositional and qualitative side of real photography means. Their idea of this AI-rendered, prompt-generated stuff being the same as going out and taking real portraits while collecting their human stories is so absurdly, stupidly, blandly utilitarian that it just leaves a bad taste about the general emotional vacuity of tech types.<p>Secondly, the creator of this IG feed was blatantly dishonest and then later fessed up about it. If there's anything creative about that it's in the area of creative mendacity, a thing that any common grifter or crypto-bro can pull off. It hardly demonstrates much artistic talent or nobility.<p>With that said, it's interesting how many here defend this kind of dishonesty in this context, though they'd happily throw all kinds of shit on someone being equally dishonest in another tech context, such as in crypto or NFTs. emotional bias very visible.
I will reiterate that if you had spent some time on StableDiffusion or MidJourney subreddit, lots of his images immediately look clearly AI generated.<p>Some are missing skin pores (some models are good at this now) the tiny details on the face are very very vague and blurry (see lines or pores) details blend into each other (try following some strands of hair, their origins are very vague). Eyes are usually bad with AI, this person has clearly copy pasted same eye in both eyes (exact same reflection in both).<p>There is a picture of old lady which is so bad (melted plastic face) that I don't know how anyone would take it for real. May be because I consciously look for details. To untrained eye (who don't know what SD or MJ is capable of) they may not look further.
> among the myriad hashtags that accompanied each image, not one mentioned A.I. art or generative art.<p>He's pretty haphazard with his hashtagging - changing the style and contents over time - but his very first post has the #ai #aiart hashtags (as well as #naturephotography) and it seems to pop up every now and then<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CjqQF9zuvkW/" rel="nofollow">https://www.instagram.com/p/CjqQF9zuvkW/</a><p>If I were a real photographer I might get upset that my photos were being used by the tool he used. But there's so much use of filters and staged lifestyle photos on Instagram I'm not sure he really deserves the hate he's getting
Wow, super neat. I could imagine doing something like that as a joke and have it launch unexpectedly out of control. I applaud the decision to come clean, I don't know if it was done to prove a point but it did make a statement
One could argue that generating portraits with Midjourney is actually harder than taking real photographs, since photographers spend only milliseconds taking their photos whereas prompt engineers sometimes spend hours copying text from PromptHero or Lexica and pasting it into Discord.
So, get fame based on lie and then come clean.<p>Had he mentioned that they were AI generated, he might not have got the exposure (since anyone could do it).<p>This would have been fine if it was a researcher (not a photographer) who was doing this.
Artists gaslight everyone else and say their work has soul so that they can gatekeep "art" saying it can't be replicated by a machine or a modern artist (AI Artist).<p>However it is not soul it is egoism. The artist spent thousands of hours developing a style to make it seem like they are special. To someone with real intelligence and creativity this level of toil is unbearable and there is no motivation to do it simply to satisfy their ego because a real artist has no ego, they hack around for the fun of it.<p>In reality , the end product is always just paint on a canvas that has specific patterns and style applied to it and this can be replicated and improved upon by an AI Artist. The machine simply automates away the middle man, pointless egoism and the toil.
The ultimate drug in a century will be anything authentic at all.<p>Deckard : Is this a real snake?<p>Zhora : Of course it's not real. You think I would be working in a place like this if I could afford a real snake?