Henri Kartmann sent us his experimentations with AI accompanied by this text.
Literature, photography, and artificial intelligence.
Recently, image generators have been able to produce images from “prompts,” that is, a sentence of text that an artificial intelligence interprets from its database to produce a result.
I was curious to compare these software programs with literary excerpts describing places or characters.
The results are both surprising and conventional.
On the one hand, even a slightly literary text is completely beyond their comprehension: Proust, Perec, etc. It’s all Chinese to these software programs, which interpret them in a completely incoherent way: Simone de Beauvoir’s family portrait depicts the same child eleven times!
On the other hand, the programmed desire to create “beautiful” images, regardless of the subject, often results in complete misinterpretations.
Otherwise, the results are rather consistent in their “cheap” aesthetic. I honestly tried to edit these photographs with the same care as my own.
I undertook this work as an experiment and a basis for reflecting on what we are entitled to expect from a photographic image. The answers are, of course, multiple.
If the goal is to create a background image for a laundry detergent advertisement, whether we start with images copied from the internet or invent them from scratch, it doesn’t matter. But if we’re talking about so-called creative works, controlled origin must be the rule, as with any work.
Henri Kartmann
https://www.henrikartmann.com/en
Images generated with Leonardo.Ai software
