14/08/2026
engagement bait thrown into the ether:
what is being called "(Generative) AI" now, are merely large-language models (LLM's) that pattern match an input to the most statistically probably outputs. thus, the hallucinations, and the very tell-tale signs of anything generated with them, whether text, images, video, or software.
as a very mid, or probably poor, photographer, i consider it a tool that can help me make changes to photos i take, without the need for several years of learning and practice with photo editing tools and workflows.
the reason "we don't do edits, we don't do crops" is my tagline, is because i have no time, nor the patience to learn to how to use proper tools such as lightroom/darkroom and photoshop.
but with software engineering as my day job, i use "ai" to help speed my processes, and remove the tediousness of the job (or art, or science depending on how you look at software). does using claude/copilot change the work that software engineers do? which is make software. is it ethical/moral/good?
and applying it to photography, which is not just taking a picture, but also finding a way to show others what the photographer sees through the lens and the emotion and responses that he seeks to evoke from the viewer, does using "AI" somehow reduce the art? reduce the skill? remove the soul? remove the emotion?
is using AI tools to do photo editing for images the photographer takes himself moral/ethical/good?
is running/using AI tools via the cloud/internet (like copilot/gemini/grok) any different from running ai models on a machine you personally own and control different (running ComfyUI, ollama, Odysseus AI on a machine you own)
