AI & PHOTOGRAPHY

As far back as Walter Benjamin’s “work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction” (1935), photography has always been challenged by mechanical means of image processing. Photographers and Institutions have first resisted and then (mostly) embraced each of these changes. This class explores Artificial Intelligence Photography as the latest in a series of earthquakes in the history of the photographic image, accompanying the desires of business, globalization, and science. This class seeks an ethically guided, globally representative model for photography and artificial intelligence. Debates around authorship and creativity (e.g., Supreme Court case with Andy Warhol) now face a radically new context of an “authorless” photograph. As crowdsourced imagemaking begins, the bias of massive datasets have taken techno-utopians by surprise, underlining that the task of building an equitable image-bank of the world cannot be left to algorithms and entrepreneurs. This class will explore the ethics and aesthetics of Artificial Intelligence and Imagery. There will be equal emphasis on reading and writing papers, as there will be on learning new software and tools.