There was a biggish story on the BBC news yesterday about parents using AI tools to remove watermarks and upscale the low-res sample photos that school photographers send out. It featured on a 'phone in' that would normally have passed me by, and it was an interesting listen.
Broadly, contributors fell into 2 camps: the outraged ("This is stealing!") and the nonchalant ("Problee shouldn't do it but whatcha gonna do?")
Being an occasional photographer myself, I've got some sympathy for the first camp. The images produced by the school photographer are produced by years of training and experience after considerable investment in equipment. It is soul-destroying to see that taken for granted and cast aside.
But AI tools are just another step along the technological road, bring new threats and opportunities with them. Photographers are facing a new refinement of a much older challenge. Watermarks etc will get more sophisticated, and I have no doubt that the tools to defeat them will keep pace. We might think it is a shame that photographers are being denied their living. (I do) But they are not the first profession to have their industry turned upside-down by technological change, and they won't be the last. Who sheds a tear now for the type-setters, shorthand-typists, and switchboard operators who were so essential to the industrial world only a short few years ago?
Perhaps the real question isn't whether AI will make it easier to steal a school photograph. It plainly will. The more interesting question is what happens when technology makes something that once required considerable skill and effort seem almost worthless.
We have become very good at recognising the value of things when they're scarce, difficult or expensive. We're rather less good at recognising the value of the people who produce them when technology makes their work easy to reproduce.
I don't think that's a problem AI has created. But it may be about to make it considerably worse.
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richard <AT> deckzero <DOT> uk