The 11 March lecture prompted me to reflect on the presence of AI in recent photographic debates and in discussions of rights of photographers and subjects.
At the start of this academic year the Photography programme hosted a photojournalism conference titled Lines of Engagement. One of the most startling and concerning presentations was Exhibit AI presented by Jenifer Kanis, a laywer leading a social justice campaign ‘Exhibit Ai: The Refugee Account’. The project enlisted the AI engine Midjourney to generate images as ‘evidence’ based on prompts from court documents to accompany 32 recorded oral statements from refugees held on Manus Island, Nauru and Christmas Island. This generation of AI images toward the goal of social justice campaigning begs interesting questions about transparency and the feasibility of codes of ethics covering the use of well-intended AI generated content in or out of context.
Fig. 1. We are at War. Toledano, P. (2024)
The ethical dilemma seems less arresting and more profound when one pauses to reflect on the vast evidence of the truancy of lens based arts, how the subjectivity, the choice of the photographer gives the lie to the notion of the photograph or film as a positivist record of the world. Inevitably in this time of flux, trickster characters are playing with notions of fidelity and truth in their use of AI and interesting work of this nature is now to be found amongst our photobooks section – perhaps they need their own classification. Phillip Tolledano’s We are at War, is a startling example: “at Omaha beach, the photographer Robert Capa. Capa shot approximately 4 rolls of film, and sent them to London to be developed, but due to a lab mishap, only 11 images survived. Capa created an empty pocket of history – a pocket that can be filled with AI.” That Tolledano initially presented, at a conference in Paris, the resulting images as recovered Capa shots is a trickster’s coup, that it was believed is far more concerning.
Reference List:
Toledano, P. (2024). We are at War. Bologna, Italy: L’Artiere Edizioni.
Image List:
Figure. 1. Toledano, P. (2005) We are at War [AI generated image] In: Toledano, P. (2024) We are at War. Bologna, Italy: L’Artiere Edizioni.