Claire Anscomb: "Understanding and Appreciating the Interplay of Photography and AI in Image-making Practices"

Claire Anscomb, De Montfort University: "Understanding and Appreciating the Interplay of Photography and AI in Image-making Practices"

Abstract
There are an increasing number of image-making practices, including “neurography” and “promptography”, that connect forms of generative AI and photography. Disagreement abounds in relation to the classification, ethics, and integrity of these practices, and scepticism is routinely expressed towards their prospects as art. To interrogate these issues, first I draw upon a typology for categorizing new and developing arts to establish that some individual “promptographs” or “neurographs” may take influence from photography or hybridize this with what I refer to as “synthetic imaging”. These distinctions are important, I demonstrate, because they indicate the different kinds of responsibility the image-maker bears in relation to the creation of the work, particularly pertaining to the use of data to train AI image-generators. Addressing worries about the use of copyrighted materials as training data, I look to appropriation art to argue that the concern underpinning much of the scepticism is whether the creator has acted for artistic reasons. I draw upon the earlier categorizations to disentangle what it means to act for “artistic reasons” in these practices and propose that a lack of trust, compounded by social media platforms, in image-makers to act with a commitment to these threatens aesthetic discourse about these practices.