RPS Digital Imaging | Artificial Intelligence

As you can’t have failed to notice, there is a lot of attention being paid to the emerging role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the photography world. Some cameras - and many image editing programs - already use AI in post-processing, but now that entire images can be generated from text prompts or new elements added to existing photos, there is considerable discussion of “how much is too much?”.

This page is the DI group’s centre for AI resources, and will be kept up to date as the topic evolves.

The RPS itself also has an AI hub with blogs, events, resources and an official statement.

DI and AI

There are several articles in DI Online starting with the June 2023 issue.
If you weren't able to join us for the "AI Blend Mode: Hard Mix" online meeting on July 27th, you can watch a recording.
Find out about the DI's AI Experiment – an online exhibition of member’s work generated by AI – just for fun.
In November, we presented "AI to Improve not to Generate" with Celia Henderson - how to use the AI in Lightroom and Photoshop to improve your images.
Also in November, "Promptography vs Photography: How AI Will Define the Future of Image-Making" with Boris Eldagsen – who famously refused an award in the Sony Awards for his AI-generated ‘photograph’.
In November with a repeat in December, we hosted "Practical Retouching Techniques for Photographers using AI" with Glyn Dewis, who got us up-to-speed with the latest technological advances from Adobe focusing mainly on Artificial intelligence.
Joe Houghton - a presenter of many DI workshops - alerted us to an article that explains how Japanese camera makers will employ digital signatures to differentiate real photos from deepfakes: https://flip.it/rgEWfP6
(and as one of our members commented, it won't take long for the hacking community to come up with evasive techniques!)
We have ongoing conversations about where this is going on our Facebook group.

This astonishingly nuanced image is generated by the Midjourney AI, which takes text prompts and, with sufficient care and skill, can generate images like this. As with any tool, practice is necessary to achieve good results, although chance also comes into it, as the same prompt won't come up with the same image twice.

The DI Committee wishes to stress that none of that which we offer in the AI arena is in any way indicative of the decisions that the RPS will make. We are purely offering members the opportunity to understand more about AI and to make up their own minds as to whether it is acceptable to them or not.