Is a photo worth a thousand words if they are all lies? The photo by Boris Eldagsen that won the Sony World Photography Award is a beautiful, haunting photo but it’s a fake done by AI. Although it appears that AI can produce beauty can it produce original works? By its own nature it is artificial and so are its thoughts as it, like Chatgpt, scans all of the electronically recorded information and builds using existing blocks or in less polite terms it steals.
It might be possible to fake a van Gogh so long as you have all of the known examples and a big tin of yellow paint but not the soul that made it. It would be fun to create my own fake life with constructed photos of myself on the wall with numerous famous people, although dead as they couldn’t then inform on me.
Maybe it’s time for people to get a life and a real one even if it is a bit boring.
Dennis Fitzgerald,
Melbourne, Australia
