Be a Human.

We live in a world where AI is integrated into the tools that we all use. To some people, this is problematic, while others see the trend as nothing but good. Wherever you sit on the discussion, one thing is clear: we are all human beings and we all have a choice.

In photography, we have an idea that the camera doesn't lie and, while that notion has repeatedly been debunked, there is something in that concept that we hang onto.

Modern digital cameras are no more than computers purporting to be a camera. Computers run software and therefore the ability to integrate AI into a digital camera isn't beyond the realms of reality. In some cases, that is exactly what happens.

AI tools are already able to "fix" photographs in camera without being asked to. They can overcome a lack of skill and the physical shortcomings of smartphone lenses by using Generative Image Manipulation. You can handhold a smartphone at 600x magnification and end up with a perfectly sharp picture.

Try doing that with an SLR camera and a roll of FP4 Plus.

For clarity, I don't believe that everything AI produces is worthless and neither do I believe that everything humans do is too valuable to be changed, questioned or interfered with. Humans have been churning out the equivalent of pigswill forever.

I'm sure when the printing press was invented, the Church wanted to use it to benefit humankind by mass producing exact copies of the Bible. They must have been disappointed to learn that pamphlets were also being produced with dirty stories in them.

AI is a tool and we, as humans, must learn to use that tool to our advantage, just like early farmers became skilled ploughmen or we all learned how to drive a car.

There is something in the AI debate that people are overlooking, and that is the belief that the future will be either AI or human, but not both.

But the reality will be somewhere in the middle, like it always is.

Humans can choose to act as humans.

In recent times there has been a move in education away from the Humanities towards those skills that might get you a better job.

So what about those people who aren't interested in money but are interested in writing or painting?

Didn't the great painters and writers of the past rely on patrons and commissions to pay the rent? Weren't paintings by great painters found on the wall in Parisian cafes because the artist had needed a meal?

What happens to creativity when a machine can produce something technically perfect in seconds?

Perhaps the answer isn't to compete with the machine.

Perhaps it's to do something the machine can't do.

Perhaps it's to be human.

Maybe the question that we should all be asking is not whether AI is good or bad, but how much of the decision-making process, in photography at least, do we want to abdicate to a machine?

And that, in the most roundabout way possible, brings me back to photography.

The bit of photography that I enjoy is the bit that I do. All those little decisions and changes to the settings of the camera that bring me closer to producing a photograph, as a negative and then positive, that I have imagined and pre-visualised when I was looking at a scene.

Now, if I fail, the failure is mine.

That's being human, isn't it?

In the film A Good Year, the character Uncle Henry says, "Failure often elicits great wisdom."

Isn't that a human trait?

How do we know what we are trying to find until we fail to find it?

So I implore you all to grab a camera and be a human.

Make your decisions, but once you've done that, live with the results.

Stop believing that if only you'd had a different lens, or the light was better, or you'd dialled in f8, you'd have produced a masterpiece.

Perhaps you would have, but it is by no means certain.

Make the work as a human.

Failure isn't to fail. It is an opportunity to learn.

If the results aren't quite up to your imagined photograph, well, you can always try again.