Twenty-first International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

The camera preceded photography by several centuries, but it may be the camera that is bowing out soon, while photography lives on. This is all thanks to artificial intelligence, or AI. The recent spread of easy to use, high-end software like DALL-E and Midjourney has changed the debate from whether digital photographs can be trusted to whether or not photography exists at all. The verb, “to take” a picture will need to be changed to “to write” a picture, as the tiresome task of getting some to pose and crack a smile becomes a thing of the past. How this impacts working photographers and photography curricula remains to be seen but cannot be ignored. The postmodern dream of semioticians has at last become realized as photography has truly become language, a literal one, as the camera is replaced by the keyboard and memory is replaced by the simulacrum.