Check how AI changed this photographer's shoots
A popular Instagram photographer admits to using AI to generate photos, shares them on his social media profile, and creates his own follower community. At first, he didn't let the truth unfold but recently decided to confess.
In today's world, artificial intelligence usage is becoming more common. In almost every industry, an AI-based mechanism or a tool is being used, including photography and social media, considering the latest news. AI tools have become a reliable tool for many people, and they use their help while conducting their work, including the famous Instagram photographer Avery Portraits & Art.
According to a report by Ars Technica, the Instagram photographer who went viral a while ago admitted to using AI to generate his photos. He said: "[My Instagram account] has blown up to nearly 12K followers since October, more than I expected. Because it is where I post AI-generated, human-finished portraits. Probably 95%+ of the followers don't realize. I'd like to come clean."
Jos Avery doesn't take the photos and leaves them to AI's imagination. Avery added that two of the photos weren't generated by AI but were taken by them. However, it still needs artistic knowledge and abilities for the result to be appealing. After generating the portraits on Midjourney, Avery takes them and makes final touches in Photoshop to make them more appealing for social media. You can have a look at Jos Avery's Instagram profile and see all his work.
Midjourney is an independent research lab famous for its AI tool many people use to create photogenic images. It takes text-based descriptions from users and generates an image accordingly. The concept is similar to other famous AI image tools like OpenAI's DALL-E 2. It is known that its creators have shown millions of art examples of other artists to make the tool more realistic and useful. Because of that, some artists sued Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt.
Avery continued his words: "I am honestly conflicted. My original aim was to fool people to showcase AI and then write an article about it. But now, it has become an artistic outlet. My views have changed." He currently has 26k followers on Instagram. It is not the biggest art account on the social media platform, but still, a big community is following to see his next works.
It is still not easy to execute as he needs thousands of generated pictures and uses Photoshop to combine them to get the best result. In an email, he said: "I have something like 160 Instagram posts. In order to come up with those, I've generated 13,723 images, not including thousands of uncounted mid-job cancellations. In other words, I'm generating roughly 85 images to come up with one usable image and canceling probably at least that many failed starts."
His followers still enjoy his work even though they are AI-generated and not taken directly by him. It is still considered an aspect of art and highly innovative. Who knows, maybe the take of art will change in the upcoming years with the development of AI, and different kinds of photography and editing professions will be born.
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He isn’t a photographer and those aren’t photos. Case closed.
I feel all portraits are distortions, whether created by brush, camera, lens, or software. Bottom line is whether the intent of the artist is achieved.
He may be an artist, but he shouldn’t be called photographer if he is not taking photos. Just like we wouldn’t say that a photographer is an hyper-realistic painter, even if the art may seem similar.
He’s a bit late to the game. For the past 6 months, everyone has been doing it better with Stable Diffusion. With the release of ControlNET, we been things far more advanced than Jos Avery’s work.