It’s been a year since my last screed against AI in editing software.

The good news is that it isn’t really Artificial Intelligence because if it were, you’d already have been replaced and the world would not be awash in the volume of dogshit posted to Facebook and Instagram every day. AI does not need humans.

Art, or at least art as we have defined it, still needs humans. Change the definition and change the game of course, but I’m not one of those happy delusional rewriters of history that make up woke and cancel culture may they all rot in hell.

Today, I received a very pleasant message from the people at Skylum software. They make editing tools and some of them are quite good, although I am not personally a user of them. Other folks like them and that is cool. Skylum is very excited about their coming version of Luminar to be called Luminar AI. This places Skylum in the same bucket as a zillion other makers who are tacking AI onto everything to make it sound new, hip and exciting.

Certainly the idea that the software will use more enhanced algorithms to provide corrections to images will sound interesting to non-creatives and they are the likely customer for this stuff because it will help them put more lipstick on more pigs of images. That’s ok too since I do no participate in any social media recognizing it as the great collectivist down-leveller that it is, so I will not have to see the images. I won’t call it work, because there’s no creative work involved.

AI software as it is called is nothing more than a new set of makeup on what we used to call presets. Presets were just someone’s idea of what looked nice and were a quick way to make your images look like theirs. If that sounds like zero creativity, you would be correct. Presets are a panacea to the lazy and inept. I accept that some will say that such a statement is mean and hurtful. In the words of comic Ricky Gervais, whose brilliant evisceration of Hollyweird while hosting some pointless awards show is genius, “I don’t care”

There are people who say that great artists of the past would be all over this software and I do think that if Ansel Adams were alive today, he would leverage tools like Photoshop aggressively. Do I think that he would use presets or AI software? Not on your life! It would ironically amusing to see Adams slap an Ansel Adams preset on an image, but he would not do it. How do I know this?

Because Ansel Adams was an artist. Like Van Gogh, Rodin. Perhaps even like Michelangelo allow there were some payoffs and dispensations from the Catholic Church therein. An artist creates from vision, not from some programmed response. AI does not think, it uses a complex set of deterministic matrices to arrive at a conclusion, yet the conclusions were created by humans. Not individual humans but collectives of humans so as not to have any individualism come through. Creativity is about as individualistic a thing as there is if one is truly creative. If you are copying another’s style as a learning tool go for it. Knowledge is wonderful. If you are doing that so you can represent your work as being equivalent to someone else’s at best you are an idiot and at worst a thief of intellectual property. In either case, I doubt very much that you are still reading this article anyway.

I don’t care.

I’ve also heard it said that these tools help you learn. They teach you how to click a button, not on how to achieve your own style. There’s no actual learning involved. It’s more the grandchild of a Xerox copier. Do you as a creative aspire to be a Xerox copier? If you do, you’re going to love Instagram because it is precisely Same Shit Different Day. You will also love presets and AI editing software and you aren’t reading this anyway.

Here’s an alternative. Go shoot your own images with your own vision and if someone else doesn’t like them they are perfectly free to fuck off on the horse that they rode in on. You don’t need presets and you do not need AI. What you need is that wobbly grey mass sitting inside your skull and a little bit of self-worth.

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I'm Ross Chevalier, thanks for reading, watching and listening and until next time, peace.