… or perhaps not. Back in 1969 a journalist by the name of Bill Vaughan sagely wrote:

“To Err is Human; To Really Foul Things Up Requires a Computer”

The much hyped advent of AI technology has amplified this a thousand fold. Now I’ve written about how Ai is changing photography and not necessarily for the better.  The aspect I want to touch on today is how Ai is supposed to make things more efficient and easier and thereby increase productivity and therefore increase profits.

Despite the advent of micro stock photography causing the bottom to fall out of the stock photography business I still persist and up until this year I was making a small (and I mean very small) amount of sales. This year all that had changed and everything has ground to a halt. Initially I put it down to the fact that the market is over saturated – too many producers chasing too few sales. But on checking with the stock library I think I’ve discovered the real reason.

Now one of the crucial things you have to do when you submit images is caption and tag your work so the library’s search engine can find what a client is looking for. Of late the stock library I use adopted Ai technology to do the captioning and tagging automatically based upon what it recognises in the image. Fantastic! I’ve been liberated from the drudgery and tedium of captioning and tagging giving me more time to use for creating. Why isn’t the cash rolling in? Because the Ai gets it wrong. Very wrong. Below are a few examples.

 

 

 

 

The program seems to be pretty fixated on eagles.

 

 

 

 

Yet when given an image of a bird prey it either calls it a heron

or ignores it completely.

 

I think humans have nothing to fear from Ai. With all that harvesting of data from all the human knowledge ever created and it can’t tell the difference between a parrot and a squirrel. I’d want my money back if I’d invested in the technology. With this kind of accuracy, or  should I say inaccuracy, it does not bode well. Imagine presenting at the accident and emergency department at your local hospital and they use Ai to triage and make the initial diagnosis. You present with all symptoms of a cardiac arrest and the program tells you you’ve got haemorrhoids and sends you home with a tube of ointment. Not very assuring is it? This was all done so I could, and thereby the stock library, make more money. So far I’ve made none and the library has lost money because the system they bought to help sales isn’t making any.