I used to maintain a large site that showcased my categorized photography and some photo studies but found the constant maintenance an unrewarding constant battle and a drain on my limited time, so now I use other platforms and let them handle the backend. Their ability to handle photo-centric content is somewhat rudimentary but acceptable for my kind of work. I publish infrequently, but when I do, I tend toward somewhat moderately long-read photo stories about the natural world around us that we usually don’t “see” or appreciate. (See my Len’s Afield substack or here).

I have a large portfolio, the vast majority of which no one else will ever see. I also have a small number of selected photos showcased for sale. I haven’t edited or updated those offerings in a long time. I intended to do so, but as you will read in what follows, something happened along the way.

I have always been easily interested in new things and can quickly become immersed in them. That means I can easily sidetrack and meander from an intended track to exploration far from where I started. It’s a terrible flaw, a curse I’ve had all my life. It has been beneficial in some respects but a detriment in others.

This was true twenty years ago when an out-of-the-blue announcement caused chaos, confusion, and questions within an organization and its stakeholder community. The complex situation was in progress and ongoing. It included existential organizational changes and economic ramifications for its future. I was up-to-speed on the legal issues, but no one knew how the unusual financial machinations would work.

I was asked to produce a long-read article to explain the major players, what had occurred, what was in the offing, and how it was intended to work—to pull it all together and present it so we could all understand. I agreed but had to undertake tremendous amounts of research in a short period of time.

My flaw became an asset.

That project inspired me to start an independent research business early in 2007, and I could see the possibility of quitting my job and going into business full-time. I was right on track with my plan…right up until the economy was tanked in 2008, and clients responded by eliminating research budgets. Business dried up, so I put mine on hold, resurrected only briefly on rare occasions but always keeping it administratively active as far as the state and the IRS were concerned.

In the fall of 2022, I intended to rework, revamp, and revitalize my existing photography ventures over the winter, hoping they would produce a revenue stream sufficient to retire in the spring. [After another three and half years, I finally set a firm date and stuck to it.]

The process was moving along in early December of 2022, until I read a couple of posts on a couple of different platforms that altered my plans and are the reason you are reading this and the other content here. That story should be your next stop, and it begins here.

In early December 2022, I read a couple of posts about new applications using artificial intelligence (AI) that could create fantastic images from nothing but simple, descriptive text inputs. Apparently, these new tools had become publicly available sometime in mid- or late-November. Maybe I saw an article title or two back then, but since they weren’t directly related to photography, they likely didn’t make me curious enough to read and explore further.

Then one day, sometime in mid-December, I saw several posts about how these new products were either a new way to “do photography” or a new way to enhance photography. They got my attention—on more than one level.

Soon thereafter, there were posts about how this new tech threatens photography—some portending its imminent death as we know it. There is no doubt that posts relating words of apocalyptic consequences to something in which I am heavily invested with my time and money (reading this stuff after having just made some major new gear purchases), and articles that play fast-and-loose with terms and semantics, certainly got my attention.

The combination of all the above, along with other topics not yet mentioned, soon elevated my natural skepticism, cynicism, and general wariness. This tends to happen whenever newly alleged next-best things are foisted upon me, and I am told I would be a fool if I do not submit to and embrace whatever “it” is with all my being—or risk being left behind. Yes, there were posts that actually said such things using such words.

I began to call all this collective tech “IT.” Great! Another topic to add to my already bloated daily reading list.

Then I read an article on how these generative image models are trained. It was written in a manner short on details and clear as mud. That gave me a sense of unease.

Then I found more detailed articles supplying more specifics of said training. In a nutshell, this involved massive input from collections of image-text pairings. Some were supplied from publicly available and licensed collections developed for the purpose. Billions more were simply and systematically scraped from “public websites.”

My unease became outright agitation after I began to find my images in one of the larger training datasets. Lots of them.

Yes, I always knew that anything posted online could likely be lifted. But I also know that without the internet, having my work seen and possibly bought by anyone, anywhere, would be impossible. So I shrugged my shoulders and accepted the conundrum.

But that acquiescence was based on the assumption that theft of my images would be done by individuals. Those infringing on my copyrights could be (and have been) found, and the situation addressed.

Calculated, deliberate, en-masse scraping of my work by corporate entities to train new, for-profit apps intended for use by the general public (and we can only guess for what other purposes), never entered my mind.

And—spoiler alert—this is quite likely completely legal.

These unsolicited, secretive, intentional, bald-faced incursions into any websites they so desired, for the purpose of taking my images, undeterred simply because they could—without my permission and without compensation—in order to produce new for-profit AI-generative apps some perceive as abusive and threatening to photography, a favorite personal endeavor, made me mightily agitated.

So much so that Me, Myself, and I had a meeting (more of an internal argument), after which we decided to put aside the original over-winter plan to revisit, rework, and revamp my existing photographic ventures. There was simply no point continuing as my brain was now infested and infected by the actions and implications of IT. Having glommed and latched on to IT, it won’t let IT go.

The implications and future impacts of artificial intelligence are going to be huge. So is the hype of previously unimaginable benefits that deep machine learning (a more accurate term) will have for our human potential. The oxymoronic juxtaposition of those concepts and the lack of restraint in saying so do not sit well with me.

Huge for whom, in what manner, and at what cost? Or would a better, more accurate question be, at whose expense…besides mine and all the others who don’t know they’ve been robbed?

Then I realized what the ultimate questions are:
Why do these companies need to produce tools for the production of generative “art” in the first place?
How does this fit into their business model or agenda?
(I provide a speculative answer here at the sister publication ThisOldGoat).

Passive anger achieves nothing. Action is necessary: calm, studious, deliberative, focused, community-oriented, directed, and properly targeted action.

I am ainxious, aigitated, vexed, stressed, and sleep-depraived because I have become attuned to the web of related topics, cross-correlations, and the threats included in this burgeoning and bewildering morass of social, economic, and political implications, all brought about by reading a few innocuous articles, a few months ago, about a few new digital toys, with more than a few implications for photography, and way beyond. What began by perusing those first few articles has quickly turned into a mountain of reading, notes, databases, and draft posts. It’s already all-consuming and overwhelming.

I do not intend to research the entire realm of AI technologies and attempts to create problematic parallel virtual universes. The specific aspects to which I have been trying to limit myself are still a massive undertaking. The amount of historical data that existed before these subjects were of broad interest is enormous, but now that AI-generative technologies have exploded into public consciousness, the amount of new daily noise about IT is expanding exponentially (much of it written or augmented in seconds by AI tools).

I hope I have clarified that asking the right questions and finding the right information is the key to action. There is no substitute, no shortcuts. Let me also be clear that all necessary information is not free to be found on the web. What is online is but a subset of all that is available, and not all that is available there is visible—or free. Please keep that in mind as you continue…

So, sensing no relief, no way out, I’m “in.” I have a new purpose. Retirement will not be a tranquil ride into my sunset. Can I transition from being “in” to “all in?” Are there enough people who are concerned enough to invest in my purpose—our purpose? It’s a gamble for me and anyone who wants to tag along.

There are vaccines to prevent various physical afflictions and medications to wean addicts from many dependencies, but none is known to prevent or quash the revival of my addiction to the disquisitive. It has been disquieting, to say the least.

Since I was vexed by this quest, I haven’t shot a single frame. Will I be able to make time to get out and about with my actual, physical photography gear to record and present the real, natural actual world in non-AI-generated words and photographs—while I still have time?