Ami Vitale: prediction

Transcript context

…Some questions about photography. What is lost with the switch from film to digital? Well, it’s funny. A lot of people lament the loss of film, but I tell you, when I began my career, the reality is I was carrying film, chemicals, a blow dryer to dry the roll of film that was hanging in my hotel room, a huge scanner. Then I was up all night trying to transmit one to two images per night from working in these remote places. So I don’t lament the loss, to be honest, because right now digital has transformed our world. We can go into the world and bring back these really important news stories from the field and transmit them faster than we ever have. There’s a whole other list of issues we have to talk about with AI. But to me, honestly, it’s probably better for the environment. I think about all the chemicals we dumped into the planet. Yes, there is a loss of that beautiful texture. Every image was unique. I think that there’s no time in human history where, as creatives, we can create anything we want. From a creative perspective, we can still create unique images and create anything we imagine. At the same time, then I, as a journalist with my journalist hat on, I worry about authenticity and what are we going to do to make sure we have ways of identifying when images are authentic and have not been manipulated. I think that both camera companies and the companies like Adobe who do post-processing manipulation are working to be able to figure out how we can create these stamps on the images to know they’re authentic. We’re in troubling times right now. Taking your question into a totally different space, I worry more about AI and what it’s doing to the trust of how do we know what’s real and misinformation. We’re entering new waters right now that are terrifying. I think more about that than I think about the loss of film. As you know, there are now social networks everywhere, for quite a while. Images everywhere, even before Midjourney. There are so many images that people are looking at. How does that change how you compose or think about photos?…

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