The comment that seems to be the latest trend word on Social media.

I read way too much social media, I also read way too much news from various sources across the web. Some call it doom scrolling and maybe it is, but I like to think it’s me trying to keep abreast of as much info as I can both globally and domestically.

There are certain words and phrases that seems to frequent the web, I lost count of how many times I read “Karen” in a post or the over use of “toxic” and or “misogyny” in any article, post or sound bite. The latest word or phrase seems to be A.I. or that’s A.I. people just commenting for the sake of having stuck their oar in and attempting to be an authority on something without actually doing any real research about what they’re looking at.

A “possible” case example is the photo below by Holger Droste. I don’t know Holger from Adam, but a photo from him popped up on my FB feed and I liked the aesthetic of the image. Reading the comments there were some genuine responses but there was the inevitable “A.I.” comment without any further explanation as to why to commentator assumed this was A.I.

Upon further investigation I followed the link and Holger lists the shot as follows: "Fotografie ,technische Bearbeitung PS" so he’s saying it’s his photo and he’s worked it up in Photoshop, now what that means these days is hard to dissect as Adobe has opted to include a suite of A.I. tools into it’s workflow, one of the reasons a lot of purist photographers are wringing their hands and feigning purist emotions.

I don’t know if the photographer that took this photo used A.I. to enhance the image and frankly I don’t really care. Looking at his portfolio almost all his image share a similar quality, a somewhat dark and moody, slightly horrific ambience and I like it.

I worry about the effect not of A.I. bit of the commentators that proclaim anything they don’t like as being A.I. because it detracts from an artists vision and waters everything down to a throw away, dismissive mentality.

I’m keen to hear people’s thoughts on this, do you think this image is A.I. and if yes explain why and do you really care?

A.I.

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