Lovely isn’t it? Now if I go ahead and generate that using AI, will that picture be ‘mine’? My creation? If I claim it to be mine that is surely not ethical. But if I go ahead and make the effort of finding the location, wait for the right light conditions, spend time on composition, and of course do some post processing (more on this later) I will have invested time and effort, using my skills, my vision, my ideas, etc. All mine. Now you have a genuine picture that is ethical. 

You can ask of course is it ethical to generate a picture using AI, be transparent about it and then share or even sell those pictures. Well is it then ethical to sell a placebo ‘medication’ (placebos do not have any active medical ingredients) that we are transparent about? Strictly speaking it is not unethical because there is no false advertising or even any lie associated with it. But would you buy it? Does that product even make any sense? I would argue it doesn’t. Transparency is critical, but transparency without a value is redundant.

Pictures are similar. Everyone can go and generate a stunning picture for free, so why pay someone for doing it for you?  And there may be a valid scenario where this is OK. You just need picture that satisfies certain criteria and you need it now for free. Go ahead.

But if you want a Picture (Capital P), with human: emotions, skills, sense of art, vision, twist, sadness, happiness, joy, anger, hope, despair, etc, well… AI will not give it you. Not today and not ever. All those human qualities are not products of algorithms. Therefore no algorithm will ever be able to replicate any of that.

I 100% believe in the importance of ethical photography and my portfolio is about ethical pictures. And about fighting for ethical photography. 

But wait. Is post AI powered processing ethical? This is an important question, because now you can have AI generative expand, generative erase, generative fill etc.

What is ethical and what is not ethical in post processing - in general - is mostly personal. People have been post processing pictures since the dawn of photography. All that has changed are the tools available. And yes these days we have a growing arsenal of AI assisted post processing tools. You think a car would make your picture better, You add one and nobody will - likely - notice. To me that is not ethical. But if I have e.g. a stone in my picture that I was not able to eliminate through framing and it gets in the way, using AI’s help to remove that stone seamlessly is OK for me. In my view using AI to do minor changes to a photo, changes that do not alter the essence, theme, context, ‘soul’, message of the picture, is acceptable. Having said that I will always do my best to frame my pictures in such a way that AI assisted removal or fill will not be necessary.

I hope you enjoy my pictures.

- Emil Zimmermann