Artificial Intelligence, press photography and The BPPA’s position
At a time when Artificial intelligence (or AI for short) is being simultaneously hailed as the technology that will change all of our lives for the better and for the worse it has become obvious that it plays two very distinct roles in press photography.
There’s “good AI” that helps us to caption images faster and more accurately as well as toning and even cropping pictures with greater accuracy and speed. On the flip side we have a form of artificial intelligence known as Generative AI that has made its way into our industry and which has rapidly become one of the greatest threats that press photographers have faced in recent times.
Generative AI creates artificial pictures using text prompts alone. It doesn’t take your existing image and “improve” it – it’s far cleverer than that. Trained by Machine Learning (ML) with access to billions of real photographs it uses your words and creates something that can often be frighteningly good at the same time as being, well, frightening. Most of the pictures that this form of AI uses as its source material have been copied without either the permission of or payment to the photographers who took them. This constitutes a breach of copyright on an industrial scale.
Generative AI threatens not only our intellectual property rights, but the also the ethics and aesthetics of who we are and what we do. A large percentage of the public have already learned to be sceptical about the honesty of images. “Oh that’s been Photoshopped” is an all-too-common refrain whose potency will be dwarfed by the mistrust of imagery that will become commonplace should AI be allowed to take a hold.
Getty Images has reacted to the general release of the latest Adobe Creative Cloud tools saying that “Getty Images does not accept files created using AI generative models. This includes Adobe’s recently announced Creative Cloud tools, which are now available with its Firefly‑powered generative AI tools built in”.
In our mission statement The British Press Photographers’ Association affirms that we exist “To promote and inspire the highest ethical, technical and creative standards from withing our industry”.
Our highly talented and dedicated members create authentic photographs of reality, drawing on their talent, insight, experience and inspiration. Generative AI produces false, sterile, artless and soulless images, draining all that is human out of the visual arts.
By creating utterly fake but seemingly realistic pictures, of people and events with no existence beyond the computer screen Generative AI threatens public trust in press photography and photojournalism.
We are the eyes of the public. The public trust us to provide an accurate and honest depiction of the news, essential to the functioning of a democratic society.
Fake news threatens both them and us. To separate fact from fiction and truth from falsehood it is now essential to identify both AI images and genuine photographs, putting their provenance beyond doubt.
The BPPA welcomes proposals for legislation, by amongst others the UK and the EU, to enforce the labelling of all AI pictures. We are in support of schemes such as the Content Authenticity Initiative which would allow our members to be part of a program to assure the credibility of genuine photographs and in turn maintain the reputation of press photography.
