The Coming AI Apocalypse
Let’s talk about AI.
The reason I bring this up should be obvious but let me lay out some topics for this completely uncontroversial blog post. Some people use AI tools to edit their work, and sometimes even generate photos and videos from scratch and use that in their work as well. I’m sure you’ve seen the instagram videos of cats playing drums, for instance. In the wedding industry, things are slightly more subtle than that but AI still exists here so let me explain my attitude surrounding those tools.
Fake vs. Facilitated
Generating images or videos based off of some real input is not something I do for my work filming weddings and I don’t believe that is what this industry is for. If someone wants to generate a timelapse of a leaf aging to help create the atmosphere for a fall wedding highlight, that’s one thing. I don’t do that but I can see why some people do. But using real photos and videos to generate completely fake content featuring a bride and groom constructed by AI misses the point entirely of what we do. That being said, there are some managerial tools that do sorting and listing and very repetitive tasks that help us organize our work. These kinds of AI tools do not affect the image and have no impact on the final product. They simply save time. But the line between time saving and simply pressing a button and having the computer edit a wedding for you is becoming blurrier every year.
Intent and Intuition
No matter how advanced AI gets, it will never ever be able to understand the most intuitive human decisions that go into making art. Yes, it can “make art” for us, it can even make music that evokes a basic kind of emotional response. Yet, this again misses the point. When human beings film and photograph each other getting married, there are thousands of small but significant emotional supernovas occurring every second. The tear falling from a mother’s eye as she watches her son watching his bride walk down the aisle is not something you can train AI to feel anything about because that’s not what it is for. AI is getting very good at reading and organizing but that does not mean that it cares about things. When I film your wedding, I am not simply a bad slow squishy version of a robot that will someday be replaced by a more efficient machine. When I film or photograph your wedding, I learn things about you and your family and I use my intuition to gain some understanding about your taste, your style, and your culture. I do this while simultaneously filming your wedding using the most organic media tools available that will never lie by smoothing over the rough edges. In this way I tell your story.
The Blurry Line
AI is getting faster every year at doing basic repetitive tasks. This is why language models have exploded recently. This is also why we see so much slop. People are using AI to do the dumbest most repetitive things possible over and over to try and be the first ones to fill up the internet will all of the content people will watch but not enjoy. This concept is applied in the wedding industry by lazy photographers who offer 1200+ photos for a 6 hour day. Those particular photographers are not editing each photo themselves, they are just pumping them through a generic AI editor to apply contrast, exposure, and saturation for them. And the results look fine… but they are not made with intention. Dumping 3000 photos into an AI can even let an overzealous photographer generate completely new photos based off of that input. Is this what you really want for your wedding day?
Let me give an example of what I do when I edit photos and videos. When working on color, I usually look at a group of clips recorded at the same time. I will grade the best looking clip entirely from scratch and then apply that same grade to each clip, and then adjust certain details on each clip if necessary. Could AI speed up that process? Of course. But if I start the process myself, with my own eyeballs and my own decisions, then using AI essentially speeds up my process and does not get in the way of my intent as an artist. This is what I would consider a responsible use of AI. Personally, I don’t have any AI tools that do anything for me. I do use AI as a talk assistant when I want to learn something about DaVinci Resolve but that’s completely different. Without getting too technical, it’s also worth mentioning that AI has kind of permeated computer functioning to the point where DaVinci Resolve utilizes AI algorithms to do some basic tasks like noise reduction. Things like that are not what I’m talking about when I refer to generating slop.
The blurry line separating a hack from an artist is all about intent. If the individual is using AI to make important decisions about how a photo or video should look, or if they are generating fake content from scratch, then they are misrepresenting your life and have no integrity as a professional. If the individual is using AI to speed up repetitive tasks and organize footage so they can focus more on the high level decision making that goes into editing, then they are simply taking advantage of a useful tool. Where it gets complicated is… what do we consider to be an important decision that a human should make, and what things are ok for AI to do automatically for us?
Intuition
If we are to survive, we must trust ourselves. You know what AI slop looks like. If what you see on a wedding professional’s website makes you cringe in that specific uncanny way, you should trust your gut. Good work is not cringey. A good photographer doesn’t need to generate slop to fill their portfolio. That being said, camera technology is progressing too, so if something looks suspiciously good, that doesn’t necessarily automatically point to slop. Usually with AI we see things like extra fingers, limbs, things popping in and out of existence, proportions changing, out of place backgrounds, incorrect details etc.
One of my friends in the industry is slightly color blind. I’m not going to tell him to not use a tool that will help him pick the right color grade if it makes his clients happy and he is still editing his work himself. In the end, we must be responsible for our work. You do not want to hire someone who makes a mistake and later says, “well… it wasn’t me it was my AI generative tools that made your mom look like a helicopter spider demon…” You do want to hire someone who believes in their work because they have actually seen every pixel with their own eyes. In other words, you don’t want to hire a hack, you do want to hire an author.
