I’ve got some quick thoughts on AI and street photography.

I’ve basically been hooked on AI for the last year. I’ve been using it for research, automation, and just making my life easier. It’s been incredibly helpful for my photography workflow.

If I’m designing a magazine, for example, sometimes I’ll throw an image in there and ask, “What do you think would pair well with this?”

But probably the biggest use I’ve gotten out of AI is learning new software.

When I first started using InDesign, I had no clue what was going on. I would just spam the chatbot: How do I do this? How do I do that? I’d upload screenshots and ask what an error message meant.

When you’re starting completely from scratch and trying to learn new technology, AI is incredibly useful.

Before, you’d type your question into Google and end up reading a Reddit forum or watching a bunch of tutorials trying to find the answer. Now you can just put your question into a chatbot and it usually gives you the answer, or at least steers you in the right direction.

So I think AI is incredibly useful.

But how does this affect street photography, or photography in general?

I think some types of photography are going to be seriously affected by AI.

Food photography, for example. If you’re a restaurant and want professional-looking photographs of your food for your website, you could potentially take a photo with your phone, upload it to AI, and say, “Make this look like a professional food photograph.”

Before, you might have hired a professional photographer to do that.

I think the same thing could happen with advertising and commercial photography. If you’re selling clothing online, for example, AI is going to be able to generate a lot of the imagery that previously required photographers, models, studios, and a whole production.

We’re probably still in the early stages, but over the next five years I think industries like that are going to change dramatically.

Maybe even landscape photography could be affected.

If you’re a landscape photographer because you love hiking, being outdoors, exploring nature, and actually having that experience, that’s obviously different.

But if your goal is simply to create a beautiful landscape print for somebody’s wall, does the average person really care whether the scene is completely accurate?

A lot of people probably just want something beautiful that looks good on their wall.

So I think a lot of photography industries are going to be affected by AI.

Wedding photography might be different, though.

The reason I think wedding photography is safer is because of emotion and memory.

People want photographs of their actual wedding. They want to look at those photographs and remember one of the most important days of their lives. There are real people, memories, feelings, and emotions attached to those photographs.

And that brings me to street photography.

I think street photography is different for a similar reason.

For me, the ultimate goal of a photograph is to create some kind of feeling or emotion in the viewer.

That doesn’t mean every photograph has to show some spectacular moment.

Let’s say you live in Santa Monica and you walk down the same street every day. I take a photograph of a tree on that street. Years later, you see that photograph and immediately remember walking past that tree every day.

That photograph might create a strong feeling for you.

It doesn’t have to be an extraordinary moment.

It can be something incredibly simple.

And that’s one of the reasons I don’t think AI replaces what interests me about street photography.

AI can generate an image that looks like a street photograph. But that’s different from a photograph of something that actually happened, in a real place, at a particular moment.

For me, that’s where the feeling comes from.

Street photography is also different because most of us aren’t doing it because it’s a highly profitable business. We do it because we’re passionate about it.

We’re walking around, observing the world, taking photographs, and recording things that interest us.

There’s not necessarily some huge industry for AI to replace.

So I think AI is going to change photography dramatically. Some commercial areas of photography are probably going to be hit extremely hard by it.

But street photography is different.

For me, its value isn’t simply what the photograph looks like.

It’s the experience, the memory, the emotion, and the fact that somebody was actually there to notice that moment and photograph it.

Those are my quick thoughts on AI and street photography.