I am not in any way a Luddite. New technologies have always fascinated me… and this extends up to and including artificial intelligence, with all the fully justified doubts and disclaimers that entails. But there is a point beyond which I feel I am just not prepared to go. In a word… hands off photography please! Now I imagine everyone here will agree that, right from the very beginning, photographers have always manipulated the truth to a certain extent. First those darkroom tricks, then basic fiddling with PhotoShop, removing a distraction here, blurring a background there, modifying colours… we’ve all been there, done that. But up till now, the basis has always been, well, a photograph, and processing has been a skilled and laborious task. Now just a few words are enough to completely change (or create) an image. I tried it for the first (and last?) time the other day with Nano Banana just to see what could be done. As this was the free trial, I only had one go at it and had to screen capture the final image, but the result is extraordinarily realistic. And it made me VERY uneasy.

Up until now, photography has always required three basic things: a subject, a camera (in whatever form) and light. If one of those things is lacking, the result may be absolutely legitimate as an art form, but can it still be considered photography? I suppose I have always had a disproportionate respect for photographs as a means of documenting reality, even though that reality may be more or less “distorted” by the photographer’s creative abilities. Now just a few words are enough to CREATE a reality. Perhaps I’m just getting old, but this worries me.

There’s no going back, but am I right to fret so much about all this?