
Recently, a friend wanted to buy an old Olympus film camera and asked me how he should check for defects. I gave him some tips, but I mused that I have all this knowledge about film photography that has been rendered obsolete by AI.
If you didn’t know, I was a photojournalist over 20 years ago. I trained for years, learning the arcane art of film photography (aperture! shutter speed! exposure compensation!) I was so passionate, I even had my own darkroom setup to develop black and white photographs at home. Around 2000, I dove into digital photography as it became commercially viable. I invested my savings in the early Canon dSLRs and spent too much on CompactFlash storage cards ($400 for 1GB of storage, if memory hasn’t failed me…)
Today, I only take out my Canon R8 dSLR if I need to shoot a 4K video, and even then, I use it on auto settings (I used to swear by manual settings). Most of the time, I take photos or videos with my smartphone. I still use Photoshop or Affinity Photo to tweak the color or contrast, but that’s hardly necessary.
Machine learning (aka AI) in smartphones has eliminated the need for the average person to learn the basic fundamentals of photography. The algorithm will correct poor exposure or contrast on the fly, and all you need to do is point and tap. This hasn’t made people dumber, it has led to an explosion of well-taken photos on social media. Many mediocre photographers have lost their jobs over the past 20 years because they could not offer more value than an average user with smartphone. The pro photographers upped their game by investing in technology and techniques to create high-quality content that are clearly beyond what smartphones can produce. The fundamentals are still critical to know if you are doing professional work.
It is through this lens that I read Leon Furze’s latest post on “AI and Skills Loss”. I resonate strongly with it, because I am a teacher who wields Gen AI and who also cautions people against its misuse. I constantly think about what I’m teaching my students – is this knowledge or skill going to be useful in the next ten years? I have experienced how technology can wipe knowledge out, but we have to ask if there’s any real loss when certain knowledge disappears or is rendered obsolete. Do read Leon’s piece.