While I’m writing or browsing the internet on the hunt for a unique guitar, I like watching YouTube in the background. YouTube is on more often than Netflix or the other streaming services in our house. It isn’t easy dividing the brain power with a wandering mind though. Most of the time it feels like the exact opposite of meditation. A few months ago, while checking my email, I remember vividly seeing this awesome thumbnail on my YouTube feed on my secondary monitor. A painting of Terence McKenna as a cyberpunk character. I clicked the thumbnail and looked at the YouTuber’s profile. A whole bunch of those cool thumbs on there. McKenna as Gandalf, Alan Watts as Yoda… Immediately I wanted a print from this artist, because I love listening to those speakers. So I went straight to the description of one of those videos, looking for the name of the painter. Nothing. I scrolled through the comments next, hoping to ask the creator if they’ll enlighten me. My question was already there: “Who is painting these awesome portraits of McKenna?”

Somebody copied and pasted a reply from another video: “AI generated. Midjourney”.

I was flabbergasted. AI made this!? All sorts of questions went through my mind. If this amount of detail can be had with generating a portrait, how would it render landscapes? And what is a “Midjourney”? I searched the web and found a minimal looking website over at Midjourney.com, with nothing but a few buttons labeled “Join the Beta” and “Sign in". I joined and watched a quick tutorial on how to get started.

You need Discord to get started. It’s a chat app that’s very popular among gamers. Then enter a room. And you need a basic list of commands. The most important one:

/imagine

The way you generate images with Midjourney is by typing /imagine. Then you can basically type whatever you want and it starts to generate art from that text, which they call a prompt. Midjourney generates 4 versions of your prompt and presents you with 9 buttons thereafter. Make variations on image one through 4, or make one of them larger and more detailed. The ninth button sends the query again for 4 new interpretations of your prompt.

After a few fun runs, I started to see the potential for my own workflow as a digital artist. An that’s how this blog post and countless hours of research and listening to podcasts started.

The desire to be different

I have a big appreciation for people who can keep a job for years and never get tired of it. Especially when that job is more or less the same in the day to day. It is as if I’m uncomfortable with monotony. A personal trait that has caused problems and still is causing problems in my everyday life. I lose interest in things after pursuing it with intensity for a while. It’s either give it your all or don’t do it at all in my book.

Not wanting to do the same

At the same time, there’s this deep rooted urge to not want to do the same as anybody else. And that is so very difficult when you learn a new skill set, isn’t it? Compare it to making music. Most people pick up an instrument with the desire to play along with their favorite songs. And when you finally learn to write a song yourself, you end up writing as the artists that inspired you to make music in the first place. Going out on a small tangent here, that happened to me quite literally when I was in a band some 20 years ago now. My friend at the time and I were jamming together at a local place we rented to practice every Friday evening. Him on bass, myself on guitar. It might have been the other way around, because we were quite flexible playing on either, but before I digress any further, we were so pumped that we wrote a great sounding track before lunch one day. Then we took an hour off of head banging to that thrashy song, and were kind of silent as we went through a big pile of french fries. We were 18, still greasy and hungry from drinking the night before. In fact, I’m quite sure it was breakfast for us as the previous meal was a bottle of Jack. We pulled out a few more ideas as we finished our healthy meal, but on the walk home we said to each other: “I don’t know about you, but that shit sounds familiar somehow…” It did. It wasn’t for long before we realized we had completely rewritten No Remorse by Metallica. All subconsciously, because we had no idea how to actually play that particular song. We just did. We tore up the notes we made and had a good laugh, but man, we were frustrated as well. Could we really not have written anything original? Were we so set in our ways as friggin’ teens that creativity eluded us already? I still struggle with that today as I write music. But for 14 years now, I’ve often felt the same with photography.

My Journey with Digital Photography

Wow, has it been 14 years already? And that’s the time I’ve spent as a photographer making money on the side with it. On my about page you can read that I’ve been shooting for much longer than that. As a kid with my dad’s Pentax and as a wannabe matte-painter when I was about 12 years old. Then I hunted ghosts for a year or two. For real. Made videos and everything.

The castle where we used to hunt ghosts as teens.

A Safe Space

In 2009 I started out with two digital cameras. My first DSLR and a Canon Powershot IXUS-something that I converted to infrared myself with a manual I found on the internet and the smallest screwdriver I found in the shed. Images didn’t look like a million bucks with it, but it pleased me to the degree that I was doing something different than others. At the time, I posted my results to a place called DeviantArt. An open-minded social media space that accepted art for what it was. Man, I was into some heavy-handed photo-manipulation at the time. Much to the dismay of my real-life peers and family of course. “How could you do that to a perfectly fine photo?” was a question I heard so many times. DevianArt felt like a safe haven or echo chamber for that always-at-100-HDR-approach. By the end of using that platform, I changed my visual style and preferences so much that I could not stand looking at that anymore myself. Perhaps the unrelenting criticism drove me to pursue a different approach. Maybe they had won. DevianArt was probably the first social media account that I abandoned, but that’s a different story.

Inspiration

But that time was great, because at the same time, it gave me a renewed interest in landscape photography. I rebranded from “Surreal Exposure” to “Laanscapes”, a clever pun that put my last name and what I did together. I learned so many new things along the way too. All the stuff I teach now myself like dodging and burning, mind-bending compositions, focus stacking and using trackers for those perfect Milky Way images. But my results looked like everybody else's. Especially like the images of those who I looked up to. At least I thought they did. Naming my fellow countryman Max Rive, but in particular the Western American modern landscape photographers Adamus, Gore, Babnik and Noriega, as well as their European counterparts Fossati, Pisani and Deschaumes. That dark mood is to die for, but I felt like the genetic descendant of them for a while now, writing No Remorse all over again.

Landscape Photography Composites and Digital Art

Fast forward to a few years ago, when matte-painting piqued my interest again. Around the time where I listened to one of the best episodes of Matt Payne’s podcast F-Stop Collaborate and Listen, when Cath Simard pulled up a chair. Simard is well known in the photography community (I can’t stand the combination of those two words) for her stunning work, openly digital pieces of art and her hard work and success in the early days of NFTs. I dabbled in photo composites myself, but always felt this self-induced restriction of fully spreading my wings. Simard is a self-proclaimed composite artist, but I’m not willing to take it that far. I sparingly put in another sky. That’s maybe the case in 1 percent of my images, tops. But I must applaud Cath Simard for her positivity in going happily along with the pursuit of something that makes her happy, pays her bills and teaches others to think outside of the box.

From Airbrushing to Compositing

Digital art or illustration and photography have always been strange bedfellows. Even before the digital age when photo manipulation was done in-camera by means of double exposures or in the darkroom with many other means. Before we called it Photoshopping, they called it airbrushing. And before that, they probably had another term for faking it. We’re not even comfortable with the notion of adding stuff into photos, while nowadays we are on the precipice of a whole new order of magnitude of controversy. A controversy that will change our world so profoundly, that I cannot overstate the importance of it. At first in the creative industry, but likely, no: surely, everywhere else as well.

Why I can’t stand those two words together

But first another tiny tangent. Sorry for the popular podcast-infused vocabulary, but for a year, I listened to nothing else while remodeling the house. The reason I have a hard time with “Photography and Community” is one that I will be going into much more in my upcoming book. I’m convinced that landscape photography is a lonely pursuit of light, land and perfection. A futile pursuit of perfection, but we all chase it nonetheless. And we revel in the idea that it’s an endless journey too. Disheartened by the so-so-sunset, we can already feel the desire to have at it again tomorrow. And sure, we can photograph together. We talk about the subject as I do here and hopefully somebody will read this at some point. But the social media thing made us believe that we are all friends somehow. Reality check. Having a single shared interest with a random person on the internet does not make us brothers and sisters.

I actually appreciate the solitude that landscape photography can give.

Perhaps I’m too strong of an introvert to care about the community aspect. But social media for me was a means of mainly connecting with clients; people wanting to learn from me as an experienced photographer. Sure, I met Kai and Isabella and Inge and Ellen there, and we get along great. But we see each other once, twice a year if both of us find the time.

But when I hear talk on a photo podcast about “the community”, I get the Heebie-jeebies and switch to Lex Fridman, Andrew Huberman or Sam Harris to listen to their guests. Now that’s a great segue into the main subject of this already lengthy article. And we haven’t even cut to the chase yet.

Ostriches at the Crossroads

What I wanted to talk about with you is not my personal past, although I feel like I’ve talked about me a lot now. However, it feels like it does contribute to the whole story. Because when we discuss the title of this article, I can’t help but feel personally affected by it in every fiber of my being. But contrary to most when we talk about the Rise of AI and the Potential Fall of Photography, I’m feeling more optimistic than I’ve been in a long time about my own work and the hope that creativity strikes again. Confident even.

This introduction was written by… myself.

News outlets love to have an introduction typed up by ChatGPT as a wow-factor to what it can do. “This introduction was written entirely by AI”, the story then classically continues. To the point that I made it a point not to do that in this article. The subject of AI is omnipresent. As it should. And if you haven’t heard about artificial intelligence, then I’m sorry, you can join the ostriches at the crossroads. There’s a nice comfortable looking pile of sand there to stick your head back into. The significance, speed and scale are hard to comprehend. So let’s start by saying that by the time I publish this article, it’s already way outdated. We have arrived at a crossroads in creative pursuits that will unrecognizably change the way we interact with the world and knowledge in a more life-changing way than Marshall McLuhan could have predicted. Put the printing press, radio, TV, internet and smartphones together and we’re not even close to the impact at which we’re going to change our lives.

(Chat)GPT

Why should I bother with trying to explain to you how ChatGPT works, when CEO Sam Altman is still unraveling the “black box” and “pulling back the fog of war” himself? If the 200 IQ people over at OpenAI only have a partial understanding of what their creation is doing, what are we doing trying to explain this crazy new technology?

But I will attempt it in practical terms. So ChatGPT is a command line interface at the moment. You ask an artificial intelligence questions. It answers. That’s what you need to know. You ask it to write an essay, it writes an essay for you. Or a book in the style of Deepak Chopra. Or a never before heard piece of music in the style of Bach.

You can learn ChatGPT new things too. Input the manual of JavaScript, Python or Ruby and it can write actual code for you. No, completely novel apps. Although I’m pretty sure it does that already out of the box.

What’s interesting to me is that the very day that I started to write this article, Lex Fridman uploaded a conversation with Altman; OpenAI’s CEO. You can watch that below here or save it for later. I highly recommend you do and give Lex a follow if you’re not already.

Midjourney

I started this article with the story of browsing YouTube like a dopamine deprived zombie while coming across these awesome thumbnails. Philosophers painted by some artist you’ve never heard about. Landscapes that make you wonder where they are. Truly spectacular works of art I thought. Nope. AI generated. All of the ones that spoke to me. The creators weren’t that transparent about it. But the comment section was. “Midjourney” was the reaction I saw most often. Apparently, some competitor to DALL·E, ChatGPT’s visual version. At the time, I was using Midjourney V2 casually. After casually playing around with it a little, I blinked and it got upgraded to version 3. And it could do so much more, much more accurately. Just tell it to paint a picture in the style of your favorite painter and voila: a work of art. Totally free. Totally yours.

The Uncanny Valley

Then Midjourney 4 came out and it started to do photos really well. With hilarious hijinks. Hands were always mangled and there was always some weird thing going on. The Uncanny Valley struck again; when something looks so real, but is off enough to make you uncomfortable. Dolls and robots are adept at that.

Now we’re at version 5 and the Uncanny Valley is out the window. Sure, hands are still prone to Midjourney memes from time to time, but I’ve shared images with my friends showing off Midjourney V5’s capabilities. And boy did Midjourney pass the Turing test. (A test designed to see if people can correctly distinguish AI from actual people).

So maybe you’ve noticed a little change in my writing as well. More blatant, direct, harsh even. I think it goes hand in hand with my main message of this gradual pivot into embracing the rise of AI. I don’t care about opinions surrounding art. Especially my art. You’ve seen that in my presence on social media (no presence: post and run), in my choice of editing and in my decision not to enable comments on my blog. When I thought of wanting to make money with photography 14 years ago, I made a pact with my future self: “if at any point you don’t feel like doing it, don’t, but never let others tell you to change nor stay the same”.

The Future

The reason AI like ChatGPT matters is not only what it can do currently, but it is actually a stepping stone towards artificial general intelligence (AGI). AGI is where most people think Terminator’s “SkyNet”, Star Trek’s “The Borg” or The Matrix’ “Machine World” GPT is probably the most complex software object anyone has ever created. GPT-4 has about 100 trillion parameters (the same number of synapses in a typical adult human brain). It is trained on all of humanity's available written knowledge that could be found on the internet. Think about that.

No wonder people think these large language models have become sentient.

Watching our back

My buddy is the AI guy. He finally got his Tesla after years of debating which model, trim and type of purchase (operational lease, financial lease, cash, Tesla shares), to the point where his girlfriend believed, he's never actually going to get one. But he did and he actively puts in the hours to make its self-driving capabilities better by providing diligent feedback.

He's on top of all this. His 5 cents on the matter is that we should be watching the Teslabot. That humanoid robot is equipped with the self-driving AI that a million cars and counting are providing, they will be self-replicating, will be driving any other cars themselves, and make boring, menial, dangerous and crappy jobs obsolete.

In a dystopian world view, it will be the actual Terminator. The Animatrix and Star Trek's Borg all spring to mind when we discuss prophets of science fiction, but I really am optimistic about this. Which is weird, because I tend to dream about all sorts of cataclysms. But again we digress. AI is going to shape our lives, jobs and future. And whether it's cyberpunk dystopian or Roddenberry utopian, we do not yet know. Although we have a pretty good inkling about how creative jobs are affected. And that’s where Midjourney comes in today.

Disclosure

I've never felt the obligation to tell anyone how or where an image was made. Cameras and lenses are tools. So are brushes and so are Photoshop, Luminar TK Actions and Lightroom. As for location disclosure, that's a bit of a different discussion, because most of the time me not location tagging is deliberate protection of delicate natural habitats. And why would we want to perpetuate comp stomping; finding the exact tripod holes of the photo you found on insta? Just download the picture and be done with it. As before, I didn't disclose whether or not it was a composite. I never felt the need to. I didn't sign a waiver somewhere for the community to agree or disagree with my creative choices. Nor did I ever say it was a single photograph. I find it so pretentious when I see a person writing that in the description. Especially when the photo isn't even that good. In art, I care about what I'm looking at. Not about the brushes you used and certainly not about the ones you didn't. I will not be disclosing whether or not it's a photograph, or generated by AI in the future.

However, I did change my bio, my tagline, my website, about page, updated my galleries to include stuff I'm happy with, my social channel bios and anything else just before this blog went live. I think it covers the extent of what I do; landscape and mushroom photography, digital/composite art and prompt engineering. Although I found prompt composing much more fitting. The reason I kept it under wraps is that my new tutorial video is all about this brave new world. But this is not a marketing ploy. It's an experiment. A social Turing test if you will. And I haven't read one single comment yet that the last few "photos" I posted on instagram were fake, shitty or AI generated. And yet they were AI generated. I trained ChatGPT on producing prompts that lead to spectacular results in Midjourney, based on actual photos I took myself or based on "the visual style by landscape photographer Daniel Laan (Laanscapes)”. Here’s an example that’s the result of that:

Conclusion

25-30 years ago, Kasparov got defeated by deep blue and he said something along the lines of "Chess is over now". ChatGPT boss Altman argues that chess is more popular today than it has ever been. And we don't watch two AIs play each other. To me, that instills hope into the future of wherever this all takes us. There might be a future for writers, photographers, painters and illustrators yet.

Where do I stand on the subject? I think it's a brave new world. I love experimenting with new technology. Especially when there's an art to it. You still need to come up with the questions or prompts for those language models to get the desired output. In that sense it's a shortcut to being creative. It just lacks developing a skill or honing a craft. Do I care about that? Meh, not as much as I used to. I can go all purist and say that we need to capture it all in camera, but I'm not that guy. And after having read that countless times in comments, in articles and seen it on YouTube everywhere, I'm so far beyond that discussion that it's old hat. I've moved on from that a long time ago. And using Midjourney, ChatGPT or both to produce images that offer me the wow factor, is just fascinating and fun to me.

Maybe you'll follow me in this ever evolving creative journey. Maybe I can teach you what I've learned. Maybe this is where you and I part ways. Again, it's not about the community aspect of it. It's about the freedom of creative self-expression.

Thank you for reading this. It means a lot to get my thoughts across in written form and having you read it.

-Daniel

The Rise of AI and the Potential Fall of Photography