AI is taking the world by storm and anyone who does’nt acknowledge its power, potential, and possibly, threat, is living under a rock. As it threatens to eradicate a variety of job profiles that we see humans perform today, can we know if AI has set its evil gaze on wedding photography as well?
Here are some possible scenarios that come to my mind.
- AI will soon reach a stage of intelligence where given a few pictures of the would be bride, groom and their loved ones, the machine can magically transform them into a wedding scene of their choosing, all decked up. The family and relatives can be added to a spot of their liking and so will the priest, ritualistic items and everything else. These images no doubt can be stunning and taken from perspectives probably very difficult for a human photographer to accomplish. The entire wedding photo series is ready even before the actual wedding; no wedding photographers required.
- Those for whom the above approach is too extreme, may upload casual cell phone images shot by family and guests during the wedding into AI, which will then build a pretty good understanding of what happened and based on this learning, generate set of images which look nearly being shot by human photographers. Though none of them are real, they are based on reality. The AI can be commanded to control how much realism it should maintain in the final output.
- For those who don’t want to pester family and guests by asking them to upload all their pics to a cloud storage, perhaps, the next best thing would be to have multiple cameras installed at strategic locations and setup in time-lapse mode. Images from these cameras can be provided as input to the AI which will do its magic.
Although the above is certainly possible, none of it would be really ‘real‘. Wedding photography creates a very personal output – the images of the bride and groom, the family, friends, ceremonies, rituals, dresses and even their pets. There is realism and photo-journalistic approach to this imagery which is what we humans cherish. The importance of an event like wedding where two souls start a new journey, can not be over stated and I believe most people would like their new beginning to be remembered as it happened and not as imagined by a machine. So will AI kill wedding photography? NO I dont think so, as long as humans are getting married.
Pre-Wedding photography though can certainly change enormously if we think about how easy it already is for AI to change backgrounds, add sky, rocks, even animals and birds and butterflies to a picture. Perhaps couples who are short on time or budget can simply upload their cell phone pictures to the more advanced AI, give it the recipe of poses, backgrounds, locations, costumes etc etc and let it generate images of them in all these imaginary or real location backgrounds. Though not possible today, I don’t think AI is too far form accomplishing this…
By the way, I generated the featured image of this article using Bing AI Chat’s creative mode.
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