On the internet, it’s all they talk about – AI and how wonderful it is. In fact, AI is really advanced. It tries its best, writes wonderful texts, draws pictures, wins art contests… And while we all fear problems with AI, the problems are created by people themselves.

In fact, humanity is now facing a new question – how to perceive AI-generated art. After all, on the one hand, everything is done by the neural network, and on the other hand, it does it at the prompts of a person, and no one has canceled post-processing. In any case, here’s another situation for you to think about.

Viral Instagram photographer racked up nearly 30K followers with his portraits – only to reveal he used AI to generate them

Image credits: averyseasonart

The first photo was published on the photographer’s account in October 2022, and he has made over 160 since then

Image credits: averyseasonart

American photographer Jos Avery launched his Instagram account last October and has since gained an impressive 28.8K followers. The author publishes spectacular portraits, accompanying each with a story, giving names to each of the people in the photo. Jos willingly responds to comments, tells what camera and lens he uses (“a Nikon D810 with 24-70mm lens”), and thanks commenters for every enthusiastic review. And there is something to admire – all the portraits are really stunning.

Image credits: averyseasonart

Recently the author unveiled the truth, confessing that all the photos were actually generated by Midjourney based on his text prompts

Image credits: averyseasonart

But in fact, not everything turned out so smoothly – recently Jos himself admitted to Ars Technica that the vast majority of his content (about 95% of all photos) was actually generated using AI, namely the Midjourney service. This is a neural network which is able to generate images from text descriptions. However, working with such services is somewhat similar to gold digging – a painstakingly compiled prompt is required to get a really spectacular image at the output.

Image credits: averyseasonart

Jos admits that the original plan for his project was “to fool people to showcase AI and then write an article about it.” However, as we all know, all the roads to hell are paved with good intentions. The more followers appeared on Jos’s account, and the more rave comments he received, the more the photographer’s attitude towards the project changed. “Now it has become an artistic outlet. My views have changed,” Ars Technica quotes Jos.

Image credits: averyseasonart

Of course, the photographer also did a lot of work. In his own words, he generated over 13K different images, improving his prompts more and more. Then, Avery processed the resulting images in Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop. In other words, there is a clear symbiosis of human skills and machine intelligence. The next step in the development of art? Or just simple fraud? Who knows?

Image credits: averyseasonart

“I was also interested in the possibilities of Midjourney and similar services – was curious to see how realistic the photos are that AI generates,” says Ivan Strahov, a photographer from Ukraine, who was asked by Bored Panda to comment on this story. “Just as there is still no ‘Take a masterpiece’ button on any camera, neither do AI services give brilliant pictures at the prompts of two or three words. To get a truly outstanding portrait, you need, firstly, to imagine what exactly you want to get, secondly, to have a clear understanding of how the camera works, how the light is set and so on, and thirdly, to make high-quality processing of the resulting images.”

Image credits: averyseasonart

“Yes, all the portraits that are published on this account are carefully and well processed using software solutions familiar to every photographer. Therefore, it turned out to be a really good mix of photographic skills and AI capabilities. However, it seems to me that the photographer should note that he uses AI – it would be honest and, frankly, more interesting,” Ivan states.

Jos accompanies each photo with a thrilling story and lots of various hashtags. However, he still barely uses #ai hashtags under his posts, while many people keep on praising his skills

Image credits: averyseasonart

Jos Avery accompanies each of his posts with a large number of hashtags, but #ai or #aiart can only be found under a few of them. Some folks in the comments write that these portraits cannot be called real human art, and that the photographer should be frank about this. But the vast majority of comments still contain only admiration and praise for the author’s skills – and he still modestly thanks them.

In addition, you can see the copyright of the photographer on all the photos – but it is likely that he will have to remove it soon – after all, the US Copyright Office recently said you can’t copyright Midjourney AI-generated images. Yes, it was related to another art project, but the legal precedent has already been set.

Some commenters call it fraud and some people think it’s just the future of photography. Or “photography”

Image credits: averyseasonart

Over two thousand years ago, the great Roman philosopher Seneca said that “to err is human.” A hell of a lot of time has passed since then, but we are still prone to self-deception. And if you have already had a chance to chat with the very famous ChatGPT, you have noticed that the bot often makes mistakes itself – and willingly admits them. So it’s too early to worry about AI gaining true consciousness.

When, in response to being convicted of a mistake, artificial intelligence begins to play up, cheat and make excuses in every possible way, then there will be a reason to sound the alarm. In the meantime, just look at the photos of Midjourney and its loyal assistant Jos Avery, and maybe try to write something to him. We tried as well, but so far we haven’t received a response. After all, he’s only human…

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