In 2019, I had the honor of photographing and interviewing media theorist Lev Manovich. While his writing has always been a step or two ahead of the rest of us when it comes to the intersections of technology and visual culture, his words on that day have become almost uncanny to read in light of current debates about AI:
"Photography is what Artificial Intelligence can't do. Computers can detect the presence of many thousands [of] types of objects in a photograph, predict age, gender, and ethnicity of people, measure their facial expressions, and describe all colors. But this is all irrelevant when you are in the presence of a great photograph. What makes its great remains a mystery. In fact, AI’s ability to describe many different things in a photograph—contrast, composition, textures, faces, etc.—only makes this mystery greater, in my view. But this is how it’s supposed to be, anyway. If we could precisely predict all nuances of our responses to art, it would be no longer needed. And the presence of billions of photographs today shared by hundreds of millions of people daily does not diminish this mystery either, nor does it devalue the power of great photography. It only makes such photographs stand out, and affect us in the way we can't (luckily) understand rationally."
