Pablo Picasso once said, "Good artists copy, great artists steal." Which was his way of saying that great art builds on the works of our predecessors.

All great artists have studied and initially copied the techniques, the styles, the brilliance of past masters to take them in new directions and create new concepts. This is what they did, this is what I will do and do it in a transformative way.

I would submit that the creative process is the art, the result is merely the end product of that creative process.

The long tradition of photography has been the image capture with a camera, and the darkroom process of realizing and interpreting the image. The original digital versions, Lightroom, etc., simply made that process easier and faster (and environmentally kinder), with the process remaining fundamentally the same. So, do we cling to that "old school" process or not? I say yes because that is precisely what photography is.

If an image is AI generated in whole or part, it is no longer a photograph. It is somewhere in the realm of photo-graphics, which, if you say what you did, is fine, but say it, clearly. Put another way, is it a photograph or merely source material for some other graphic endeavor?

 In his most recent blog post, Bruce Percy laments the prospect of the basic tools of manual photographic processing disappearing as keystrokes and presets replace human control. The "perfect picture" is now available to anyone, except it is not a picture but an aggregation of algorithms. The camera is barely necessary if at all. Manual control is essential to the artistic process and realization, otherwise, there is no creativity.

The arts and sciences are the highest forms of human expression. It is my personal belief that AI will not supplant human artistic expression because that is the very essence of who we are.