00:00 Earlier this year, this photo by Berlin artist Boris Elgazden won a Sony World Photography
00:05 Award.
00:06 Sony's press release called it "haunting" and "reminiscent of the visual language
00:09 of 1940s family portraits."
00:11 But Boris rejected the award because this photo was AI-generated.
00:16 As a person who makes a living as a photographer and videographer, on principle I want to hate
00:20 all of this work and all of the tools that make it possible.
00:23 But in reality, I haven't been able to look away.
00:26 So I went to Berlin.
00:27 Mom, I made it!
00:28 To see how it's done.
00:30 I'm Boris Elgazden.
00:31 I'm a Berlin-based visual artist working with photography, video installation, and
00:38 for one and a half years now working with artificial intelligence.
00:42 These are pieces from Boris' series "Pseudomnesia No. 3," meaning "fake memories."
00:47 It fuses the visual language of the 1940s and post-war photography with abstract art.
00:52 It was entirely created with text-based AI image generators.
00:55 Text forms for me are quite complex.
00:57 I can go up to 13 text-formed elements, and you see they're kind of poetic.
01:03 He considers himself a "promptographer," or someone who uses text-to-image generators
01:08 to create the visual imagery that he wants.
01:11 And his process takes a great deal of time.
01:13 What you're about to see is a graphical representation of that process.
01:16 I still like to start with text-to-image.
01:20 The result is just an interim product.
01:22 I use the result and I blend it in mid-journey.
01:27 That again is just an interim product.
01:30 I use those images, combine them with text, so it becomes an image prompt, create something
01:37 new out of it.
01:38 And this I do multiple times.
01:41 And in the end, I spend one or two days in post-production doing what in the past was
01:47 called in-painting, out-painting, and what Photoshop calls these days generative fill
01:52 or expand.
01:54 And then it can take two months to have 15 images produced.
02:00 But clearly there's more to it than that.
02:03 So after he told me about his process, I asked him if he would sit down and show me how it's
02:07 done.
02:08 Here, Boris is using mid-journey, which you access via Discord.
02:11 I could also use a negative text prompt.
02:14 It's one of many generative AI programs.
02:17 Weights, and they can be positive or negative.
02:20 One that I thought I was quite familiar with, but Boris was speaking a whole different language.
02:24 I could now exchange certain elements.
02:27 And I was totally confused.
02:29 I want to have the seed of those images.
02:32 My red flag is thinking that I can do anything that anyone else can do.
02:36 So after spending two days with Boris and learning all about his process, I came home
02:39 to see if I could do it too.
02:41 More on that after the break.
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03:13 The best thing about attempting to be a promptographer is that you really don't need much to make
03:16 it happen.
03:17 I'm going to start with a simple object, a pancake, and then I'm going to try to build
03:20 a scene around it and have it look like film photos that I love, which are usually an Ektar
03:24 100.
03:25 It's my favorite film stock.
03:26 And then I'm also going to try to put it in the 1970s, because that's something that I
03:29 can't really do IRL.
03:32 Imagine a pancake.
03:34 How could this possibly go wrong?
03:36 Okay, here we go.
03:39 Those are good pancakes.
03:41 It leaned cartoon for three of the four.
03:45 Let's change that.
03:46 Let's change that.
03:47 The first thing Boris taught me was to build out my prompt.
03:50 Pancake photorealistic, diner, 1970, film texture, Kodak Ektar.
03:57 I like the text on the building over here.
04:00 I want more of that.
04:02 It's giving me kind of what I want, but I want more of like a scene.
04:06 This feels very stock still.
04:09 I also feel like it's not really getting my film look.
04:12 My process continued on like this for hours.
04:15 Boom, green.
04:17 What happened here?
04:19 We got wonky forks.
04:21 And it looks like the ceiling fell down on this stack of pancakes.
04:24 How do I reel this in?
04:26 It also didn't give me any text on that last one I want.
04:29 And with each prompt came incredibly different results.
04:33 So many pancakes.
04:35 And then I remembered what Boris told me about seeds.
04:38 The seed is like a geolocation in the latent space of the training data.
04:45 And using the same seed over and over again, you can really work on a text prompt.
04:50 If you put the same prompt into Midjourney twice, it will always generate different images.
04:54 That's because this program was designed to be random.
04:57 But every time you generate an image, the program selects a seed value for it.
05:01 And in really simple, not technical terms, the seed value is like a code for a particular
05:06 look and feel.
05:07 So if you want to maintain a consistent look with each image generation, you have to input
05:11 a similar prompt and then also input the same seed value as a previous image that you liked.
05:16 This process will help you fine tune a prompt.
05:19 I really liked what I got here and I have the seed.
05:21 So now I'm going to use the same prompt with the same seed.
05:26 And I should get a very similar result that I can then manipulate and change.
05:31 Fingers crossed.
05:33 After many hours and even more stacks of pancakes, I still hadn't achieved the exact look I
05:38 was going for, though I was happy with some of the things I was getting.
05:42 I feel like I'm just scratching the surface of any sort of skill that Boris has achieved.
05:49 I mean, this like, this could not be more different than picking up a camera and taking
05:54 a photo, even if the results are similar.
05:58 Which brings us all the way back to that photo competition that Boris duped.
06:02 When he entered his work into the Sony World Photography Awards, his intention was to make
06:05 a statement about the need to recognize the work he was doing as something different from
06:10 photography.
06:11 No, I think it's very important that it's separated into different categories or different
06:19 competitions because the way the image is produced is differently.
06:25 It's different technologies.
06:26 It's different forms of images.
06:28 It doesn't matter if they look the same.
06:30 It is not the same.
06:32 I can have a plastic lemon and a real lemon and they don't taste the same.
06:36 And that is what I'm trying to help, to get going.
06:43 This is why we needed a new terminology.
06:45 My suggestion was promptography.
06:48 And this is why it's important to talk about workflow and motivation.
06:52 Photographers tend to go out into the world, to be present at a certain location, interacting
06:59 with people.
07:00 Yes, there is technology and AI in the cameras, but we are still needing light that is reflected
07:05 from them.
07:06 And creating images with AI, you don't.
07:09 I can sit in a dark cellar.
07:10 I just need my technology and Wi-Fi and that's it.
07:16 On our last night in Berlin, there was an opening for Boris's work at a gallery that's
07:20 dedicated to AI-generated art.
07:23 So what you're looking at is both AI-generated photos and found photos from the time.
07:28 All of the real photos are in brown frames and the AI-generated and manipulated images
07:33 are not in frames.
07:36 Seeing Boris's process and knowing how these images were created completely changed how
07:40 I viewed them that night.
07:46 Going forward, it's going to be important that everybody knows how the images that they're
07:49 viewing were created, which is something we are very much struggling to do currently.
07:55 And giving Promptography a platform allows everyone to know more about the tools that
07:58 are available.
08:00 And in Boris's mind, this will advance all art forward.
08:03 There is a study about chess.
08:05 And you know at a certain level in time, humans were not able to win against chess computers.
08:11 But did we stop?
08:13 No.
08:14 We continued to play and we used chess computers for training.
08:18 So the level on which chess is played today is much higher than before the invention of
08:24 chess computers.
08:26 Incorporating and making use of AI creativity, our creativity can get onto a higher level
08:32 and maybe the transformative creativity is something we can focus on.
08:36 This is not the entire story of AI-generated art.
08:39 There are some big problems here around the legality of the training data.
08:44 Where are these models learning from and are those artists being compensated properly?
08:49 We made an entire video about it.
08:50 I'll link it down below.
08:51 I'm Becca.
08:52 Thank you for joining me.
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