Many photographers have been using artificial intelligence to improve their photography for denoising, sharpening or upscaling, but one photographer thought he’d try another way – ask a chatbot for its opinion on his work. The results are hilarious.
Landscape photographer Todd Dominey posted a video to his YouTube channel, @dominey, where he explained what happened when he asked the latest version of ChatGPT whether it liked his work.
“I’m excited to see what’s going to happen here, so let’s jump in,” he says, before showing a landscape image he took last autumn in New Mexico.
He types, “Give me some honest and unbiased feedback on this landscape image of mine and provide helpful tips and recommendations for how the image could be improved if I were to photograph it again.”
Despite starting positively, the chatbot has a few things to say about Dominey’s composition. “Uh oh,” he says as he reads, “subject emphasis while the rock formations themselves are interesting – uh oh, here we go – the eye can wander a bit trying to pick a primary subject consider a composition that emphasizes one key rock.”
The chatbot goes on to describe the image as “busy,” suggesting “when shooting next time, try positioning the camera lower or incorporating a particularly striking foreground rock that anchors the front portion of the frame.
“Leading lines: look for the natural lines formed by cracks or ridges in the rock that direct the viewer's attention into the scene. If you can align those lines so they guide the eye towards a main subject in the mid-ground or background it will create a stronger flow through the image.”
Describing the image as “crunchy” Chat GPT suggests, “you might experiment with selective contrast or clarity adjustments on the rocks to bring out the tiny details and layer texture.”
Dominey takes all the AI-generated commentary with good humor, even agreeing with some of it, responding, “Oh my god, 'crunchy'! Such a great word. I mean, that's totally a word that I would use. Onto the next thing, depth and scale. ‘When conveying scale in a vast landscape with unusual rock formations, it can be helpful to introduce a reference point to convey scale’.
“I've noticed this a number of times. Like when other people see my my images, and often times people have a hard time understanding what the scale is, because the images end up being somewhat abstract. But then again, I can't go out and put a banana in the scene, or I can't introduce something that's not there just for the sake of scale. And god no, I'm not going to put myself into the photo – I have no interest in doing that.”
ABOVE: Watch Dominey talk us through ChatGPT's critique
Overall, Dominey thinks that AI could be a useful tool for photographers to objectively analyze their work:
“Just think for a second about how useful it could be if there was some type of chatbot built into Lightroom, built into Photoshop. Some kind assistant, almost like having a creative director sit next to you – someone that you could say, what do you think about this? Does this look too warm, does it look too cool? Do I have enough texture in detail? How would you critique this image? How would you improve this image?
“It's way more helpful to have some kind of unbiased eye or ear on your work that can analyze it and provide recommendations, and help you improve. And that's not just for editing an image but that's also analyzing the composition of an image or the focal length that you used.
“I think just from an educational perspective for people who are trying to learn the ropes and looking for advice, even if it's from a bot that is basically giving you a bunch of tried and true best practices, those are still valuable things and it still can be helpful.”
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