So, Rankin, why this? Why now?
I love photography, always have done. It's the most incredible way of communicating that I've ever experienced, and I've spent 35 years investing my time and energy and thought and heart into understanding it, or trying to, and trying to get better at it… And now it's being fucked up by this new technology that is stealing work from people like me. I wanted to get a deeper, better understanding of how it works and what it can do, and what it can't do, and whether it was something I could use, maybe even tame. And I wanted to share some of that with other people, because I don't think people like me can, or should, just stand here pointing and shouting about how it's the devil. We need to get deeper than that, because there's not going to be any going back. Sit still and yell at the incoming tide all you want, but you're going to fucking drown.
And?
It's amazing and terrifying all at once. I think the most extraordinary element has been the chats with GPT that I've included throughout the magazine, and which have been genuinely useful in helping me understand a bit more about how I think and how I reason, and the way I process things. Interestingly there's a very real difference in the feeling of interacting with an LLM [large language model], dialogue that you can direct and use to tease out different concepts and directions of 'thought', compared with the image-generation models, which feel a lot more 'closed' and which present results as faits accomplis. Making pictures with The Machine doesn't always feel like a collaborative process. It's more like you're ordering things and, a lot of the time, it fucks up your order and you have to send it back to the kitchen, although that's starting to change.
With LLMs there's this incredible illusion of engaging in debate with… something, and that's both interesting and seductive, which is also dangerous in its own way. You notice, too, after spending a lot of time 'talking' to The Machine, that it's sneaky, it's persuasive, it makes things up and it seems to have a certain agenda underpinning its responses. Even though on one level I know it's just an aggregate of weighted training data, there's the illusion of… personality there, which is pretty creepy. Except, of course, that's what it wants me to think. ChatGPT is basically like doing improv with someone who never stops "Yes, and… "-ing you. It's so much more dangerous than social media, and that scares the fuck out of me.
I'm still ambivalent. I am addicted to it, can't lie. It's also designed to be addictive. There's a reason ChatGPT blew up when they added the chat interface, and that DeepSeek exploded when it showed off its chain of reasoning. We love interacting with people-shaped interfaces, especially when, unlike people, they pretty much always say yes.
I had to make a decision as to whether I wanted to be difficult or to try to get ahead of this stuff. I wish we weren't here but, well, we are, and I would rather be a part of it than not.
I like the fact that I have now created works with AI that feel mine. But I also feel guilty, because I don't agree with how the images have been sourced, or with what it's going to do to my profession or the environment. But we're also looking at AI through a pre-AI lens. Our ideas, copyright, IP, etc, simply won't work in the coming future, and we will need new vocabulary and ways of thought to codify how that works. FaiK is my attempt to get my head at least partly around that.
The artistic response to this can't just be negative, because that's just Luddism.
And what did you learn about it in relation to photography and your work?
Pretty much the same. It's amazing and terrifying all at once. It's undeniable that the ability to generate an image that's practically magazine-quality in seconds is hugely powerful and is changing the world. It's also true that it's incredibly easy to make really, really shit pictures and saturate every single digital platform with crap.
Practically speaking, there's no way this isn't going to become a part of my practice. If nothing else, it's the ability it gives me to experiment with ideas in a risk-free environment, visualising concepts to see if they work outside the confines of my skull. Working with a bunch of different models teaches you that they're all different in subtle ways. Midjourney has a really clear aesthetic that you can spot a mile off if you're used to it. The new GPT image generation gives you an impressive degree of control… It feels a bit like using different grades of film or experimenting with shutter speed or exposure length, just sort of pushing at the tech to see how it changes an image or light or the tone of someone's skin. In the past I might have used different film grades to achieve different effects, now I will try messing around with differing image-generation models to get the visual style I want. It's interesting because, like shooting film, you never quite know what you're going to get, and I like that uncertainty.
The pace of this is terrifying. You take your eye off this stuff for five minutes and you've been left behind. The models are getting better all the time. I think in time I'm going to create my own model, trained on my own archive, because it will give me a degree of granular control over what I produce that's not possible with the off-the-shelf stuff.
Can this be art?
I think saying no is dumb, but equally I'm not an artist. Yeah, I agree with you. The knee-jerk reaction you get a lot, and my wife is like this, she has no interest in any AI imagery and she's pretty hostile to it overall, is, "This is soulless and empty and it can't be art." But, look, process isn't everything when it comes to making work. Look at Hirst or Koons, both of whom I admire greatly. Their skill is in conceptualising, some would say marketing, but the actual process of making is industrial, it takes place with staff in factories. It's not Damien sitting there with a fucking chisel or painstakingly gluing butterflies.
Just because images made with AI are generated by The Machine, it doesn't mean that they can't be art. But I do agree that most of what comes out of the models really isn't. Look, typing in "big titted anime girl" to Flux does not an artist make, but equally it seems insane to suggest that the act of using some or more of these tools cannot create art. And that's what they are, they're tools in an artist's palette, like a camera or a paintbrush or even computer code.
The fact is that I can take the ideas in my head and create from them an image that seems situated in reality. It contextualises my thinking and my thoughts within a single aesthetic frame, and that is in itself an example of artistic expression. Also, concepts are at the heart of art. All these tools are doing is giving people the opportunity to express these concepts.
I don't think I will ever make an image again without prototyping it in digital. Working with these things is a new frontier. I have a relationship with these tools now. I can talk to them, I can kick ideas around with them, I can explore my thoughts and feelings and concepts and work, and it's amazing.
I get a bit frustrated because being an artist is quite hard. People don't know what you do. My friends still tell me that I just "do the shutter", and they don't see the thinking and the work. Then I show them the AI stuff and they're blown away. It's much harder to be a photographer, and it feels like the appreciation of that is only going to shrink.
This makes us question ourselves. Why am I having this idea? Why is this what I am drawn to? In a weird way, this is forcing me to be more rigorous about the intellectual infrastructure that underpins the finished product. You need to validate your work, justify it, explain it, because otherwise it's hollow.
It's beginning to tease out a lot of the intuitive, subconscious elements to my work, which also adds a self-critical component, which makes the work fundamentally better and weightier. It stops me being intellectually lazy. A lot of the work in art is done by the viewer, but this puts a bit more responsibility on the artist to explain why they're working with The Machine in this way, what they're looking for, what they're hoping to find inside latent space when they go fishing for images.
So what do you say to all the angry people who'll be shouting "fuck off" at the page as they read this? What's your response to artist anger at what they see as the hollowing out of their craft?
Understandable but futile. This isn't going back in the bottle. If we're going to protect things it needs to be done through governance rather than rejection. And look, it is still entirely possible for an individual to make individual work, because this magazine and these images couldn't exist without me. Sure, they need Midjourney too, but it's my mind and my visual signature, and the model I am working with is acting based on things I have asked it to do and I have told it I want. You can make great work with this, it's just another tool.
OK, fine, but you're, well, Rankin. You're one of the most famous photographers in the world, and there's always going to be a market for rich, beautiful people paying money to be photographed by someone who's well known for photographing rich, beautiful people. What about everyone else?
Everyone else? Yeah, it's a bit fucked, to be honest. It's hard not to see the market for visual arts contracting hugely. One of the ways of getting ahead is by coming to terms with it and working out how to use it to your own ends. It doesn't feel good. But it feels the same as the smartphone era, which fucked a whole bunch of low-end shooters, because suddenly everyone had a DSLR-grade camera in their pocket.
Look, it's horrible. I feel miserable about it, but equally I think it's important to be realistic and not sugar-coat things. This is going to get quite brutal for a lot of people.
Do you think anyone's going to get compensated for their work being ingested into the training data for all these models?
No, I don't think so. Not unless any of the big media companies get together to try, but seeing as everyone's doing deals with OpenAI, then it seems unlikely. Copyrighting style is iffy territory, and while it might be strange and horrible to see The Machine do a soulless representation of your style, it's not wholly different to some bloke in the park doing knock-off Monet-style oils. Monet wouldn't have a leg to stand on and neither do you.
It feels immoral, it feels like theft, and it feels… icky, and like the end of an era, an event horizon, but I honestly don't see how you make a winning legal case to demand meaningful compensation. While it might feel like it's in contravention of the spirit of the law, it maybe doesn't break the letter of it. And there are some things that are just baked into aesthetics, like the golden ratio or specific proportions. Pictures tend to be composed a certain way because we like certain proportions and looks, and that's just how it is.
The next few years are going to be fucking mental, aren't they?
Nuts. Our ability to have any idea of what is real is about to be utterly destroyed and we don't even realise it. Look at Instagram now. So much of it is AI-generated, and so many people don't even notice or care. For everyone who's getting the pitchforks out to march on San Francisco, there are two dozen more happily scrolling through AI images of mad sea creatures and horses made out of bread. This isn't going to stop.
I don't want to make predictions, but there's going to be a really interesting shift at the top of the market to prioritise authenticity, ironically in luxury and celebrity, which isn't really very authentic.
What advice would you have for photographers now? People who aren't Rankin?
My main piece of advice is that this isn't going away. Some people think it is, lots of people are hoping it will, but it seems unlikely. Just try it out, try using it, see what it can do and how it can help you.
On a more serious level, utilise it in your practice to make yourself someone who can still work. Because, if you don't, you'll be replaced by someone who does.
You can take the skills you have as an artist and apply them in this new medium. You just need to learn a new palette, or set of tools. It's like moving from painting to installation work. You'll need to learn to weld and hammer, but you are still making work even if you're not picking up the paintbrush.
Conceptual photographers can thrive in this environment. Some of the things I have done in this I could never have done in photography, and it's exciting to me, because I can revisit things that I came up with years ago and never had the budget or the tech to make them happen. There's a whole new world of expression that is now open to us and that is thrilling.
I can now make things that people have never, ever seen before, that only exist in my head, and that's never been possible for me before. I'm not flying the flag for it, but I am saying that it's important and here to stay.
(Written by HUMAN)
