Is AI conditioning us to obsess over perfection?

To get impatient when things run on normal, human speed?

To accept nothing less than polished, clean results?

Perfect, fast, clean output is sometimes good. But if it's at the cost of preserving the story or the human touch, I don't think it's worth it.

Especially when it comes to photography.

Working harder just to stay human

Recently I had a conversation with a friend about how AI is quickly interjecting into a lot of our everyday work and social relations. We’re going to have to work harder and harder just to keep things human.

So much of AI’s impact on photography right now is in polishing things, “improving” subjects, cleaning up imperfect images and giving an idealism to a scene that wasn’t there.

In essence, it’s correcting the raw, authentic reality of life.

Are we being trained to believe it needs correction?

Does this erase a bit of the story and our connection to it?

To delete, or not delete

The other day I was taking photos of a gorgeous sunset at the beach. I was working hard to get my iPhone to capture the scene as best as possible. But as I was reviewing my images after a series of shots, I noticed one of my favourite frames had a black speck.

Ugh! A mosquito! (there were soooooo many of them that evening)

I was just about to use the spot remove tool in Lightroom to remove it, but then I stopped myself.

Instead, I decided to keep the ugly mosquito in the shot.

Yes, that pesky insect that NO ONE LIKES was marring my perfect photo. But I decided to keep it anyway.

I realized that it was enhancing the humanness of the story.

No, it's no longer a polished sunset photo when distracting bugs are left in the frame.

But being human includes getting eaten by mosquitoes. While we enjoy great moments of beauty we’re also at the same time experiencing real moments of annoyance and pain.

We hold both realities at the same time. And that’s being human, isn’t it?

So next time you’re out taking photos and you’re trying to make your photos look as pristine as possible, stop and think about how to practice adding a raw, human touch to your photos.

People like seeing the real, unpolished stories through our photos, and as photographers, this is as human as we can get in an age of AI perfectionism.

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Hi I'm Gabrielle. I run a full time photography business in Winnipeg, specializing in portrait and commercial photography. This newsletter started with my passion for helping everyday people realize their full photography potential. With a bit of technical and creative help, you too can take better photos with the phone camera you already have.

Find more of my resources here:

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Gabrielle Touchette Photography

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