Jose Avery said the AI tool has been extremely beneficial
Paris:
Jose Avery was given a camera nearly four decades ago, sparking a lifelong fascination with photography.
But last September he found a new creative outlet that’s inspired him to trick thousands of people: the artificial intelligence program Midjourney, which generates wild and wonderful images from brief text instructions.
“Immediately after starting Midjourney, I became obsessed with the creative possibilities,” Avery told AFP.
Midjourney and rivals such as the DAL-E2 and Stable Diffusion generate unique images by mashing up a huge back catalog of images on which they have been “trained”.
For Avery, a 48-year-old software engineer and lawyer by training from Virginia in the United States, midjourney was liberating.
He said it allowed him to create beautiful art without the need to deal with his social concerns.
“Then I wondered if I could create AI images that could pass for photographs,” he said.
This led to his fateful experiment: He started an Instagram account to house his midjourney output, without ever being entirely clear about the origins of the images.
– ‘deceptive’ –
“Initially, I don’t think many people thought the images were photographs,” he said. “The eyes and skin were unreal.”
He corrected these glitches with a dose of Adobe Photoshop, eventually populating his Instagram feed with stunning and stark portraits of beautiful — but unreal — people.
More users kept flocking to his feed, and more of them started believing the images to be real.
“People will ask in the comments about my camera and lens equipment,” he said.
“I will answer with the tools I actually used for the actual photos or the tools I included as part of the hint.”
He admits that their answers were “misleading” because they suggested that he had used his own gear to make those specific images.
Yet he delved deeper into the deception, spending hours selecting and editing images to boost realism and remove earlier attempts that were clearly AI-generated.
The number of his followers was increasing rapidly, so the experiment was successful.
But he was struggling to maintain the facade.
– losing sleep –
“It’s gone way beyond my expectations,” Avery said.
“The followers and my confusing answers made me uncomfortable, and I had trouble sleeping at night.”
He eventually told expert website Ars Technica what he had done, added a mention of AI to his Instagram biography, and began giving honest answers to his followers.
“I’ve slept much better since then,” he said.
Although he received some backlash—”I had to block about 30 people”—he said the overall response was positive, and his Instagram account, now with nearly 40,000 followers, is still growing.
These days he populates it with clearly labeled images originating from actual photography and midjourney.
He said the AI tool has been extremely beneficial, helping him find his love for portrait photography.
But the downside is that once again he’s not sleeping so well – he’s been up all night midjourney making images.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and was auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)