On the process of image creation with artificial intelligence: rephotography using midjourney AI

When we make images using text-to-image AI systems like Midjourney, what precisely are we making? In the context of significant cultural, political and legal uncertainty about the status of AI-generated imagery, this paper reports on a practical experiment in rephotography. The authors attempted to recreate four notable American photographs in Midjourney: Vivian Maier’s Untitled self-portrait (circa. 1954), Gregory Crewdson’s Untitled (Twilight), (1998-2002), Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California (1936), and Joe Rosenthal’s Flag Raising on Iwo Jima (1945). The practice of rephotography, which seeks on one hand to faithfully reproduce and on the other hand to reveal difference, enables us to compare human and AI-generated photography as practice. We find that the AI system exhibits bias in its default perspective, likely an artefact of training data scraped from the open Internet. Specifically, we find: (1) AI images give prominence to main subjects in a way that appears to reflect a late capitalist, consumer gaze; (2) AI images ‘hallucinate’ details that reduce human intentionality and control; (3) AI images are detached from the social and historical context that gives human photographs meaning. Despite these striking differences, we consider emancipatory and critical potential for AI imagery as an artform. Creative possibilities present themselves in rendering visible the probabilistic links between datasets, user prompts and outputs.