When photography first arrived it was thought able to liberate traditional forms of art from the need to accurately and figuratively represent life. Since then, photography has had an ambiguous relationship with 'truth' - we tend to assume that the camera does not lie but we know that it often does, leaving its output open to our own projections of what we want or need to see as the truth.
With the arrival of the AI bot in the artist's toolkit, neither intention nor execution can be considered honest or accurate. Sometimes the bot is told to lie and sometimes it just makes stuff up. Either way, no image, apparently photographic or otherwise, can be trusted any more: there can be no default assumption of truth. As in pre-enlightenment times, truth is now unambiguously a matter of choice rather than fact.
© Tim Ashley
