There are few things that make me more upset these days than a company encouraging artists to betray other artists in favor of AI slop. Adobe famously did that, as reported by PetaPixel. (They later tried to clarify what they meant, but in my opinion it did a better push to get photographers off of Adobe products than any ad campaign run by a competitor. Photographers weren’t their target audience, though.)
Well, I’ve found something that’s close. Apparently Ricoh and DJI are fans of using slop in their ads, which is strange as you’d think camera companies should have a photographer or two on the payroll, right?
I’m going to assume that neither company has enough faith in the quality of their hardware to consistently show us images made with their cameras, even cherry-picked ones.
I’d love to end this post on a happier note than this. I want to shout from the rooftops that open source exists, and it does, but open source hardware isn’t so much a thing.
Of course there’s used hardware. Aim for that and not a single penny goes to the manufacturer. That’s getting harder to do, as prices for used equipment continue to increase.
So how about this.
How about we just make art. Let’s celebrate what we can do. It doesn’t need to be perfect. It doesn’t even need to be good. It just needs to be ours.
We don’t need to think about Ricoh, DJI, or even Adobe when we do this. We can use whatever tools we have, perhaps borrowing or loaning things where needs and surpluses exist.
I don’t think that’ll solve the problems here. I don’t know how to do that.
But I know sometimes it’s worthwhile to find one’s joy anyway. I find a lot of mine in art, so I’m going to go make some.
Find your joy.