Can anything on the internet be trusted anymore? On Friday, hundreds of people were fooled by a convincing post that went viral on the two Instagram: (opens in new tab) and Twitter by French photographer Mathieu Stern, featuring beautifully crafted images of medium format and film cameras, along with an accompanying full fictional history lesson on their unique origins.
Mathieu Stern used the emerging trend of AI-image generators to create stunning images of porcelain cameras, then contextualized them with the tale that they were allegedly created by artisans commissioned by the great Chinese emperor Qianlong after he fell in love with the art. of photography.
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Experimental photographer and YouTuber, Matthew Stern (opens in new tab)pranked the Internet last week, easily tricking other photographers and social media users via Twitter and Instagram into believing he had a real collection of beautiful porcelain cameras that were once owned and commissioned by the great Chinese emperor Qianlong (1711-1799). , created by its team of dedicated artisans.
The images from these cameras are not real at all and were actually created by Stern using Midjourney. (opens in new tab)a powerful Discord-based AI image generator that can generate any image based on a plain or descriptive text prompt provided to it in the chat server.
Midjourney can create images in minutes that either look super realistic or sometimes have a bit more of a fine art effect, presumably by getting work and elements from other online artists blended into the AI creation process.
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Some of the responses to Stern’s post show that the internet can be quite gullible and easy to fool, although few have actually looked into the illegality of porcelain cameras and their history, noting that the Fifth Emperor of the Qing Dynasty reigned from 1735-1796. and that the camera and the daguerreotype imaging process were not invented until 1839.
It is true that the facts and history surrounding the invention of photography and Talbot’s creation of the first lattice window are not necessarily known to every photographer, especially those who have been lucky enough to avoid writing an essay on the subject, so it is quite easy for some to believe , that these cameras were actually manufactured in 17th century China.
When asked why he chose this original idea of porcelain cameras in the first place, Mathieu shared with us that “I had already done some experiments with artificial intelligence cameras that looked like Star Wars characters and cameras made were made of stone and wood, but this project was more about having a real object that could possibly exist and seeing if I could make it quite realistic.”
The great Chinese emperor Qianlong admired the art of photography, and he commissioned his best craftsmen to create a series of cameras made entirely of porcelain. #midjourneyV4 #filmcamera #camera #aicinema #aiartcommunity pic.twitter.com/AkNeBZbTmZDecember 9, 2022
The images of the porcelain cameras that Stern shared on social media are definitely convincing AI-generated photos and don’t look distorted in any way, or show any obvious glitches that most AI-generated images can have. The text and historical contextualization of these images relating to the emperor and his porcelain cameras was also created using AI.
Using software called ChatGPT, a conversational artificial intelligence chatbot prototype developed by OpenAI, the same intelligence company and research lab (with Elon Musk as founder) responsible for the hugely popular Dall-E 2 for: (opens in new tab)generator, Stern was able to create not only real and well-written explanatory images behind the scenes, but barely had to type a word himself.
Mathieu exclusively shared with us that “ChatGPT helped me create a story about an emperor and how he fell in love with photography, I came up with the general idea of the story and asked the AI to fill in the gaps and make it more likeable. museum explanation”.
The resulting images were stunning, and the emperor was so pleased with the camera that he ordered several more to be made for his court photographers. pic.twitter.com/QDau6mTmbiDecember 9, 2022
One of the Instagram users commented. and was also in on the joke, urging Stern to go a step further and create one of the images these porcelain cameras could hypothetically produce.
Stern then shared the image below of herself Twitter account (opens in new tab) With the inscription “Here is a photo taken with one of the cameras.”
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Some Twitter users were delighted with the (fake) result of the cameras, although others pointed out that while the AI did a pretty good job, the text on the subject’s clothing was not made up of actual Chinese characters, but in fact complete nonsense, although we may need to fact-check to have
Stern has also previously shown off several other AI-generated movie camera designs inspired by the Star Wars franchise, created using the Dall-E 2 AI image generator, as well as additional pieces of concept art that hint at Ralph’s style. : Macquarie and Doug Chiang, two designers of the Star Wars universe.
The example above is what Stern produced using the Dall-E 2 generator created by OpenAI, and the post below shows slightly more polished (in my opinion) creations produced using another generator, Midjourney AI- which Stern also used to produce deceptive porcelain camera images.
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