I’m a photographer and, while I consider myself too young to be old school, I evidently am old enough to see a gap between myself and younger photographers.

That gap, primarily, is one of software and editing. I hate editing photos. I will explain.

When you shoot film (as I still do), there are certain considerations that need to be made. You have to consider the limitations of the film (the film speed, how you meter the exposure, etc.), and it is within those confines that you can determine to either push or pull the film (basically under or over expose the image); and from there you can determine what you will do as far as developing the film to get certain levels of contrast.

Now, with current technology you can scan the image into the computer and use different software to achieve certain effects; but therein lies the question of authenticity.

That is why I shoot my digital images — typically — in jpeg format, because I am set within the limitations of the jpeg file and, in my mind, it is much like working with a particular film stock. The only real benefit of shooting a raw digital image is that you have access to all the information in the file for editing purposes.

I know some photographers who genuinely seem to love the editing process, and they will spend literally hours tweaking a photograph in one software or another. But the end result often looks too polished and somewhat artificial. And it looks like what everyone else is producing because this new group of photographers all do the same thing.

To make matters worse, with the introduction of artificial intelligence, so many programs now will do preset editing to achieve a particular look. Couple with that the fact that you can literally use AI to generate an image of someone out of nothing and even fabricate videos with it, and you might see my issue.

To me, photography is an art and ostensibly is considered as such empirically. So the question becomes: What is art?

To me, it is the genuine authenticity of what is being expressed by the artist within one medium or another. As a photographer, I might shoot with lighting differently from another photographer. I might choose black and white over color for a certain image. I might push for high contrast where another photographer might want something more even or flat.

And that is how I was able to generate business as a photographer in southeast Missouri, because I marketed the fact that my work didn’t look like what everyone else was doing. But it seems like every time I turn around, I am seeing more and more AI images. It’s getting more difficult to identify what is and isn’t real, and that’s unfortunate.

When we live in an age where someone can create something from nothing with the push of a button and call it art, then art — true art — no longer exists. There is no substitute for genuine creativity. So, in a world of growing artificial intelligence, I will always choose just regular old intelligence.