Protecting “photography” from “AIFI”
Many photographers are enthusiastically embracing AIFI, incorporating it without hesitation into their workflow and seeing it as an almost limitless new tool for creating many kinds of images.
But other photographers choose to make photographs specifically because they value the art of “recording with light.” They worry that AIFI will extinguish photography’s unique role in culture (thereby “killing the goose that lays the golden eggs”).
These photographers fear that AIFI will turn photography into just another variation of graphic illustration, never tethered to any specific record of “what one person saw, in one small corner of the world, at one unrepeatable moment in time.” (Quoted from FAQ #120)
With TTG being the largest area of the photography world where photography will never be displaced by AIFI (see FAQ #104), a photographer’s use of the TTG label is a declaration of affinity for the “light recording” role of photography.
See also this brief.
About that goose...
“Killing the goose that laid golden eggs” is an idiom referring to
“Destroying the source of things of great value after failing to realize that those ‘things of value’ depended on that source.”
The phrase is based on one of Aesop’s Fables:
• A farmer had a goose that laid a golden egg every day.
• The farmer assumed that the goose must be full of gold.
• The farmer killed the goose to get the gold inside.
• The farmer found the goose’s insides to be like those of any other goose.
• The farmer was left with no new gold and no way to get more of it.
• The farmer realized too late that the only way to keep generating something of particular value (“golden eggs”) is to safeguard the source (“the goose”).
The “favicon” (the browser-tab image) for this website is a golden egg.