While many scorn AI, I think it's awesome. What most of my creative colleagues believe will happen to them, I think, won't. Technology serves us, and fearing it will just get in the way of using it creatively. In reality, AI can make work better....if you're already doing good work. Bad work will always weave its way in. People who made shitty images on film went on to make shitty images digitally.
It's argued that the digital camera has ruined photography. But the same could be said for the hand-held camera; in actuality, it democratized the medium and allowed us to photograph everything. You can't shoot the Vietnam War with a view camera...you can't report on the flattening of the Middle East with platinum prints.
When I went to Colombia last summer, I didn't photograph much. As reported a few posts ago, I spent much of the time in the Library researching. I interviewed elder scholars from the area who shared meaningful insights--and shaped four narratives. I passed one of these to a friend from the area for an opinion, and he said he couldn't read it...since what I'd written hit too close to home. I'd had a similar feeling when I read Marquéz's Love in the Time of Cholera (which takes place in Mompox, a town near where my project is set), since the characters' lives closely mirror my relatives'. One of the characters in the book even has the same surname.
I want to return to Colombia this summer, but the current political climate makes that unlikely. A colleague recently planned to visit Mompox, but was strongly advised against it. Recent instability in the area has made travel there unsafe, underscoring the distance between intention and reality. The impending presidential election there forces me to find ways to add to my project.
Enter AI. From the narratives I wrote, I translated them into Spanish. Ugh. Very stuffy and slow. I put them through a filter of Cordobés Spanish: the dialect of the area, so fast and so modified with colloquialisms that many Colombians themselves can't understand what's being said. I took out my digital recorder and mic and taped it. After I slapped together some footage, I ran my voice through an AI filter approximating a "northern Colombian accent". Not bad, but nowhere near as colorful as the speaker Martina La Peligrosa, right.
But then, I replayed a segment from a spoken word artist (comedian, I guess...but more on him another time) and realized there's still a lot of work to be done.
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