Calle Rosenqvist: "I'm waiting for the backlash against AI images"

Trends within a specific area tend to attract a large crowd of people to continue growing, until it eventually becomes 'normal' or 'commercialised'. By the time the trend has reached this point, those who created it have long since moved on, with other goals in sight.

This can certainly be applied to trends in photography. What comes to mind now is of course AI and generative AI, where software can be used to create images – and there are ongoing sub-trends in how the content is designed, experienced, or looks, often quite static and many times also plastic in appearance. Just check out the image of the aurora borealis generated by Midjourney AI that I wrote a comment about here.

Since Instagram is a social media platform, a second counter-reaction occurred – when users noticed the trend moving towards the #nofilter crowd – which was to tag every single photo with #nofilter regardless of whether a filter had been used or not.

This is akin to an analogy of Newton's third law – the law of action and reaction. For every force, there is always an equal and opposite reaction force that balances the situation into a zero-sum game, and perhaps it can be said that this is the case with Instagram.

What is interesting now is to see if the use of AI for images will trigger perhaps the most obvious counter-reaction: a flourishing activity among those who delve into the wonderful world of analog photography. The movement has been underway for a while, with the popular analog options such as instant cameras and the growing interest in and exploration of analog photography. 

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