I recently posed a challenge to DALL-E 2 (or to myself?) to mimic one of my photos using prompts. I didn’t think it was actually going to work, until it did. Almost.

The left part of the photo above represents AI’s interpretation of a “photo of Fire Island Lighthouse during the day with few clouds and common reeds with shallow depth of field in foreground” which is about the best way I could describe the actual photo I took with a Canon EOS M6 Mark II and Sigma 56mm f/1.4 DC DN Contemporary Lens.

To get that photo, I drove out about an hour to Robert Moses State Park’s parking field five. I parked my car, carefully picked out which lenses to bring with me for my trip (and yes, I also brought along Camera brand camera) and then walked about a mile along a boardwalk to get out to the lighthouse, and then walked off the path along some dirt trails to find this interesting scene from amongst the reeds. I made the conscious decision to shoot at ISO 100 and set my aperture to f/1.4 to get the shallow depth of field. I had to think to put a 3-stop neutral density filter on my lens so that the camera’s maximum mechanical shutter speed of 1/4000 would be able to expose the scene properly.

But I’ll be damned if the AI didn’t come close enough to make me wonder: In a couple of years when the computers actually get it right, will it be even worth it to get “the shot” when “the shot” could be produced with just a few clicks of a keyboard?

To be fair, AI is a long way off, and in the case of the main photo in this article, I think it was a combination of a detailed enough prompt and some luck. Sometimes, I struck out, like with this photo of the Montauk Point Lighthouse that I tried to recreate with AI:

The prompt for this one was: “Low angle shot of Montauk Point lighthouse covered in white Christmas lights with long exposure of water flowing over rocks and lighthouse reflecting in water at dusk with clouds.” It certainly looks like the Montauk Lighthouse has seen better days in the AI photo, but still, as in the photo of the Fire Island Lighthouse, it doesn’t look like the AI is too far away from actually figuring this out.

Some may argue, especially in the case of recognizable landmarks like these two lighthouses, that the AI is essentially just stealing images and tweaking them a bit. While it’s impossible to tell what’s going on behind the scenes of the software, I wouldn’t be surprised.

That said, I’d never be able to photograph a “Photorealistic image of a t-rex wearing sunglasses driving a red convertible car through a machine car wash,” and so I’ve got to hand it to DALL-E 2 on that.

Still, with the ability to produce frame-worthy images (maybe) in the near future through AI, is it worth it to travel at great cost and expense to make a photo?

For me, the answer will always be yes, as I want to experience and see the very thing I’m photographing, which is something AI will never replace. But is that the case for you? Is having the photo produced by an AI prompt good enough for you?

Leave your thoughts in the comments below.