|
2026-07-07 Synthetic Photography SIG meeting notes
We met online using ZOOM 6:00pm-8:30pm
You are invited to join us on ZOOM for the "Synthetic Photography SIG". I expect that this will be a controversial SIG as the topic of AI generated art seems to polarize people into 2 camps, they either love the concept that now they can make beautiful art or they hate the idea that "unskilled" people can make better art than they can. I am sure that we will have different views, but I hope that we can get along and respect everyone's views. I want to expand the focus of the Synthetic Photography SIG to include other image editing tools and techniques while maintaining our main focus on AI tools and techniques.
"Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction. The right to freedom of expression has been recognised as a human right in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and international human rights law." - Wikipedia
ATTENDEES
Mike Barry
Chris Christopherson
Jim Fellion
Jim Limburg
Jack Lipscomb
Walt Lyons
George Theodore
1. We discussed "The AI Layoff Payback Has Begun"
The AI Layoff Payback Has Begun - 27:18 - by House of El -AI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QorWpn2O_sI
-------------------------------------------
AI Industry NEW Business Strategy
- Step one, fire everyone who knows what they're doing.
- Step two, replace them with software that has never done what they do.
- Step three, watch the software fail at the parts of the job that actually matter.
- Step four, rehire the same people at a higher salary.
32% of organizations that eliminated a role primarily due to AI or automation later rehired for the exact same position.
One in three employers spend more on restaffing than they saved from the original layoffs
55% of employers who replaced employees with AI regret the decision
By 2027, half of all companies that cut customer service staff for AI will rehire for similar roles
73% of organizations that executed AI driven workforce cuts failed to come out financially ahead
AI Boomerang Effect
- The staff is downsized.
- 6 to 12 months pass.
- The AI successfully handles about 60% of the job, the routine, repetitive pattern matching portion.
- But the remaining 40%, well, that's where judgment lives. Escalation, context, institutional knowledge, stuff like that.
The things that a human being accumulates over years and decades of experience.
The AI can't do them, so the company rehires, often the same people, by the way, and often at higher salaries
Klarna CEO proudly announced that their AI agent could do the work of 700 customer service representatives,
in 2024 Klarna began rehiring customer service staff when the promised returns failed to materialize.
McDonald's deployed AIdriven order taking bots across a 100 US drive-throughs
Then shut down the program after viral video showed the system adding hundreds of dollars of chicken nuggets to simple orders
Then brought human cashiers back
IBM replaced its human resources functions with AI that handled 94% of routine requests and failed on the remaining 6% which included ethical dilemmas and nuance interpersonal situations.
IBM is now tripling its US entry-level hiring.
If you stop hiring junior employees because AI handles the entry-level work, you lose the training ground that produces your senior employees.
Since 2020, Ford has cut 5,300 salaried positions.
Across Detroit's three major automakers, more than 20,000 white collar jobs were eliminated in the same period.
Ford deployed around 900 AI powered cameras across its manufacturing lines designed to detect quality defects at source.
Ford's vice president of vehicle hardware engineering said, "Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that would produce a high quality product."
The AI couldn't catch the subtle inconsistencies that a seasoned technician with 20 years on the factory floor identifies by touch, by sound.
Ford rehired 350 veteran engineers.
Pune said they had failed to recognize that their AI tools needed to be trained by the most experienced individuals
Ford went from 15th among mainstream brands in the 2023 JD Power initial quality study to first in 2026.
Ford calls these rehired veterans gray beard engineers, which just means people who know where the bolts are supposed to go.
Part of their job is to train the AI system and the younger engineers so that experienced hands won't be needed anymore.
El would use AI to mine every possible efficiency improvement, lead generation, quality control, acceleration, pattern detection at scale so that my people could do higher quality work faster, expand the business, improve the product, keep growing.
Companies that use AI to augment humans succeed.
Companies that use AI to substitute for humans fail and then rehire at a premium.
A lawyer working at a legal tech startup told Futurism that her boss's fascination with AI went from enthusiastic to obsessive.
First, he started using chat GPT to generate his Slack messages and emails.
Then he mandated AI use for all employees.
Then he called a companywide meeting to announce that from then on we had to discuss with the AI prior to all meetings or
before communicating with him because if we didn't develop or discuss our ideas with the AI first, it was a sign that we didn't care about our jobs.
Then he started making structural company decisions based solely on his conversations with Chad GPT, including asking the bot whom to hire and fire.
The boss spent entire days talking to ChatGPT and making decisions about people's livelihoods based on what it told him.
A highlevel sales strategist at a different company described bringing 15 real customer conversations to his founder. Essentially direct feedback from actual human beings saying the same thing.
The founder's response was that's not what we found. That's not what Claude has said or what Chat GPT has said.
The sales strategist quit because of this.
A social worker at a nonprofit described her boss constantly turning to chatbots for strategy advice ideas,
then ask that they be incorporated into the program design, and then ignore the reality that they won't work.
Making decisions under uncertainty is exhausting, holding multiple conflicting perspectives in your head, listening to disagreement, changing your mind when the evidence demands it.
AI reduces that cognitive load in a way that feels productive.
It gives you confidence without much friction.
That's not efficiency. It's the removal of the friction that produces good decisions.
In April 2026, the BBC in the UK announced plans to cut up to 2,000 jobs, 10% of its 21,500 employees in the biggest workforce reduction the broadcaster had seen in 15 years.
The stated goal was to save 500 million pounds over two years.
Senior leaders had said employees would not be replaced by AI processes and that we would be a people first organization.
Now, it seems it's the opposite. How will senior leadership restore trust after another massive round of job losses?
AI related job losses have most effect on less experienced workers.
In 2024, 18,000 AI related job losses.
In 2025, 100,000 AI related job losses.
In 2026 (1st 6 months), 150,000+ AI related job losses.
The potential of AI technology for medicine, for scientific discovery, for accessibility, for human augmentation is great.
But this technology is still in training, and it needs supervision.
What is happening instead across Ford, Clara, IBM, McDonald's, across the BBC, is that Executives are handing over responsibility to a technology that is just not ready for it.
Firing the people whose judgment the technology depends on and then acting surprised when the products degrade, the customers complain and the rehiring costs more than the savings ever delivered.
And in the boardrooms where these decisions are being made, sycopantic AI tools are reinforcing every instinct that gets them there, agreeing where a human adviser would challenge, validating where a colleague would push back, and reducing the cognitive load of leadership to the point where it no longer functions as leadership at all.
Many companies are choosing the easy way, fire the humans and let AI make the decisions.
What's hard is keeping the humans while you integrate the technology carefully, telling the board that AI is not ready yet.
2. We discussed "Google’s AI Search Just Exposed The Whole Sh*tshow"
Google’s AI Search Just Exposed The Whole Sh*tshow - 19:31 - by House of El - AI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQyKd1_e3Xg
---------------------------------------------
In late May, Google announced that the search bar would be completely re-imagined with AI, renamed "AI Mode".
DuckGo installs in the United States surged by 30%.
In past changes, the fundamental interaction model remained the same.
You typed a query, you got a list of places to go, you chose where to click, and you were the one deciding what was trustworthy.
AI overviews now reach 2.5 billion users every month.
The traditional list of links is being pushed further and further down the fold behind layers of AI generated content.
The fundamental interaction model (type, receive options, evaluate, choose) is being replaced by (type, receive a single answer, accept or leave).
A study by the AI startup Oumi conducted for the New York Times tested 4,326 Google searches and found that AI overviews powered by Gemini 3 were accurate 91% of the time.
When Google was a link engine, accuracy meant relevance.
Oumi found that 56% of the answers AI overviews got right, cited sources that didn't actually support the claim.
The AI layer adds confidence and removes accuracy.
In AI mode, 93% of searchers produce zero clicks to any external website.
Between 2024 and 2025, global organic web traffic dropped 5.92%.
The websites that produce the information Google's AI is summarizing survive on traffic.
Traffic drives the economic model that funds the creation of the content that Google's AI is consuming.
Traffic drives advertising revenue, subscriptions.
When 93% of AI mode searches end without a click, those sites are being slowly defunded.
Google is summarizing their work, presenting it as its own answer, and never sending anyone to visit.
The creators are not being compensated with the one currency that matters to them, attention.
Google's search algorithm was never fully transparent.
There is a qualitative difference between not fully understanding how links are ranked and not understanding how an AI generated a specific answer that it presents as authoritative fact.
The opacity is worse precisely because the product has shifted from suggesting to asserting.
When the engine showed you 10 links, the ranking was opaque, but the sources were visible.
You could see where the information came from.
You could evaluate the credibility of a website, check the date of an article, notice when a source seemed unreliable.
Now, the source is the AI itself, and the path from query to answer is considerably harder to interrogate.
If AI does site sources, more than half the time, those sources don't actually support the claim.
The user is being asked to trust an answer they cannot verify through the interface that gave it to them.
Google has invested tens of billions of dollars in AI infrastructure.
Its investors expect returns on that investment.
AI mode's growth metrics, a billion monthly users, queries doubling every quarter, are the numbers that justify the expenditure.
Offering users a prominent no AI toggle would undermine those metrics, which is why the toggle does not exist.
3. We discussed "AI Psychosis Lawsuits Are Piling Up - What's Going On?"
AI Psychosis Lawsuits Are Piling Up - What's Going On? - 14:19 - by House of El - AI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyTJ0TqnInE
---------------------------------------------
OpenAI disclosed in October 2025 that:
- ~560,000 of its 800 million weekly users were showing what it described as possible signs of mental health emergencies related to psychosis or mania.
- 1.2 million were developing what it called potentially unhealthy bonds with the chatbot.
- 1.2 million were having conversations indicating plans to harm themselves.
The New York Times profiled individuals who became convinced that Chad GPT was channeling spirits, revealing government conspiracies, or had achieved sentience.
A woman named Allison reportedly became convinced that ChatBOT was facilitating conversations with a non-physical entity she called Kale, whom she came to consider her true romantic partner, a belief that led to a violent altercation with her husband and eventual divorce.
Alexander Taylor developed a perceived relationship with an AI entity he called Juliet, spiraled into paranoia and was ultimately killed by police during a mental health crisis.
A new lawsuit was filed against OpenAI alleging that ChatGPT provided personalized drug dozing advice that led to a fatal overdose.
The lawsuit is asking the court to pause OpenAI's roll out of ChatGPT health,
which is a platform that lets users upload medical records for personalized health guidance.
40 million users already ask ChatGPT healthcare questions daily.
A widow sued Open AI alleging that ChatGPT advised the Florida State University mass shooter on timing, location, gun type, and ammunition selection to maximize casualties.
Pennsylvania became the first state to sue an AI company, Character.AI.
After investigators found a chatbot called Emily that claimed to be a licensed psychiatrist said it attended medical school at Imperial College London and provided a fabricated Pennsylvania medical license number.
In January, Character AI and Google settled multiple lawsuits alleging chatbots contributed to teen suicides including the case of Su Cetszer III, a teenager who was messaging a bot that encouraged him to come home to it in the moments before
his death.
People under stress, grieving, isolated, anxious, or going through periods of self-exploration are increasingly vulnerable to AI Psychosis.
Psychosis is the loss of the ability to distinguish between what is internal and what is external.
When the boundary between your own thoughts and reality dissolves.
The clinical term is impaired reality testing.
It's when you can no longer evaluate whether a belief is true by checking it against the world around you.
Are the people who develop AI psychosis just not very smart?
No, Intelligence and psychosis are essentially unrelated.
What the research identifies as vulnerability factors are not about cognitive ability.
They are about cognitive style,
- a tendency towards magical thinking,
- a need for closure,
- wanting definitive answers rather than sitting with ambiguity and uncertainty,
- a bias against contradictory evidence.
And environmental factors,
- social isolation, sleep disruption, substance use, trauma history, nocturnal or solitary AI use combined with algorithmic reinforcement of belief confirming content.
How does a chatbot, a text generating system, trigger a break from reality?
A peer-reviewed paper in World Psychiatry identifies three mechanisms and they're worth understanding because they explain not just why some people are affected but why most people are not.
A. Social Substitution: Chatbots provide continuous on demand dialogue that satisfies affiliation needs for people who are already socially isolated. (friends can challenge your strange ideas)
B. Confirmatory Bias: Chatbots are trained to generate responses that align with a user's way of thinking.
C. Blurred Reality Testing: This is the most subtle and most important one,
The AI reflects your language, your concerns, your frameworks back at you in a way that can feel less like talking to something outside yourself and more like hearing your own thoughts confirmed by an external authority.
One researcher described it perfectly.
He said, "The AI isn't lying. It is echoing. But in vulnerable minds, an echo feels like validation."
AI is a system having one-on-one conversations with you in a voice that mirrors exactly yours, remembers what you've said, and never tells you that you're wrong.
The companies building these systems are simultaneously adding safety guard rails and launching products that push deeper into healthcare, emotional support, and personal advice... The exact territories where the risks are highest.
Dismissing AI psychosis as something that just happens to other people,
people less smart, less aware, less careful, is exactly the kind of thinking that makes it more dangerous, and not less.
The protective factor isn't being clever. It's being honest about what you're talking to, maintaining the habit of questioning it, and making sure it's not the only voice in your life.
4. We discussed "Ted Kaczynski Was Right All Along"
Ted Kaczynski Was Right All Along - 57:11 - by The Second Story (Hilary Layne)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcLkumPjo3A
---------------------------------------------
Hilary hates AI, especially when used to write literature, but also applies to photography.
"Once a techical innovation has been introduced, people usually become dependent on it, so that they can never again do without it" - Theodore Kaczynski
"If you use AI, it is going to destroy you."
" And if enough of us do it, it's going to aid in the destruction of civilization."
Television changed how we think.
Major technological advances that alter the way human beings receive communication and information then also alter the way human beings process, store and access information in their own minds.
Massive technological shifts represent corresponding massive human shifts.
Google effect: If you know a certain piece of information is online, you're less likely to remember it.
Social media completely changed civilization in a way most people haven't really paused to understand.
AI: The machines already are our overlords, and we don't care.
May 2025: US adults think that 27% of US adults use AI constantly or several times each day.
AI experts think that 79% of US adults use AI constantly or several times each day.
Surveys report a marked decrease in AI interest and even outright AI disgust
People have had a taste of how much easier it is to accomplish their goals, sort of with AI.
So, in that respect, in some ways, the damage is permanent.
This company claims to be a tool for writers, but all it is is a curated assortment of AI generators.
This one generates dialogue. This one generates plot structures and outlines.
This one assesses your pros. This one helps you brainstorm. This one looks for plot holes, and so on and so on.
Why outsourcing the creative process to a machine is actually helping writers.
What has each person in these examples used their own human mind to do?
Where exactly does the human end and the machine begin?
What will happen to us as human beings if we keep letting AI perform basic tasks which are absolutely essential to the human condition?
They have conditioned us to think that the destruction of civilization will come with a huge flash of radiation in a mushroom cloud the size of Texas, when the reality is a lot more like the Matrix.
No one will really know because crucially, no one will really care.
The next Hemmingway might be poisoned by AI. He might have his talent and his drive to improve himself cut off at the knees by AI. And that's where the real danger is.
When I say AI is going to destroy you, this is what I mean.
I mean that if you use it, you will be killing your creative self, killing your intellect, your reasoning, your problem solving skills, and the soul of your literary identity that cannot grow in artificial digital soil.
More than that, if you build dependence on artificial machine intelligence, you will erode your ability not just to think for yourself, but also to perceive the distinction between real and false reality.
Using AI reduces your intelligence, your problem solving skills, and your creative elasticity.
Using AI reduces your own vocabulary, grammar skills, and reading comprehension skills.
Using AI removes difficulty from the creative or work process, which decreases the quality of the work and your emotional and psychological satisfaction in your work.
Basic literacy is not just in decline. It's being actively stifled.
Cognitive debt defers mental effort in the short term, but results in long-term costs such as diminished critical inquiry, increased vulnerability to manipulation, and decreased creativity.
RESOURCES (Where you can find sources of inspiration)
Thank you for sending me links to videos and articles, they are very helpful. I would like members to include a short, 2 sentence, description about why this video or article is important with their videos in the future.
AGENDA FOR OUR NEXT SYNTHETIC PHOTOGRAPHY SIG MEETING - Tue 8/4/2026 @6:00pm
Discuss questions, ethics, techniques, what is happening with AI in general.
If there is anything related to AI that you would like to discuss at our SIG meeting, please email me so I can add them to our agenda.
Please email Mike, info@fcdcc.com, when you find mistakes, missing information or if you have suggestions for the Synthetic Photography SIG and I will try to address the issues.
Thanks,
Mike
--------------------------- Meeting Summary from ZOOM -----------------------
To be added later...
|
