A photographer Mathieu Stern has fooled the internet with his AI-generated images of antique cameras that don’t exist. He generated the fantasy cameras using Midjourney before working on them in Photoshop. “The generation itself only takes less than a minute, what takes time is to create a good prompt, this trial and error part can take hours”. Users of AI image generators write text prompts to describe the image they would like to see. Mathieu Stern employed another artificial intelligence (AI) program called ChatGPT, an AI chatbot, to help write a convincing backstory for the cameras.

Stern posted that the “historical” cameras belonged to the Chinese Emperor Qianlong, a real Qing dynasty ruler, who “became fascinated by the art of photography.” “He was particularly enamored with the intricacies of the cameras and the beautiful images they produced. The Emperor was so taken with photography that he ordered his finest artisans to create a camera made entirely of porcelain.”
The French photographer tells PetaPixel that the general idea for the story was his but that the language-learning model ChatGPT “helped make it more like a full story with a better structure.”

The fictional story continues: “The artisans worked tirelessly to create a masterpiece that would please the Emperor. They carefully crafted each piece of the camera by hand, using the finest kaolin clay and ...