When making our list of expectations of “cameras” and “capturing”, we discussed the fact that there has to be a human photographer when an image is captured. While I agree this is not true, I think owners of image-capturing machines are not talented, and machine-captured images cannot be beautiful because they are not purposeful. Projects like the Google Clip eliminate the need for a photographer, which, as one myself, really upsets me. I already get annoyed by the amount of people who claim they are “photographers” but hardly know how to handle a DSLR off of auto, and I think smart cameras would create even more of these people. I imagine that training a neural net to take “beautiful” photos (well-composed, well-lit, with strong subjects) isn’t that far off, and it’s acceptable to assume those who own such cameras would claim the computational excellence as their own expertise. It’s important to highlight the difference between ownership and authorship here–I think owning a device that takes a photo, and even using it, does not make you a photographer. It would feel so wrong to credit the owner of a smart camera for a “beautiful” photo–in that situation, the human hardly even touches the camera. But I realize saying the opposite, the camera should get credit for its own photos, is not necessarily correct either, because the camera has no intuition about beauty–it’s capturing strategy comes from an algorithm. There is no reason why the camera is taking the photo other than it senses something it recognizes. And the people who coded that algorithm shouldn’t get credit for the beauty; they weren’t even at the scene of the photo. The smart camera seems to take authorship, or uniqueness, out of photography, which is essentially what makes photography a valid art practice. In my opinion a good photographer is one that provides a unique perspective and voice to the world through their images. The smart camera will strip the world of these unique perspectives. That makes me so sad.