When I read this article I was reminded of another article I’d read a while ago about a woman who explores the world in Google Street view and takes screenshots. This is her photography, and she sells it online. It presents an interesting question of authorship as well, as she was not the one to take the original photograph. She’s just curating certain frames from the larger collection of photos on Street View taken by Google’s cameras. In this case, I think it’s pretty clear that she is still the photographer and has authored the work; there was intention behind the selection and composition of each of her frames.
The Google Clips camera, on the other hand, doesn’t even require someone to curate the photos. The machine learning model does that. So who’s the author? I think the answer is the authors of all the photographs the model was trained on. The algorithm has been trained what constitutes a moment worthy of photographing from others’ choices of this moment. I don’t really think we need to worry about machines making intentional choices about a “decisive moment” yet, given that all the ML really is doing is predicting what best matches what it’s been trained to do from existing data.
While the definition of a camera may be in constant flux due to changes in technology, I think that a steady definition of a photographer or author could be useful. Intentionality is definitely a part of that, and probably is the most liberal approach to encompassing everything that’s historically been thought of as authored by somebody. Even photographs taken by a machine learning model can be thought to be authored, just not by the machine itself.