The street is honest. It does not lie. It’s not always clean and pretty. It doesn’t wait for you. It comes at you quickly. 

It’s the man drinking a goon bag on the 109 tram at 11am. It’s the kicked in window of a tobacco shop. It’s a moment of boredom or longing on a park bench. It’s a bearded man in a pith helmet crossing the road. 

Artificial intelligence can name a photograph. It can measure the light. It can draw a box around what it calls a subject. But it does not know what it feels like to be yelled at by a member of the ill-at-ease or an angry parent. 

For that you need a soul. You need to know what it is to feel something when the light hits right and the subject doesn’t even know they’re part of something honest and spontaneous.

AI can’t drink a goon bag. It doesn’t experience boredom or longing. It can’t wear a pith hemet. It looks for rules someone wrote in a book. 

So let the machine count pixels and scan for faces. But don’t let it tell you what’s good. Let the photo speak for itself.

So with that in mind, I asked ChatGPT to review one of the colour photographs I took with M6 recently. It had a go. But it just made shit up lol. 

ChatGPT’s review of this photograph 

“This image evokes a sense of ethereal flight and transcendence, capturing not just a bird in motion but a feeling—one that exists between clarity and dream.

“The bird, silhouetted and blurred in mid-flight, sits against a vast, soft-toned sky. The motion blur and light flares surrounding it create an almost painterly effect, as if the subject is dissolving into the light. This abstraction draws the viewer inward, encouraging an emotional rather than literal interpretation.

“The strongest feature is the play of light: the radiating streaks suggest either sunrise or sunset, but they feel more symbolic than temporal—representing emergence, hope, or epiphany. The image walks a fine line between minimalism and mysticism.

“Technically, the softness and lack of sharp focus serve the artistic intent. What might be a flaw in another context becomes a strength here—it gives the photo a surreal, atmospheric quality, reminiscent of impressionist painting or dream sequences in experimental cinema.”

Listen to my street photography podcast that I co-host with my friend, John St. It’s called Street Life and is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.