At a time when photography is under threat from generative AIs such as Midjourney, Nikon is taking a stand against AI with an advertising campaign in Peru. Entitled “Don’t abandon the real world”, it aims to extol the beauty of nature and reality in the face of the growing use of algorithms to generate artificial images.
“All over the world, millions of people are obsessed with the idea of being able to create incredible surreal images of anything they can imagine, by typing just a few keywords,” reads the campaign video. Nikon Peru is referring here to the famous prompts, the descriptive text instructions at the origin of any image generated by generative AI models such as Midjourney or Dall-E.
Nikon Peru’s campaign aims to set things right, this time promoting the power of the real over the artificial, thanks to a succession of images produced not by artificial intelligence, but by real photographers. Incredible shots of nature, each just as strange as the next, bear witness to nature’s potential to create extraordinary landscapes, sometimes surreal, but all too real.
In the photo below, for example, we can see geological formations offering a phenomenal palette of colors, which could be straight out of an expressionist painting. But this is a very real landscape, to be found in Argentina’s Quebrada de Humahuaca.
Of course, all the shots taken for this campaign were made using Nikon cameras, some of them quite dated, like the Coolpix 5200 compact or the APS-C D80 SLR. But what’s most interesting is the way these shots are superimposed with a prompt, often completely far-fetched.
“This obsession with artificial intelligence makes us forget that the world is full of incredible natural places, often stranger than fiction,” says Nikon Peru.
With this original campaign, Nikon Peru wishes to remind us that technology and artificial intelligence are not the only means of surpassing the limits of what is possible, and that they are by no means essential to our world when compared with what nature has to offer. The brand thus uses the term “Natural Intelligence”, in clear opposition or even confrontation with artificial intelligence.
