Before the age of the smartphone, photographers had to learn how to use high-tech cameras and photographic techniques. Not everyone had cameras, and it took skill and a good eye to capture and create a great photograph. Today, with the huge range of camera apps on our smartphones, we’re all amateur photographers, and pretty good ones at that, since the quality of smartphone images now nearly equals that of digital cameras.

The new ease of photography has given us a tremendous appetite for capturing the magical and the ordinary. We are obsessed with documenting everyday moments, whether it’s a shot of our breakfast, our cat or the cat’s breakfast. And rather than collect pictures in scrapbooks, we share, like, and comment on them with friends and strangers around the globe. Even photojournalists are experimenting with mobile phones because their near invisibility makes it easier to capture unguarded moments. And the Internet allows them to avoid traditional media, to act as their own publishers reaching huge audiences via social media sites such as Instagram. A photograph taken in New York can get a response from someone in Lagos within seconds of being uploaded.

In the past, magazines published unforgettable photos of important people and global events that captured our imaginations. These photos had the power to change public opinion and even the course of history. But if there are fewer memorable images today, it’s not because there are fewer good images. It’s because there are so many, and no one image gets to be special for long.

As people everywhere embrace photography and the media make use of citizen journalists. professional standards appear to be shifting. Before digital images, most people trusted photographs to accurately reflect reality. Today, images can be altered in ways the naked eye might never notice. Photo journalists are trained to accurately represent what they witness. Yet any image can be altered to create an “improved” picture of reality. The average viewer is left with no way to assess the accuracy of an image except through trust in a news organization or photographer.

The question of the accuracy of images gets even trickier when photojournalists start experimenting with camera apps - like Hipstamatic or Instagram—which encourage the use of filters(滤镜). Images can be colored,brightened, faded, and scratched to make photographs more artistic, or to give them an antique look. Photographers using camera apps to cover wars and conflicts have created powerful images—but also controversy. Critics worry that antique-looking photographs romanticize war, while distancing us from those who fight in them.

Yet photography has always been more subjective than we assume. Each picture is a result of series of decisions—where to stand, what lens to use, what to leave in and what to leave out of the frame. Does altering photographs with camera app filters make them less true? There’s something powerful and exciting about the experiment the digital age has forced upon us. These new tools make it easier to tell our own stories - and they give others the power to do the same. Many members of the media get stuck on the same stories, focusing on elections, governments, wars, and disasters,and in the process, miss out on the less dramatic images of daily life that can be as revealing.

Who knows? Our obsession with documentation and constantly being connected could lead to dramatic change in our way of being. Perhaps we are witnessing the development of a universal.

Who knows? Our obsession with documentation and constantly being connected could lead to dramatic change in our way of being. Perhaps we are witnessing the development of a universal visual language, one that could change the way we relate to each other and the world. Of course, as with my language, there will be those who product poetry and those who make shopping lists.

The 3D-printing industry is accelerating its efforts to help fight the new coronavirus and the disease it causes, COVID-19.

On Tuesday, HP announced it’s working with those who bought its 3D printers to make medical face shields, hands-free door openers and an adjuster for face masks for medical staff who often must wear them for hours. It’s also testing “hospital-grade” face masks meeting the higher-end FFP3 (过滤式面罩) standard and parts for simple emergency ventilators (呼吸机) and it’s looking into nasal swabs to test for COVID-19 infection. HP also is offering free downloads of its 3D-printed medical equipment designs.

Carbon, whose 3D printers are used to make everything from bicycle seats to teeth straighteners, said it plans to send face shield designs to its network of customers who’ve bought its 3D printers. Carbon co-founder and Executive Chairman Joseph DeSimone said on Monday the company expects to send the designs by early Tuesday.

3D-printcr makers typically sell their products to others that actually do the 3D printing. One such customer, Ford, said Tuesday that it’s made 1,000 face shields and shipped them to Michigan hospitals, with plans to make 100,000 face shields a week. It is also working with 3M and General Electric on respirator masks and ventilator designs.

The effort is one of several to apply 3D-printing technology to the fight against coronavirus. 3D printing isn’t as fast at churning out products as conventional mass production methods. But 3D printers are flexible and able to make many different parts anywhere there’s a printer and raw materials like the plastic resins Carbon printers use.

Some 3D-printing efforts have focused on ventilators, which expected to be in short supply with a surge of COVID-19 patients suffering from respiratory (呼吸器官) problems. Also in short supply are N95 masks that can be useful in reducing the likelihood a wearer will spread COVID-19 to others.

Carbon’s DeSimone is cautious about the enthusiasm, though, saying that regulatory approval is important and that 3D-printcr enthusiasts shouldn’t be making components not intended for close human contact that might release unhealthy gases.

Machines might one day replace human laborers in a number of professions, but surely they won’t ever replace human artists. Right?

Think again. Not even our artists will be safe from the inevitable machine takeover, if a new development in artificial intelligence(AI) by a team of researchers from Rutgers University and Facebook’s AI lab offers a clue of what’s to come. They have designed an AI capable of not only producing art, but actually inventing whole new aesthetic(美学的) styles similar to movements like impressionism or abstract expressionism. The idea, according to researcher Marian Mazzone, was to make art that is “novel, but not too novel”.

The model used in this project involves a generator network, which produces the images, and a discriminator network, which “judges” whether it’s art. Once the generator learns how to produce work that the distributor recognizes as art, it’s given an additional instruction: to produce art that doesn’t match any known aesthetic styles.

“You want to have something really creative and striking — but at the same time not to go too far and make something that isn’t aesthetically pleasing,” explained Ahmed Elgammal.

The art that was generated by the system was then presented to human judges alongside human-produced art without showing which was which. To the researchers’ surprise, the machine-made art scored slightly higher overall than the human-produced art.

Of course, machines can’t yet replace the meaning conveyed in works by human artists, but this project shows that artist skill sets certainly seem reproducible by machines.

What will it take for machines to produce content with meaning? That might be the last AI frontier. Human artists can at least hang their hats in that field for now.

“Imagine having people over for a dinner party and they ask, ‘Who is that by?’ And you say, ‘Well, it’s a machine actually.’ That would be an interesting conversation starter,” said Kevin Walker.