good cards just last longer

And the larger the capacity, the longer they generally last because the same memory storage cells are re-used less often.

Wedding photography is probably the best example of this - I don’t think most people can imagine a world where AI generated art would be sufficient to replace a wedding photographer who’s actually present at a real wedding, because the real world context of the wedding is what makes those photos significant, not just the quality of the photography itself.

I mostly agree. For me personally, photography is special because I’m aphantasiasic (no visual memory) and photographs can put me in the memories more solidly.

But I think that we’ll see hybrid AI/real photography in weddings within 5 years. What I mean by this is the in person photography will proceed as normal but then all the photos are used to create an AI model of the event to allow the client to have photographs which may not have actually been taken. Models combined with photogrametry would allow highly accurate fakes.

The negative for us as photographers is that it will lower the bar. The level of skill and experience to produce a similar outcome to a low end professional will be minimal.

Much like my day job (IT) AI poses a risk that ‘entry level’ jobs will be mostly disappear. How do you get to be a mid level professional in either field? Being an ‘entry level’ professional and working your way up as you gain experience. The risk is that mid levels will dry up because there are too few jobs at the entry level to produce the required number of mid levels etc.

I suspect it will be somewhat like Champagne. You can only call it Champagne if it comes from Champagne region of France. It used to matter a lot until as good or better sparkling white was available from elsewhere. Today there is a certain extravagance and authenticity having Champagne, and some people try to pass their sparkling white off as the real thing, most people can’t tell the difference.

Photography will be protected eventually, but once AI models can do as good a job in most cases it will become a lot like Champagne. There will always be some need for photography, but once they don’t need it for most things it will need that authenticity signing Leica and Nikon are adding so it can be proven that it isn’t cheap sparkling AI.

Tip for you all who don’t know it already. Most flash and solid state storage will try to keep the number of writes per ‘cell’ the same. So first use it will start writing across the memory and even if you delete images/files or format, it will keep progressing and writing to consecutive cells until they’ve all been used once, then back to the beginning for write 2 as you keep using it.

You won’t generally find any sold state storage these days which some cells have significant ‘wear’ and others have not.

So, buy the biggest SD/CF/etc you can as it will generally last longer. It also has the side effect that the larger cards usually have a bit faster read/write speed for the same class rating.

I did once see a device which was effectively an external hard drive with built in battery and CF/SD reader. When you plug in a card, it would copy all the data to the drive, verify it, and optionally delete it from the card. If I was stuck with a single slot body, I’d look for something like this as a backup. If I didn’t find anything, I’d get a Raspberry Pi with battery and create my own version, possibly with 4G/5G connection to the cloud backup as well.