Photography and Ethics?

 Artificial Intelligence and Photography

We have heard a lot lately about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and it's roll in the arts.  I have AI programs where you say or type into the program a couple ideas with one of them Van Gogh and the program will generate an image (painting) that appears to be painted by Vincent himself.  It is also available for photography also.

To experiment with this I downloaded an APP to my iPad called Dream.  With the free APP you start with typing in a Prompt(s) up to 200 characters (or use the preset prompts), then select an art style.  You have the option of adding a photograph, with an adjustment of adjust the influence you want the optional photograph  (from weak to strong) to have on the final product.  

Here is an example of the AI image I created in 30 seconds.

Starting image

AI Generation

Prompts: Marlon Brando and Glasses

Art Style: Realistic

Influence: Normal

I generated two other photos from the same base image but I do not remember the qualifiers I used for their  generation;

OR JUST ART

If I don't want to manipulate a photographic image how about generating some wall art,

Here was my attempt at this

Prompt; Van Gogh and Roses

Art Style: Expressionism

Input Image: NONE

And the results were 

Ethics

Now to the point of this discussion.  Is this ETHICAL? 

Maybe I am old fashion or whatever but I could not claim this as my work.  It is nice magic and fun to play with but No I am not a fan of doing this for any presentation of my work (I have trouble using sky replacement which is available in a number of software packages) no matter how crappy the sky is the day I took the picture.  In my humble opinion I could not do this.  BUT, then the question comes up when I use Photoshop/Lightroom for post processing am I manipulating the image to make it something that wasn't there at the time I took the photograph.  Hmmm? Just asking for a friend.

Obviously I do not have any answers on this subject.  BUT, I think it is an area the we need to be aware of and we may have to start adding this to rules for various competitions.  

There is an AI program to write letters and term papers out there which is causing a stir in academia today.  Obviously with my grammar in this posting I did not use that program.  But beware AI is here and is changing the way things are done.