In my opinion the sine qua non of photography and indeed all art is that it transmits human experience because shared experience is one of the core binding elements and joys of human existence.
The internet and now AI has slowly separated the experience from the final product. That's absolutely an emergent pressure that comes from digital sharing simply because sites that encourage that are more likely to get more engagement due to the resulting superficiality when art is separated from experience. Indeed, once we are separated from a true thing, the search for that thing becomes eternal.
As much as I hate AI, I think AI itself should be considered an artistic reflection of machine experience. But by elevating that, we lower ourselves and forget the true meaning of sharing art for the purposes of human connection. So we are giving up a legacy and tradition for economic short-term advantage and the opiate-like qualities of advanced technology.
It's a sad process and one I think we should fight against, although I acknowledge I am in the minority.
AI pictures / art prose or poetry I think of as more like a separate art form sort of like the "ultimate kitsch art" since it has been trained on a large amount of images and art in general and derives an output that attempts to imitate (inference) other pieces of art. I don't hate that type of art and I actually like AI right now but I do recognize why people hate it and its why I think it is a separate art form at this point.
So is art itself. AI art is the ultimate fuck you to the IP/Copyright crowd, and the fact that the supposedly left wing artists are turning into Luddite copyright trolls at the moment that their field becomes opened to the masses tells me that most folks who purport to hold left wing sympathies actually don’t. I always knew that the performative leftism thing was bullshit. RMS, Aaron Swartz, huggingface and mistral are far more liberatory than 50 years of Marxist artists wasting our time with empty claims of liberation
Never ever claim to support the poor if you get butthurt at the idea that poor people can now access tools to create beautiful art. And if your first thought is to take shots at me for claiming that “Ai art can be beautiful”, you’re part of the problem!!!
Art has always been open to the masses. Poor people could already access tools to create beautiful art, they do so all the time.
You're just venting your anti-leftist prejudice, I get that. Finding a way to work an anti-leftist rant into the subject at hand is practically a pastime around around here. But your thesis that only the wealthy and privileged were capable of creating art until generative AI came around is absurd. We've literally been in the midst of a global creative renaissance across every creative field, AI wasn't necessary for any of it.
When the “tools” are built from countless lifetimes of blood sweat and tears dedicated to mastery and bottled by mega corps to siphon all of the value and sell it back to the people by laundering their intellectual property, your angle falls flat. The “poor” can’t eat art. They used to be able to sell their art to buy food. Now 5 tech bros are seizing all of that food money, artists are starving, humanity is being regurgitated into slop, and you’re cheerleading for molloch.
It's not even that. A lot of papers are trained from copyrighted works without permission by less than five people groups in academia or startups. The systems to make the models can be done extremely cheap.
People are downvoting wrongthink again. This is a valid rebuttal to a pretty poor and not very historical comment. The new narrative must be perpetuated at all costs.
This is a misunderstanding of Marx. Marx would have loathed AI, because it it the ultimate form of alienation ("Entfremdung") of people from their work.
He would have loathed the industrialization of art and the concentration of the means of production in the hands of huge corporations.
Marx proposed the equality in the access to the means of production. He never said that everyone has the right to "be" the greatest chess player by using Stockfish. He never said that everyone must be an equally great mathematician.
The empty claims about equality are from the huge corporations who hold the means of production and steal from the original producers.
I'm not going to bother engaging with... whatever ideological soapbox this is, so I'm just going to address one baffling assertion:
"Never ever claim to support the poor if you get butthurt at the idea that poor people can now access tools to create beautiful art."
Being able to afford a decent laptop/machine to run diffusion models or a SaaS subscription to Midjourney is VASTLY less financially viable to poor people then just putting pencil to paper.
Poor people have ALWAYS been artists, and artists have ALMOST ALWAYS been poor people.
The problem is broader than this. There is a tradition of using photography to record real world events (photojournalism) which has been quite broadly adopted within our cultures - we believe a photograph as reflecting events that have happened.
The problem with these AI generated 'realistic photojournalist' images is that they erode the belief in these images as being factual representations of real world events.
Just think of the impact that, say, war photography has had on the world, and our understanding of the horrors that our governments decisions have had on people's lives. Would Nick Ut's 'The terror of war' have had the impact it did if AI image generation was available at the time? I believe there was at the time an attempt to say it was staged, but there are many many ways of dismissing an image these days.
So, I think we have lost something, but it's much greater than the connection with a subject that the author is concerned with.
>The problem with these AI generated 'realistic photojournalist' images is that they erode the belief in these images as being factual representations of real world events.
That isn't the problem. The problem is people will believe inherently that they are factual representations, because there will be no non-AI mediated sources of truth available, Or worse, people simply won't care, since the concept of "objective reality" simply doesn't exist in a post-truth culture.
Agreed. We have lost a lot and no benefits from AI are worth what we have lost. I mean, we are talking about some of the things that make life worth living...
even with manual photography, the image could show whatever story the publisher wanted to tell - so I think it's actually a good thing that AI is going to help immunize people from falling for it.
if we want "certified" images, we have to tie a personal identity to the photo - e.g. a gpg web of trust approach and signature. I trust this picture because my friend who trusts his friend who trusts his friend took it.
Agreed, there needs to be trust, and how this used to work was that the photographer would gain a reputation for their accurate portrayal and would be picked up by an agency (e.g. magnum). They would supply the picture editors for the newspapers, so the public would have a chain of trust back from the the paper to the photographer.
The equivalent for digital photography is that cameras can sign images - I believe there are some canon/nikon cameras which supported this to allow digital photos to be used in court, but I don't think this idea was widely adopted, so a typical snap on your phone doesn't provide any sort of trust, which is surprising really, but there we are, this is the world we live in.
in a court case, you might still be able to prove a given picture was taken by a given camera, since the ccd has detects. I'm not sure how true that is nowadays with AI making up half the details (like Xerox copiers taking creative licence with the numbers in a table).
I may be in the minority, but I don’t see any appeal to AI generated art. I’m not sure which positive emotion it is supposed to evoke.
I also dislike heavily edited photos for the same reason. At some point it is no longer real. That point is debatable, but AI generated art is the complete end of the spectrum of not real.
Do people enjoy looking at nice things which humans (or, perhaps God/science if we are talking about nature) did not create? Its a genuine question because I don’t get it myself.
I was new to New York in the late 90s. I watched some people playing card games for money (3 card monte scam). I took out my camera and click. Every head turned towards me. “No pictures”, I nodded and muttered something back incoherent as if I didn’t speak quite understand what the fuss was about. They kept playing.
It’s different now when everyone has a camera and the results are available instantly.
I have to go back through my photos and sort and group more. This is something I feel ai would be supper helpful with.
Thought experiment here would be: what if simulation theory is correct? Than there'd be a deep irony here, because traditional photography would itself be operating in a kind of generative latent space.
AI is trained on images from physical cameras, so maybe it can be considered to be gathered from light. It is also simulating light. I can imagine some thought of raytracing as photography. So I’m not sure gatekeeping the term photography will work.
Going beyond the title shows this isn't about gatekeeping terminology. It's about what we lose when we substitute genuine human interaction with AI comfort, and how simulating an experience isn't the same as living it. The experience never happened, so any AI image is precisely 'simulacra' - a copy without an original. The elder's smile in Chinatown couldn't have been prompted, and if it was, that would just prove the point about simulacra and missing the real experience.
I definitely dont think so, its insulting to anybody who ever engaged in actual photography and put the serious effort in to learn this craft / art blend.
Same can be said about fake music, paintings or soon fake movies. Do you put the same impact or value to old masters paintings vs endless cheap AI generated stuff? AI novelty already wore off quite some time ago for those.
Can it be consumed and enjoyed? Of course, everbody has their preferred fun, ie people already wasted millions of lives in virtual worlds for fun, relax, or to cater to their loneliness or addiction. Usually but not always to detriment to their real lives but thats another topic.
Everybody enjoy whatever works for you, but dont hijack widely accepted words and meanings just because it momentarily suits you or you try to push some narrative, on 0 effort lazy things like this.
Of those, music is one where the word is most quickly applied to AI without qualifiers. It’s because the more abstract term sound doesn’t convey melody or rhythm. Behind that is movie where people will often call it a video so it doesn’t carry the creative meaning of the term movie. This post to me is suggesting that the term photography be treated like painting. I agree it’s a noble pursuit. I just don’t think it will work.
Indeed, preventing co-opting positive terms by non-creative people who devise ever new ways of redistributing IP of actually creative people won't work.
They'll just do it and come up with convoluted rationalizations.
I'm glad you see the logic behind my comment, as discomforting as it is. I get the disdain for non-creative people, but with that comes putting creative people on a pedestal. The only way to fight this absurdity seems to be with more absurdity, and thus it remains the way it is.
Words mean something and just because the result is similar doesn't mean it's the same thing. Creating a photorealistic painting doesn't make it a photograph just like a photograph of a painting is not a painting.
An AI tool could construct a virtual scene and then take a simulated photograph or make a simulated photorealistic painting. While I would prefer that people always use words like virtual or simulated to describe it, I think it’s likely that it will often get dropped. I’m thinking of the camera in metal gear solid. At some point people get used to something and start using less precise language.
That's as much as a photograph as someone manually creating a scene in blender and running it through the Pixar Render farm or whatever to get an ultra realistic scene - as the sibling comment stated what you have is a render
Similarly the camera in MGS would be a screenshot, as in a shot of the screen
It has virtual brushes. This predates AI by quite a lot. It's important to be careful to call it a virtual or simulated painting but perhaps not all the time. Maybe every single instance it's brought up but not always repeated – if you wrote a paper about virtual painting perhaps 10 of 100 occurrences of the term painting would come with a term like virtual or simulated.
The internet and now AI has slowly separated the experience from the final product. That's absolutely an emergent pressure that comes from digital sharing simply because sites that encourage that are more likely to get more engagement due to the resulting superficiality when art is separated from experience. Indeed, once we are separated from a true thing, the search for that thing becomes eternal.
As much as I hate AI, I think AI itself should be considered an artistic reflection of machine experience. But by elevating that, we lower ourselves and forget the true meaning of sharing art for the purposes of human connection. So we are giving up a legacy and tradition for economic short-term advantage and the opiate-like qualities of advanced technology.
It's a sad process and one I think we should fight against, although I acknowledge I am in the minority.
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