Photographers are still doing photography for the same reasons we always were. People who want to take pictures no longer need to be photographers. I think it

Photographers are still doing photography for the same reasons we always were. People who want to take pictures no longer need to be photographers. I think it’s interesting to look at, but I think the parallels break down pretty quickly. The decline of legacy photographic equipment and the reduction of skill needed to take photos is all about a rather technical skillset becoming less and less necessary. The smartphone also made many other legacy things irrelevant for most people. Language and writing are closer to the core of humanity in a rather existential way. It’s less clear that reducing the skillset required to participate in writing is a net benefit, even if it enables the generation of more text by people who might not have done so before. Smartphones make a photographer’s job easier and a non-photographer’s goals possible. I worry that the same can’t be said for language models and the end result is likely to be closer to a new form of illiteracy than it is to the democratization of a process that formerly required greater degrees of technical skill. When painting broad strokes, I see the similarity. Drilling down even a little widens the conceptual gap quite a bit.