4 ms·

AI 'Street Photography' Isn't Photography: What We Lose by Simulating Experience

41 points by smnrg 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
benatkin 2y ago
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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Etheryte 2y ago
  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.
  - benatkin 2y ago
    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.
    - Etheryte 2y ago
      That's called a render.
      - benatkin 2y ago
        The trained neural net form of it would perhaps be a virtual render.
    - tomatotomato37 2y ago
      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
    - mejutoco 2y ago
      A painting is actually painted with pigment on something. An LLM by itself cannot grab a brush. Maybe with something else.
      - benatkin 2y ago
        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.
        mejutoco 2y ago
        A simulated painting is not a painting, so there is no contradiction.
- Algebra5502 2y ago
  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.
- jajko 2y ago
  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.
  - benatkin 2y ago
    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.
- rjahra 2y ago
  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.
  - benatkin 2y ago
    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.
- romanobro56 2y ago
  Opting to define ‘photography’ is definitely not the same as gatekeeping
acomjean 2y ago
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.
vouaobrasil 2y ago
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.
- zitterbewegung 2y ago
  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.
  - vouaobrasil 2y ago
    I understand that. Unfortunately, AI art is inextricably linked to the motivations behind it, which is far from benign.
    - Der_Einzige 2y ago
      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!!!
gdubs 2y ago
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.
- darepublic 2y ago
  Still lower resolution than the real experience.
- Delmolokolo 2y ago
  But not in a random space but one based on a certain ruleset and a simulation time of billions of years Not to be an ai art snob but I would value a picture which takes billions of years to happen as more valuable. Nonetheless photography is valuable primarily to the maker anyway.
cesaref 2y ago
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.
- vouaobrasil 2y ago
  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...
- exe34 2y ago
  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.
  - cesaref 2y ago
    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.
jmathai 2y ago
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.
- anon7000 2y ago
  I don’t know a single person who likes or appreciates AI art, so I don’t think you’re in the minority

41 points by smnrg 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

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.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Etheryte 2y ago
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.
- benatkin 2y ago
  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.
  - Etheryte 2y ago
    That's called a render.
    - benatkin 2y ago
      The trained neural net form of it would perhaps be a virtual render.
  - tomatotomato37 2y ago
    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
  - mejutoco 2y ago
    A painting is actually painted with pigment on something. An LLM by itself cannot grab a brush. Maybe with something else.
    - benatkin 2y ago
      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.
      - mejutoco 2y ago
        A simulated painting is not a painting, so there is no contradiction.
Algebra5502 2y ago
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.
jajko 2y ago
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.
- benatkin 2y ago
  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.
rjahra 2y ago
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.
- benatkin 2y ago
  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.
romanobro56 2y ago
Opting to define ‘photography’ is definitely not the same as gatekeeping

acomjean 2y ago

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.

vouaobrasil 2y ago

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.

zitterbewegung 2y ago
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.
- vouaobrasil 2y ago
  I understand that. Unfortunately, AI art is inextricably linked to the motivations behind it, which is far from benign.
  - Der_Einzige 2y ago
    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!!!

gdubs 2y ago

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.

darepublic 2y ago
Still lower resolution than the real experience.
Delmolokolo 2y ago
But not in a random space but one based on a certain ruleset and a simulation time of billions of years Not to be an ai art snob but I would value a picture which takes billions of years to happen as more valuable. Nonetheless photography is valuable primarily to the maker anyway.

cesaref 2y ago

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.

vouaobrasil 2y ago
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...
exe34 2y ago
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.
- cesaref 2y ago
  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.

jmathai 2y ago

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.

anon7000 2y ago
I don’t know a single person who likes or appreciates AI art, so I don’t think you’re in the minority