4 ms·

Photography is a form of art and requires human work and creativity, it isn't some clanker slop.

by Laurel1234 2mo ago

CuriouslyC 2mo ago
[flagged]
- Laurel1234 2mo ago
  You seem significantly more aggrieved than me here. > most people make garbage, That's fine, that's what sets truly great art apart. Not that it terribly matters, more care and ingenuity goes into even some shit instagram thirst trap picture than every clanker slop ever output combined. These are lifeless things. Their only value is by referencing human creation which they debase with their very existence.
- dofm 2mo ago
  Serious question: are you having a particularly bad day or week? Because this was really rude and you appear to have poured out a lot more irritation than was merited. If it were not for this, as a geeky photographer I'd get into it with you about whether Ansel Adams was really an artist, whether he's any particular benchmark or high water mark for photography, and whether individual creations are any less artistic than what he did.
  - Laurel1234 2mo ago
    Sloppers get really defensive.
    - CuriouslyC 2mo ago
      [flagged]
ModernMech 2mo ago
Okay but that’s exactly what the painters said about photography when it was invented. They said it was more chemistry than art because of the development process. Photography couldn’t qualify as an art in its own right, the explanation went, because it lacked “something beyond mere mechanism at the bottom of it. https://daily.jstor.org/when-photography-was-not-art/ https://daily.jstor.org/when-photography-was-not-art/ I don’t see how blanket labeling all images made with AI as slop is any different from people rejecting photographs because they were made with chemicals and lenses. In 100 years the same article will be written about AI art, and will probably feature the phrase “clanker slop”.
- Laurel1234 2mo ago
  Can you show me one AI image with artistic value?
  - TaLiTr 2mo ago
    I can show an AI image with artistic value. But, to you? Apparently not.
    - Laurel1234 2mo ago
      Do it then
      - TaLiTr 2mo ago
        My comment was referring to the fact that art is in the eye of the beholder. Given your biases, nobody could show you an AI image that you would say is art.
  - ModernMech 2mo ago
    Yeah if you want recommendation of things I like, drop a contact and I'll send you some. But I don't really want to get into a public debate about taste in art, because that's all posting anything would come down to. It's a losing battle, because the bias is so strong you can post an actual Monet but say it was generated by AI, and people will come out to tell you how it's clearly not art: https://www.threads.com/@merzmensch_kosmopol/post/DYUaBV2CbEw https://www.threads.com/@merzmensch_kosmopol/post/DYUaBV2CbE... Which is funny because that's how Monet and the Impressionists were originally received by critics. The comment about the light rendering being wrong, so clearly it couldn't be Monet is especially funny given the origin of why they are called Impressionists: Le Havre, he called it Impression. The term, springing from the jargon used by painters, had been an artistic watchword since the middle of the century, reflecting the growing interest in capturing the atmosphere of a scene, or impression, rather than giving a painstaking description of nature https://www.marmottan.fr/en/notice/4014/ https://www.marmottan.fr/en/notice/4014/ So give the above it's really futile to debate over whether any particular image is art. But yeah, drop a contact if you want recs!
iamwil 2mo ago
Your quick take lacks perspective. Photography wasn't always viewed to be art. Critics called photography "slop" in its infancy for a long while. See Charles Baudelaire for his 1800's take on photography: > As the photographic industry was the refuge of every would-be painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies, this universal infatuation bore not only the mark of a blindness, an imbecility, but had also the air of a vengeance. I do not believe, or at least I do not wish to believe, in the absolute success of such a brutish conspiracy, in which, as in all others, one finds both fools and knaves; but I am convinced that the ill-applied developments of photography, like all other purely material developments of progress, have contributed much to the impoverishment of the French artistic genius, which is already so scarce. Harsh. It wasn't a fringe view either. I encourage you to read how much creatives despised photography. This argument was transferred to film when it first came out as well. It took a long while and a couple court cases before it was accepted that it took editorial choice for a photograph and film to be good. When it was accepted that to be the case, despite the aspects of mechanical reproduction, it was also accepted into the pantheon of fine art. So it will be for AI generated images and video. So far, I've seen nothing inherent in the properties of AI generated media as a medium that obviates a human editorial eye. Even if AI could exercise comparable judgement, we will like an image because we want the curation of a specific person. In Grant Sanderson's interview with Dwarkesh Patel about the future role of mathematicians (36:25), he says: > One interesting take that I've heard about what mathematicians will end up being is that it's actually more analogous to art museum curators than anything else. The AI solved the thing, so the art exists. They even know how to explain it really well. But you still want someone to help you navigate this nearly infinite space of what ideas are worth engaging with. Even if AIs were in some sense better at that, I think we would always still prefer a human that we had a relationship with, because the way we get motivated to be interested in things is a social phenomenon. If you have some specific technology you're trying to build, that might be different. But the people listening to this podcast trust your curation on what's an interesting topic in the first place. It's not that they're landing here because whatever your next topic is, that's what they wanted to understand in a prior sense. They're trusting you as a curator. So my role, and arguably that of other mathematicians, might actually just shift subtly into that curation direction of what ideas are worth pursuing. That's a lot of my job right now. Hence, I think there will be a role for AI generated images and video to be elevated into the fine art in the next couple of decades, and we'll see them in museums and exhibitions--as well more mundane uses like what's sitting on your phone right now--just like how photographs are used today.

Photography is a form of art and requires human work and creativity, it isn't some clanker slop.

CuriouslyC 2mo ago

[flagged]

Laurel1234 2mo ago
You seem significantly more aggrieved than me here. > most people make garbage, That's fine, that's what sets truly great art apart. Not that it terribly matters, more care and ingenuity goes into even some shit instagram thirst trap picture than every clanker slop ever output combined. These are lifeless things. Their only value is by referencing human creation which they debase with their very existence.
dofm 2mo ago
Serious question: are you having a particularly bad day or week? Because this was really rude and you appear to have poured out a lot more irritation than was merited. If it were not for this, as a geeky photographer I'd get into it with you about whether Ansel Adams was really an artist, whether he's any particular benchmark or high water mark for photography, and whether individual creations are any less artistic than what he did.
- Laurel1234 2mo ago
  Sloppers get really defensive.
  - CuriouslyC 2mo ago
    [flagged]

ModernMech 2mo ago

Okay but that’s exactly what the painters said about photography when it was invented. They said it was more chemistry than art because of the development process. Photography couldn’t qualify as an art in its own right, the explanation went, because it lacked “something beyond mere mechanism at the bottom of it. https://daily.jstor.org/when-photography-was-not-art/ https://daily.jstor.org/when-photography-was-not-art/ I don’t see how blanket labeling all images made with AI as slop is any different from people rejecting photographs because they were made with chemicals and lenses. In 100 years the same article will be written about AI art, and will probably feature the phrase “clanker slop”.

Laurel1234 2mo ago
Can you show me one AI image with artistic value?
- TaLiTr 2mo ago
  I can show an AI image with artistic value. But, to you? Apparently not.
  - Laurel1234 2mo ago
    Do it then
    - TaLiTr 2mo ago
      My comment was referring to the fact that art is in the eye of the beholder. Given your biases, nobody could show you an AI image that you would say is art.
- ModernMech 2mo ago
  Yeah if you want recommendation of things I like, drop a contact and I'll send you some. But I don't really want to get into a public debate about taste in art, because that's all posting anything would come down to. It's a losing battle, because the bias is so strong you can post an actual Monet but say it was generated by AI, and people will come out to tell you how it's clearly not art: https://www.threads.com/@merzmensch_kosmopol/post/DYUaBV2CbEw https://www.threads.com/@merzmensch_kosmopol/post/DYUaBV2CbE... Which is funny because that's how Monet and the Impressionists were originally received by critics. The comment about the light rendering being wrong, so clearly it couldn't be Monet is especially funny given the origin of why they are called Impressionists: Le Havre, he called it Impression. The term, springing from the jargon used by painters, had been an artistic watchword since the middle of the century, reflecting the growing interest in capturing the atmosphere of a scene, or impression, rather than giving a painstaking description of nature https://www.marmottan.fr/en/notice/4014/ https://www.marmottan.fr/en/notice/4014/ So give the above it's really futile to debate over whether any particular image is art. But yeah, drop a contact if you want recs!

iamwil 2mo ago

Your quick take lacks perspective. Photography wasn't always viewed to be art. Critics called photography "slop" in its infancy for a long while. See Charles Baudelaire for his 1800's take on photography: > As the photographic industry was the refuge of every would-be painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies, this universal infatuation bore not only the mark of a blindness, an imbecility, but had also the air of a vengeance. I do not believe, or at least I do not wish to believe, in the absolute success of such a brutish conspiracy, in which, as in all others, one finds both fools and knaves; but I am convinced that the ill-applied developments of photography, like all other purely material developments of progress, have contributed much to the impoverishment of the French artistic genius, which is already so scarce. Harsh. It wasn't a fringe view either. I encourage you to read how much creatives despised photography. This argument was transferred to film when it first came out as well. It took a long while and a couple court cases before it was accepted that it took editorial choice for a photograph and film to be good. When it was accepted that to be the case, despite the aspects of mechanical reproduction, it was also accepted into the pantheon of fine art. So it will be for AI generated images and video. So far, I've seen nothing inherent in the properties of AI generated media as a medium that obviates a human editorial eye. Even if AI could exercise comparable judgement, we will like an image because we want the curation of a specific person. In Grant Sanderson's interview with Dwarkesh Patel about the future role of mathematicians (36:25), he says: > One interesting take that I've heard about what mathematicians will end up being is that it's actually more analogous to art museum curators than anything else. The AI solved the thing, so the art exists. They even know how to explain it really well. But you still want someone to help you navigate this nearly infinite space of what ideas are worth engaging with. Even if AIs were in some sense better at that, I think we would always still prefer a human that we had a relationship with, because the way we get motivated to be interested in things is a social phenomenon. If you have some specific technology you're trying to build, that might be different. But the people listening to this podcast trust your curation on what's an interesting topic in the first place. It's not that they're landing here because whatever your next topic is, that's what they wanted to understand in a prior sense. They're trusting you as a curator. So my role, and arguably that of other mathematicians, might actually just shift subtly into that curation direction of what ideas are worth pursuing. That's a lot of my job right now. Hence, I think there will be a role for AI generated images and video to be elevated into the fine art in the next couple of decades, and we'll see them in museums and exhibitions--as well more mundane uses like what's sitting on your phone right now--just like how photographs are used today.