Is a photographer “not an artist” because the photos are actually created by the camera?
It could be a defensible position (surely held by many 19th century painters), but I suppose that many people would find significant differences between an actual professional photographer and a random bozo with a camera, even if you give both the same camera.
I have a similar feeling about AI artwork. As long as AI remains a tool and does not start to generate art on its own, there will be a difference between someone who spends a lot of time carefully crafting prompts and a random bozo who just types “draw me a masterpiece”. I would consider fair to define as an “artist” the first one and not the second.
Is a photographer “not an artist” because the photos are actually created by the camera?
This can be dispensed with via Chalmers’ and Clarke’s Extended Mind thesis. Just as a violinist’s violin becomes the distal end of their extended mind, so with brush and painter, and so with camera and photographer.
As long as AI remains a tool and does not start to generate art on its own, there will be a difference between someone who spends a lot of time carefully crafting prompts and a random bozo who just types “draw me a masterpiece”
I’m not as optimistic as you about that difference being eternal. The pre-to-post-AI leap is fundamentally more disruptive, more kind-not-degree, more revolutionary than the painting-to-photography leap or even the analogue-to-digital-photography leap[1]. With wirehead logic (why bother seeking enjoyable experiences if we can take dopamine-releasing drugs? Why bother with dopamine-acting drugs if we can release dopamine directly?) post-threshold GenAI dangles the promise of circumventing every barrier to ‘creation’ except the raw want. No longer is time, ten thousand hours’ practice, inspiration, sticktoitiveness or talent required.
In short, I fear that the difference (long may it exist) between the work of the careful craft-prompter and that of the random bozo will shrink with each generation. More specifically, the group of people who can distinguish between one and the other will collapse to a smaller and smaller elite (art historians, forensic AI experts), outside which paranoia and apathy will reign. That is not the democratic utopia we got promised by the CEOs.
The principles of composition and optics, e.g. vanishing point, golden ratio, focal length, colour balance, depth of field, etc., apply to digital photography (and even rendered 3D graphics) just as they apply to analogue: the knowledge base is the same and a good, non-bozo photographer will excel in either submedium. Contrast this to an armchair prompt engineer who can ‘create’ a professional-seeming photorealistic image in seconds without knowing a thing about any of these principles.
Whether this is good/democratic or bad/obscurantist is open for debate, but I think it shows that the GenAI shift is different from and bigger than the earlier disruptive shifts it gets compared to.
Is a photographer “not an artist” because the photos are actually created by the camera?
It could be a defensible position (surely held by many 19th century painters), but I suppose that many people would find significant differences between an actual professional photographer and a random bozo with a camera, even if you give both the same camera.
I have a similar feeling about AI artwork. As long as AI remains a tool and does not start to generate art on its own, there will be a difference between someone who spends a lot of time carefully crafting prompts and a random bozo who just types “draw me a masterpiece”. I would consider fair to define as an “artist” the first one and not the second.
This can be dispensed with via Chalmers’ and Clarke’s Extended Mind thesis. Just as a violinist’s violin becomes the distal end of their extended mind, so with brush and painter, and so with camera and photographer.
I’m not as optimistic as you about that difference being eternal. The pre-to-post-AI leap is fundamentally more disruptive, more kind-not-degree, more revolutionary than the painting-to-photography leap or even the analogue-to-digital-photography leap[1]. With wirehead logic (why bother seeking enjoyable experiences if we can take dopamine-releasing drugs? Why bother with dopamine-acting drugs if we can release dopamine directly?) post-threshold GenAI dangles the promise of circumventing every barrier to ‘creation’ except the raw want. No longer is time, ten thousand hours’ practice, inspiration, sticktoitiveness or talent required.
In short, I fear that the difference (long may it exist) between the work of the careful craft-prompter and that of the random bozo will shrink with each generation. More specifically, the group of people who can distinguish between one and the other will collapse to a smaller and smaller elite (art historians, forensic AI experts), outside which paranoia and apathy will reign. That is not the democratic utopia we got promised by the CEOs.
The principles of composition and optics, e.g. vanishing point, golden ratio, focal length, colour balance, depth of field, etc., apply to digital photography (and even rendered 3D graphics) just as they apply to analogue: the knowledge base is the same and a good, non-bozo photographer will excel in either submedium. Contrast this to an armchair prompt engineer who can ‘create’ a professional-seeming photorealistic image in seconds without knowing a thing about any of these principles.
Whether this is good/democratic or bad/obscurantist is open for debate, but I think it shows that the GenAI shift is different from and bigger than the earlier disruptive shifts it gets compared to.