Comment by tlh
13 hours ago
AI art is certainly considered uncool today in many circles.
I do wonder though… were there other innovations that were uncool in their early years, where now nobody bats an eyelid?
Is that point just a generational/passage of time issue?
Photography was considered pretty uncool; it removed what at the time was perceived as all of the skill. We now can appreciate deeper aspects of captured images such as composition, and we now see painted portraits replaced by more abstract, surreal, or imagined imagery. Generative AI is similarly revolutionary in that it moves away from realism back into the realm of the imaginary; whether or not a user's prompts can be appreciated remains to be seen.
Fun fact: copyright law was invented in the UK basically because painters and sculptors (!) considered photography theft. That came to a large degree before "real" text copyright as we know it today.
> Fun fact: copyright law was invented in the UK basically because painters and sculptors (!) considered photography theft. That came to a large degree before "real" text copyright as we know it today.
This is...not true? Or at least I can find no basis for your claims.
UK Copyright for books and sculpture predated the invention of photography and existed in a completely recognizable form ("a copyright term of 14 years, with a provision for renewal for a similar term, during which only the author and the printers to whom they chose to license their works could publish the author's creations.[4] Following this, the work's copyright would expire, with the material falling into the public domain"[1]).
Paintings and photographs gained copyright protection at the same time, in the 1862 Fine Arts Copyright Act, seemingly because it seemed natural to extend the haphazardly covered fine arts more completely.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne
Digital Photography and digital painting. Both were considered deeply offensive to a lot of artists. I have witnessed both first hand and the criticisms were verbatim the same as AI.
They said you couldn't become a good photographer if you didn't learn it with the limitation of film that forced you to make each shot count. Photoshopping a picture made it "not a real photo" and was banned from online communities and irl events, drawing in photoshop was not considered art. I find it very ironic that digital artists are repeating the exact same argument as the one used against their art
Switching to digital didn't change their fundamental mechanics, that's why they're still called photography and painting.
But there's no such thing as AI photography, and it's debatable how much mixed AI tools like inpainting are actually like painting and not just like issuing corrections to a commissioned painter. Just generating images from prompts definitely isn't AI painting.
Apple AirPods.