[soulofmischief]

People said this about cameras. About digital cameras. About digital photo editing software. The next generation will normalize these tools and find incredible ways to be creative within their new cutting edge medium.

The post-art world is here! Just think about how history books will remember this period! The styles that will be borne of necessity, of the need to break down art and find what makes it tick.

[pmoriarty]

"People said this about cameras. About digital cameras. About digital photo editing software."

Also about desktop publishing.

Remember all the printers (ie. people working in the printing industry operating printing machines) that were put out of a job when you could just buy a (electronic) printer for your home computer and just print whatever you wanted yourself?

People were wringing their hands about that too back then... now we take it for granted that we can instantly print whatever we want whenever we want, without having to pay an expensive professional to do it for us (something most people couldn't afford).

Has it resulted in more junk being printed? Absolutely. But it also let people print all sorts of fantastic not to mention useful things that would almost never have seen the light of day without cheap and easy access to home printers.

The xerox copier was similarly revolutionary... as was the printing press itself, which put a lot of scribes out of business.

Photoshop put a lot of airbrush artists out of business, and who does copy and paste with physical glue and paper anymore?

As with photography, printers, copiers and photoshop, artists who embrace this technology will be able to use it to enhance their creativity and speed up their creative process.

There'll be a lot more competition, a lot more junk but also a lot more fantastic art that we can't even dream of yet.

[eru]

> [...] and who does copy and paste with physical glue and paper anymore?

When I was finishing high school in the early 2000s, we still had teachers who made worksheets that way.

I remember one history teacher in particular. She used a photocopier to get sections from books, cut-and-paste them together, and then use the photocopier again to make the final sheets to distribute to the students.

I was very surprised at the time, but also admired the ingenuity. The process is much more physical than using a PC.

[etrautmann]

Yep, I see this as a start, and very curious to see the ways in which it’ll get used with a human in the loop, and also the ways human artists will be pushed to creat art that’s out of distribution for these models.

[avereveard]

Even then, few artist got famous on technical skill alone, surely less than those who got famous primarily for their message irregardless of their skill. And this is before getting into the endless pit of defining what art is.

Besides having an ai doing the legwork is no much different than Veronese giving large swath of paintings to his novices while focusing on the two/three major parts.

[etrautmann]

I think we agree then - if new technologies allow an artist to more rapidly explore, iterate, and refine a particular message, then those artists should still have something to create beyond what is possible with these images.

[avereveard]

Yes! Was expanding and building a little.

[LeoPanthera]

> People said this about cameras. About digital cameras. About digital photo editing software.

Did they? Because I don't think they did. I think most people were amazed by all these technologies.

[derac]

https://daily.jstor.org/when-photography-was-not-art/

Research beats idle speculation.

Google "photography skeptics early history"

[eru]

From the article you linked:

> As long as “invention and feeling constitute essential qualities in a work of Art,” the writer argued, “Photography can never assume a higher rank than engraving.”

Ha, dissing engraving at the same time as photography.

Though I wonder if the 'write' meant engraving of a design someone else already produced, or any engraving work at all.

[wpietri]

Both reactions always happen. With basically anything new, people will select some points via happenstance or bias, draw one of a few basic trend lines [1], and give a hot take. Because they generally think only about first-order effects and don't imagine other things that could happen, the hot takes are often of the utopia/dystopia variety.

These hot takes generally tell you more about the opiner (or the audience they're playing to) than the reality to come. It turns out it's hard to model en entire universe using 3 pounds of meat.

[1] Heinlein listed some of them way back in 1952: https://archive.org/details/galaxymagazine-1952-02/page/n19/...

[p1esk]

Most people haven't heard about recent advancements in image generation. When they do, I expect they will be amazed.

[logisticpeach]

True, but then we've essentialy had limitless image generation capabilities since we've had the tools to make marks. I guess this is faster, and in other ways it offers promising new opportinities for people who can't / don't want to learn to create stuff directly.

Others are interpreting my original comment as "this is not art", but I'm not really trying to make that argument. Art is entirely subjective and i don't presume to define what is or isn't art.

I guess my point is more specifically "what itch does this scratch"?

It's really cool, and that may well be the answer tbh.

[p1esk]

people who can't / don't want to learn to create stuff directly.

That’s 99% of the people. I mean even to learn prompt engineering will probably be too much for majority of those 99% people, but it’s a huge step forward in user friendliness, compared to, say, photoshop.

”what itch does this scratch"?

How many people post pictures on social media? Many of those pictures are not personal, they show something pretty, cool, or interesting in some way. All of those people can potentially use image generators to achieve the same effect.