How much room for creativity is there with a camera? Angle, lighting, F-stop, film type, film processing? I have a local image generator app called Draw Things that has many times more options than this.

Early synthesizers weren't that versatile either. Bands like Pink Floyd actually got into electronics and tore them apart and hacked them. Early techno and hip-hop artists did similar things and even figured out how to transform a simple record player into a musical instrument by hopping the needle around and scratching records back and forth with tremendous skill.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnRVmiqm84k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekgpZag6xyQ

Serious AI artists will start tearing apart open models and changing how they work internally. They'll learn the math and how they work just like a serious photographer could tell you all about film emulsions and developing processes and how film reacts to light.

Art's never about what it does. It's about what it can do.

> How much room for creativity is there with a camera? Angle, lighting, F-stop, film type, film processing?

How many subjects exist in the world to be photographed? How many journeys might one take to find them? How many stories might each subject tell with the right treatment?

> Serious AI artists will start tearing apart open models and changing how they work internally. They'll learn the math and how they work just like a serious photographer could tell you all about film emulsions and developing processes and how film reacts to light.

I agree that "AI art" as it exists today is not serious.

I do not think that the things you say will happen, will ever happen.

Also, photography has the added benefit of documenting the world as it is, but through the artist's lens. That added value does not exist when it comes to slop.