Interesting comparison. I remember watching a video on that. Landscape paintings, portraits, etc, was an art that has taken an enormous nosedive. We, as humans, have missed out on a lot of art because of the invention of the camera. On the other hand, the benefits of the camera need no elaboration. Currently AI had a lot of foot guns though, which I don't believe the camera had. I hope AI gets to that point too.

>We, as humans, have missed out on a lot of art because of the invention of the camera.

I so severely doubt this to the point I'd say this statement is false.

As we go toward the past art was expensive and rare. Better quality landscape/portraits were exceptionally rare and really only commissioned by those with money, which again was a smaller portion of the population in the time before cameras. It's likely there are more high quality paintings now per capita than there were ever in the past, and the issue is not production, but exposure to the high quality ones. Maybe this is what you mean by 'miss out'?

In addition the general increase in wealth coupled with the cost of art supplies dropping this opens up a massive room for lower quality art to fill the gap. In the past canvas was typically more expensive so sucky pictures would get painted over.

The footgun cameras had was exposure time.

1826 - The Heliograph - 8+ hours

1839 - The Daguerreotype - 15–30 Mins

1841 - The Calotype - 1–2 Mins

1851 - Wet Plate Collodion - 2–20 Secs

1871 - The Dry Plate - < 1 Second.

So it took 45 years to perfect the process so you could take an instant image. Yet we complain after 4 years of LLMs that they're not good enough.