> People have been painting with red and yellow ochre and soot for at least 50K years for sure,

Compare those to the pigments used (mixed up!) by professional painters, and then to what printers could make.

If you wanted to paint fine art in the 1400s you were possibly making your own canvases, your own paint brushes, and your own paints.

And on top of that you had to be a skilled painter!

> The walls on the streets of Pompeii are full of advertising -- they had an election going on and people just scribbled slogans and such on walls. You don't need flyers lol.

The American revolution included a lot of propaganda courtesy of printing presses and some very rich financers who had a vested interest in a revolution occuring.

Pamphlets everywhere. It is one thing to scribble on a wall, it is another to produce messages at a mass scale.

That sense of scale has been multiplied yet again by AI.