Photography is a form of art and requires human work and creativity, it isn't some clanker slop.

Your quick take lacks perspective. Photography wasn't always viewed to be art. Critics called photography "slop" in its infancy for a long while. See Charles Baudelaire for his 1800's take on photography:

> As the photographic industry was the refuge of every would-be painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies, this universal infatuation bore not only the mark of a blindness, an imbecility, but had also the air of a vengeance. I do not believe, or at least I do not wish to believe, in the absolute success of such a brutish conspiracy, in which, as in all others, one finds both fools and knaves; but I am convinced that the ill-applied developments of photography, like all other purely material developments of progress, have contrib­uted much to the impoverishment of the French artistic genius, which is already so scarce.

Harsh. It wasn't a fringe view either. I encourage you to read how much creatives despised photography.

This argument was transferred to film when it first came out as well. It took a long while and a couple court cases before it was accepted that it took editorial choice for a photograph and film to be good. When it was accepted that to be the case, despite the aspects of mechanical reproduction, it was also accepted into the pantheon of fine art.

So it will be for AI generated images and video. So far, I've seen nothing inherent in the properties of AI generated media as a medium that obviates a human editorial eye. Even if AI could exercise comparable judgement, we will like an image because we want the curation of a specific person.

In Grant Sanderson's interview with Dwarkesh Patel about the future role of mathematicians (36:25), he says:

> One interesting take that I've heard about what mathematicians will end up being is that it's actually more analogous to art museum curators than anything else. The AI solved the thing, so the art exists. They even know how to explain it really well. But you still want someone to help you navigate this nearly infinite space of what ideas are worth engaging with. Even if AIs were in some sense better at that, I think we would always still prefer a human that we had a relationship with, because the way we get motivated to be interested in things is a social phenomenon. If you have some specific technology you're trying to build, that might be different. But the people listening to this podcast trust your curation on what's an interesting topic in the first place. It's not that they're landing here because whatever your next topic is, that's what they wanted to understand in a prior sense. They're trusting you as a curator. So my role, and arguably that of other mathematicians, might actually just shift subtly into that curation direction of what ideas are worth pursuing. That's a lot of my job right now.

Hence, I think there will be a role for AI generated images and video to be elevated into the fine art in the next couple of decades, and we'll see them in museums and exhibitions--as well more mundane uses like what's sitting on your phone right now--just like how photographs are used today.

Okay but that’s exactly what the painters said about photography when it was invented. They said it was more chemistry than art because of the development process.

  Photography couldn’t qualify as an art in its own right, the explanation went, because it lacked “something beyond mere mechanism at the bottom of it.

I don’t see how blanket labeling all images made with AI as slop is any different from people rejecting photographs because they were made with chemicals and lenses.

In 100 years the same article will be written about AI art, and will probably feature the phrase “clanker slop”.

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