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.

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Laurel1234 a day ago | parent [-]

> 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

Show me one example of AI "art"

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iamwil a day ago | parent [-]

Would you be able to pick out an example of "good photography as art" in the first 6 years of photography's existence, given generative media has been around for about 6 years?

Does the lack of an existence proof for fine art photography in the first six years mean that photography will never be fine art? Obviously not for us living in the future.

You'll need to propose a different, more honest test.

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Laurel1234 a day ago | parent [-]

> Would you be able to pick out an example of "good photography as art" in the first 6 years of photography's existence

"Self‐Portrait as a Drowned Man" is thought to be the first staged photograph and it carries a powerful artistic and political message.

Literally everyone in the world with access to a browser can prompt chatgpt for an image. Billions of AI images have been generated yet you can't point literally to a single one.

Illiterate hunter gatherers in the Paleolithic with a life expectancy of mid-20s scrounged what few pigments they could muster and left their hands' imprints on stone. Even in this age of globalization, immediate access to information, and the sum of human knowledge on your pocket, having stood in one of these caves I can tell you it's breathtaking. A billion clanker slop images later and you can't produce ONE (fucking 1) of value. And you think I'm the one who's "lacking perspective"?

But once we have AGI and ASI the Minds will produce great art! Super related to current transformer architecture slop.

	▲	iamwil a day ago \| parent [-]
		Was "Self‐Portrait as a Drowned Man" thought of as great art at the time it was taken in 1840? Or was its status as great art a retroactive judgement with the perspective of time by people after 1840? Not being familiar with the piece, so I looked it up. Seems like it was a protest correspondence aimed at a specific institution, not a public artwork. It doesn't appear to have been exhibited, reviewed, or discussed in print in 1840. Mostly circulated privately. So I don't think it's a good test. Because you're asking me to point out an equivalent piece in the billions of generative art produced in these six years that would be judged by future historians to have great artistic value. If we were both back in 1840, we both wouldn't be able to point out "Self‐Portrait as a Drowned Man" either. It never posed itself as art at the time, and we'd have to know what future art historians thought. Yes, I stand by the "lacking perspective" comment, because your judgements on photography and what's considered art are from the current modern point of view, rather than putting yourself in the shoes of those judging photography when it first came out--which is the shoes we find ourselves wearing when it comes to judging generative images, because the alternative (retrospectively judging it from the future) is unavailable to us. Hence, my core argument still stands. In what way is photography different than generated images, where in photography is considered art because humans can exercise their creative judgement, but in generative images isn't because humans cannot exercise their creative judgement? To argue against my own stance, the tact you should have taken could have been: If one major component of art is the human judgement, how could humans could be credited for exercising any judgement at all when prompting, when LLMs are at the end of the pipe? And if they're at all intelligence, what's to say they're not superseding our intentions with their own?