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Comment by benatkin | Hacker News Reader

AI is trained on images from physical cameras, so maybe it can be considered to be gathered from light. It is also simulating light. I can imagine some thought of raytracing as photography. So I’m not sure gatekeeping the term photography will work.

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Going beyond the title shows this isn't about gatekeeping terminology. It's about what we lose when we substitute genuine human interaction with AI comfort, and how simulating an experience isn't the same as living it. The experience never happened, so any AI image is precisely 'simulacra' - a copy without an original. The elder's smile in Chinatown couldn't have been prompted, and if it was, that would just prove the point about simulacra and missing the real experience.

I definitely dont think so, its insulting to anybody who ever engaged in actual photography and put the serious effort in to learn this craft / art blend.

Same can be said about fake music, paintings or soon fake movies. Do you put the same impact or value to old masters paintings vs endless cheap AI generated stuff? AI novelty already wore off quite some time ago for those.

Can it be consumed and enjoyed? Of course, everbody has their preferred fun, ie people already wasted millions of lives in virtual worlds for fun, relax, or to cater to their loneliness or addiction. Usually but not always to detriment to their real lives but thats another topic.

Everybody enjoy whatever works for you, but dont hijack widely accepted words and meanings just because it momentarily suits you or you try to push some narrative, on 0 effort lazy things like this.

Of those, music is one where the word is most quickly applied to AI without qualifiers. It’s because the more abstract term sound doesn’t convey melody or rhythm. Behind that is movie where people will often call it a video so it doesn’t carry the creative meaning of the term movie. This post to me is suggesting that the term photography be treated like painting. I agree it’s a noble pursuit. I just don’t think it will work.

Indeed, preventing co-opting positive terms by non-creative people who devise ever new ways of redistributing IP of actually creative people won't work.

They'll just do it and come up with convoluted rationalizations.

I'm glad you see the logic behind my comment, as discomforting as it is. I get the disdain for non-creative people, but with that comes putting creative people on a pedestal. The only way to fight this absurdity seems to be with more absurdity, and thus it remains the way it is.

Opting to define ‘photography’ is definitely not the same as gatekeeping

Words mean something and just because the result is similar doesn't mean it's the same thing. Creating a photorealistic painting doesn't make it a photograph just like a photograph of a painting is not a painting.

An AI tool could construct a virtual scene and then take a simulated photograph or make a simulated photorealistic painting. While I would prefer that people always use words like virtual or simulated to describe it, I think it’s likely that it will often get dropped. I’m thinking of the camera in metal gear solid. At some point people get used to something and start using less precise language.

That's called a render.

The trained neural net form of it would perhaps be a virtual render.

That's as much as a photograph as someone manually creating a scene in blender and running it through the Pixar Render farm or whatever to get an ultra realistic scene - as the sibling comment stated what you have is a render

Similarly the camera in MGS would be a screenshot, as in a shot of the screen

A painting is actually painted with pigment on something. An LLM by itself cannot grab a brush. Maybe with something else.

It has virtual brushes. This predates AI by quite a lot. It's important to be careful to call it a virtual or simulated painting but perhaps not all the time. Maybe every single instance it's brought up but not always repeated – if you wrote a paper about virtual painting perhaps 10 of 100 occurrences of the term painting would come with a term like virtual or simulated.

A simulated painting is not a painting, so there is no contradiction.

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