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Comment by MattGrommes | Hacker News Reader

I see this comparison to a camera a lot but I don't think it works (not that you're saying this, I'm just contributing). I'm not an expert but to me the camera is doing very little of the work involved in taking an artistic picture. The photographer chooses which camera to use to get a certain effect, which lenses, the framing, etc. All the camera is doing recording the output of what the person is specifying.

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I think there's a sliding scale in both cases. Vanilla prompting something like DALL-E 3 and uncritically accepting what it spits out is the AI equivalent of dime-a-dozen smartphone snapshots of the Eiffel Tower or an ocean sunset. But like your description of professional photography, there are more intricate AI approaches where an expert user can carefully select a model, a fine-tune/LORA, adjust the temperature or seed, inpaint or layer different elements, and of course have the artistic vision to describe something interesting in the first place.

Photography mostly eliminated the once-indispensable portrait artist, among other formerly-dependable lines of work.

There's a line to be drawn somewhere between artist and craftsperson. Creating beautiful things to a brief has always been a teachable skill, and now we're teaching it to machines. And, we've long sought to mass-produce beautiful things anyway. Think textiles, pottery, printmaking, architectural adornments.

Can AI replace an artist? Or is it just a new tool that can be used, as photography was, for either efficiency _or_ novel artistic expression?

Billions of R&D and millions of man hours made the camera exist. It’s doing most of the embodied work.

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