If you want to shoehorn AI into this analogy at all then no one is even bothering going hiking at this point, let alone seeing anything worth capturing. It would just vomit up endless permutations of statistically average images that look like the kind of pictures people take of landscapes.
You can be creative and take the photo for your sake but at the same time accept that you can generate 1000s of them and many of the generated ones will be more liked by the general public than your creative one.
In the past few could afford to be photographers due to time and money. Many were not the most artistic or talented minds in the universe on the subject (you can’t find those until you give everyone a camera) but just people who enjoyed it and could make money off of it. Those who gained experience with the old tech were essentially AI models trained on statistically good probabilities of getting good shot. You had smaller selection and the model / brain quality determined what % of the best that photo was between 0 and 100% for any sunset. In modern days more people get a camera - more people with bad taste and more people with good taste. You also get more attempts at the shot - more photos taken, more tries. More tries means you are now preserving more of that moment from more angles and extending the time your taste people have to pick the best shot of all possible.
Your plethora of statistically average photos happen if you don’t have anyone filtering the ginormously increased output. If the problem is really valuable, someone will filter it. Possibly a model.
The real filter is value, not capability anymore. Do you have the empathy and taste to know what matters? The AI tokens/cost lets everyone make and become interested in making of someone hasn’t solved their problem. And then if search isn’t improved - everyone will just repeat the making of the same thing over and over. So if you don’t want repeated slop. fix search.
Or do you copy everything and everyone into making more of nothing.
I am so glad I am not you. What a miserable way to live your life.
Ex: Much-more furniture being sold are duplicates from a factory process; There are better tools—which do not substitute for executive function.
It worked for a time, and manufactures employed experienced, legendary even, watchmakers and specialized "watch setters" to create and tune to the best possible extent a few experimental watch movements. They would be sold as collection pieces, the firm would gain boasting rights in its advertising, and the experience informed the design and tuning of more mainline movements.
By the end of the history of (the revival* of) this concours, the winner was always Tissot, a second-rate company. What hides behind Tissot is ETA, a huge watch movement manufacturer for all of the Swatch group (dozens of brands, from Omega to the worst no-name stuff you can find).
What they were doing to win was just to pick the best watch movements out of the millions of basic, bland, uninteresting "workhorse" ones they were producing each year. Just by chance, there was always one combination of the hundreds of components, each with their manufacturing tolerances and variations, that would fit all together to make an exceptionally accurate movement.
In the end, yes, Tissot won repeatedly. But the concours is dead. And Tissot is still a second-rate brand making second rate watches. Nobody is interested by their watch movements, no collector, no historian, no customer.
The credulous LLM users Dan Luu is complaining about don't take the equivalent of thousands of photos of the same sunset. They take a couple photos at most, say "LGTM", and move on to taking a photo of something else, even if their couple of photos of the sunset aren't great.
As someone who will often compare different things, I think doing that usually takes time. I think LLMs can help reduce the time (especially if it's programming, not necessarily so much in other areas), but I'm not seeing many people use LLMs to try a large number of independent approaches and compare them.
Now if you know and analyze your photos in those terms you can get good faster. There is no shortcut to the value of quantity.
What we have never done here is define how much effort the "professional" has put into getting better. I've known a lot over the years that know the terms and have the "best" equipment, but they just take a measurement and put it into the tools without understanding the whole and so take really bad pictures. They consider composition as a checklist - which works okay (only okay) in a studio when it means put the chair here - but they can't handle a sunset where they can't control the scene.
Award winning photography means get those details perfect. If you have the details right a phone is often more than good enough to take the right shot - and if it can take more photos faster than is worth a lot more than the best equipment limited to one shot (or a few) and hope that you get hit the shutter at the right moment. If you can get the right moment the better equipment is better, but that is one of the least important parts of the shot.
It's not as if he was covering every combination possible of exposition, composition, depth of field, shutter speed etc. The tourist doesn't even know the existence of those settings.
Define wrong in this case.
I mean there are some obvious examples of a photo just being all black or all white. There are things so blurry that you can't identify the subject matter. But in between these extremes exist matters of preference and taste and everything goes subjective as hell. There are very few rights and wrongs here.
https://ippawards.com/winners/showcase
How many of these pictures do you think were just a lucky shot by someone clueless about photography just shooting hundreds of photos?
How many of these pictures could even be the result of just shooting at random thousands of photos?
What is more interesting to me, the most beautiful photo of a sunset taken by an iPhone ever, or a mundane quality photo of my daughter taking her first steps?
That doesn't exist. The very act of taking hundreds of photos will give anybody a clue. They won't be able to pass a written test - they will have no clue what terms like "depth of field" mean - but they will start to apply the concepts in their photos without knowing the terms.
I suppose there is someone who takes hundreds of photos without ever looking at them and thus never starts to develop any sense of what is good. Likewise some people just have more taste than others and so will get better. However in the real world people are taking lots of photos and they are on the way becoming reasonably good.
Training alone will not make you a good photographer. Someone already skilled at this can help you look at your photos and understand why it "looks bad". However it takes hundreds - perhaps thousands of photos before you become an award winning photographer in the best case. While someone without training will need thousands of even tens of thousands - but these days a photo on an iphone is cheap enough that getting a thousand photos is not hard.
You have a very limited experience of life. Not only does it exist, it is even the majority.
If that were the case then photo competitions would have been upended by now by tourists who accidentally took masterpieces with their phones.
I can take as many thousands of pictures as I want but, without taking the time to critically review them to see what works and what doesn't, I will rarely produce a prize-worthy picture. And then there's the risk that I'll discard it anyway because I don't have the eye to separate the prize-winning picture from the Instagram shot all my contacts are publishing.
Incidentally, analog film photography is having a huge revival, and Instax is still Fujifilm's best seller. Maybe there is something missing from "I did an award-winning photo but I have have no clue how, lol".
Is there anybody here who wants to have their portrait taken by the "tourist"? Is there anyone here who would prompt an AI to generate their portrait, apart from Ghibli-style remixes (which are funny five minutes, and stale a month later)?
https://www.instax.com/printer/
Also the AI powered instax Up! app...
Have even more fun with the instax UP!™ app. With the introduction of AI, you can now scan an instax™ photo regardless of the background or angle, or even in your hand.
https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/cameras/instant-cameras/f...
https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/cameras/instant-cameras/6...
Incidentally, the memory price increase is going to hit hard the "hybrid" cameras - the ones who take a digital picture and then print it out. So the pure analog one may increase its predominance over the "hybrid" one.
https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/cameras/fujifilm-is-break...
But a better analogy is how we hired a guy to take photos of us in front of the Eiffel tower on Christmas day. He came with a DSLR, directed the different poses, then sent us the photos later that day. Whole thing took less than 20 minutes.
It's the fact that the floor has been lowered so substantially.
Of course every modernized, automated craft ends up having its hobbyist revival. Whether it's analog photography, hand tool woodworking, knitting, assembly programming, or whatever. And that's lovely, but it doesn't mean much for economic trends.
I also think the analogy works if we're talking about average photographs, or even very good photographs, that are conventionally well-composed, balanced, etc, but lack the special spark that we associate with true art.
But if the photographer on the hill is a real artist, it's hard for me to imagine a current frontier LLM winning the contest. I suppose it may stumble upon a winning photo sooner than a roomful of monkeys would, but I believe the number of attempts would still be so vast that it would be more efficient for the human to make one single attempt at taking a photo, rather than dealing with prompts and sorting through the millions of AI-generated options.
EDIT: I also think it's very easy to underestimate the size of the nearly limitless set of possible "solutions" to the photograph, and also easy to overlook the constant feedback loop in the artist's mind as he considers each option and looks through the viewfinder, while the LLM is shooting blind the entire time.
Making things easy is good as long as it is not too easy, then it's Spotify muzak.
Of course "manual" programming can always be a hobby that provides emotional gratification, but that's not what dominates the economy.
Is that so ?
Except it sometimes shows you a photo of something completely different than what you're looking at for or alters the landscape to "improve" it. Maybe that's not a good analogy.
Humanity is a rather fragmented bunch.
That's the point of the analogy, not that people are passing it off "as if it's art."