It feels like I’m living through 2004-2008 all over again. People who can’t think far into the future or have tiny imaginations…
In 2004 I got my first camera. A point and shoot Kodak EasyShare X4530 gifted to me by my grandmother for Christmas. It wasn’t yet common for every teenager to have a camera that they would carry with them at all times. I’d help take photos of my friends to update their MySpace with. Many of them using particularly poor cameras built into the clamshell-style flip phones of the day. (2004 was probably around peak RAZR popularity but most people had cheaper phone models). I’d take photos of everyday, mundane objects and I wasn’t what you would describe as a “photographer”. I took pictures of things that interested me and what interested me most was using a low shutter speed. I never really got much flack for this offline - people thought my camera was cool! Some of my photography was even described as “good” by people other than my mother. Photography had been an art form for nearly a century and a half.
But not online. Oh no - definitely not yet online. I would be called a wanna-be artist who could only take photos of things because I could not draw them or imagine them. I lacked any skill or talent and that photography was not “real” art. That I should stop cluttering deviantArt with photography. I remember around this time that cracked versions of Photoshop 7 (and later CS1/CS2) were rampant. People were using Photoshop to make digital art and among all that digital art were photo collages and highly edited photos. Of course - digital art wasn’t real art either. Real art required real paper and you could not simply “Ctrl+Z” to undo your mistakes. Digital artists, like photographers, were not taken very seriously in online art communities. Even as digital art became better and better and the things people made more and more amazing - digital art was not real art.
Until one day - it was. I’m not exactly sure when this transition took place. I think it is when Wacom tablets were finally cheap enough for hobbyists to start drawing with a “digital pen” and suddenly the medium began receiving more respect. Respect that it had always deserved but was never given. Photoshop was merely a tool, digital art a medium, and artists would create wonderful, creative works with it.
All of that was 20 years ago. And the debates over AI art - even using AI as part of your toolchain - have seemingly come full circle. The barrier to create has been lowered to such that anyone with a bit of spare time and the capability of writing English sentences can have anything they can imagine be created and at a relatively “good” level. Do I think the very first thing generated by a prompt is “art”? Not quite. But curation is an art form and if someone spend shours curating “AI slop” until they find a diamond in the rough - is that diamond not considered art at that point? People are creating image collages using AI-generated art, digital posters, touching up their “hand-made” art. I use quotes around “hand-made” because is digital art “hand-made” now? It wasn’t when I was growing up. I’ve seen tons of AI slop and I’ve seen equally as much AI art. Artists who are incorporating AI as just another tool on their toolbelt to create amazing things that inspire other humans. But I’ve also seen countless people decry that “AI slop isn’t real art” who would be betrayed by their Twitter likes being public - at least before Elon Musk removed that functionality and helped anti-AI luddites from outing themselves as likers of AI art.
So it feels like I’m living through 2004-2008 all over again. Ironically a ton of digital art around 2004-2008 was created using stolen things. Stolen photographs (being justified by “if you didn’t want people to steal it don’t post it online where people can ‘right click->save as’”), stolen IP (anime renders from PlanetRenders.net), pirated copies of Photoshop, uncredited assets and PS brushes. And these same thieves who had turned their early-age piracy into their modern-day careers have the gal to complain about AI “stealing” from them (ignoring that training an AI isn’t fundamentally too different from artists learning from so called “studies” where they steal and copy from artists they like).
Put me in statis and let me wake up in 5-10 years when AI has become “just another tool” like Photoshop already. I’ve dealt with the luddites once already - I did not think I’d have to deal with them twice in a single lifetime.
And I’ll admit that my memory isn’t perfect. This was over 20 years ago and I was still living life as a child. I wasn’t terminolly online (at least not yet). I had only been around on the internet for a few years. Maybe there were large photography communities online that I simply hadn’t heard of or wasn’t a part of. I believe around this time many photographers were on Flickr as it was the new hot thing. Never caught my attention then.