2023 Black & White Awards

I had meant that you are right about my taking your potted history rather too literally.
Photographers are obsessed with painting in their discussions, but WHF Talbot persistently refers to drawing. He was impelled by his own failure using an optical device, to make successful sketches of his honeymoon, he remarks that his process could capture details that were beyond the ability of a draughtsman, and he referred to his process as photogenic drawing.

I’m inclined to think that all this harking back to painting is induced by the high prices demanded in galleries for any old daub. Envy, in fact, both financial and social.

In the matter of making facsimiles of natural objects, we now have a very similar situation with the third dimension. We can scan and 3-D print any object today and yet no-one had said (as far as I know) “…from today, sculpture is dead.” In fact, it’s possible to have a ghostly portrait head, embedded in clear plastic, made on Brighton Pier. It seems to the 3-D version of the Daguerreotype.

AI may be used to generate a painting as much as a faux photograph. It’s certainly easier to generate a digital image and then conveniently print it on a digital printer, but I can see no insuperable obstacle to generating brush strokes, or even inventing new ones, impossible to execute by hand.
 
David M said:
I had meant that you are right about my taking your potted history rather too literally.
Photographers are obsessed with painting in their discussions, but WHF Talbot persistently refers to drawing. He was impelled by his own failure using an optical device, to make successful sketches of his honeymoon, he remarks that his process could capture details that were beyond the ability of a draughtsman, and he referred to his process as photogenic drawing.

I’m inclined to think that all this harking back to painting is induced by the high prices demanded in galleries for any old daub. Envy, in fact, both financial and social.
Click to expand...

Absent outright fraud, the price of art - like anything else - is roughly set by the usual supply demand curve. One can model price as a measure of (relative) scarcity. That said, I often feel that the arts buyers - at least at the very high end - see this as a way to demonstrate their financial status primarily, not their good taste.

In the matter of making facsimiles of natural objects, we now have a very similar situation with the third dimension. We can scan and 3-D print any object today and yet no-one had said (as far as I know) “…from today, sculpture is dead.” In fact, it’s possible to have a ghostly portrait head, embedded in clear plastic, made on Brighton Pier. It seems to the 3-D version of the Daguerreotype.

AI may be used to generate a painting as much as a faux photograph. It’s certainly easier to generate a digital image and then conveniently print it on a digital printer, but I can see no insuperable obstacle to generating brush strokes, or even inventing new ones, impossible to execute by hand.
Click to expand...


Agreed and hence my option that AI-assisted work will become a branch of art in it own right.
 
We shall see. It may take unexpected forms.
The construction of motion pictures might be the most widespread application. They already use a great deal of computing power to create impossible scenes. Using AI could mean that unimaginable scenes might be generated.
I type "unimaginable" but that raises questions of intent and consciousness.
One useful aspect is the speed of AI. I was very impressed by the way it could generate a short essay - it was at about typing speed. In visual matters, we might contrast this with both both the stop-motion production of Wallace and Gromit and the hand-colouring of successive cells by early Disney.
Otherwise, I believe it's proving useful for generating visualisations of complex molecules.
 
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