from Hacker News

AI 'Street Photography' Isn't Photography: What We Lose by Simulating Experience

by smnrg on 12/21/24, 4:56 PM with 38 comments

• by vouaobrasil on 12/21/24, 5:54 PM

  In my opinion the sine qua non of photography and indeed all art is that it transmits human experience because shared experience is one of the core binding elements and joys of human existence.

  The internet and now AI has slowly separated the experience from the final product. That's absolutely an emergent pressure that comes from digital sharing simply because sites that encourage that are more likely to get more engagement due to the resulting superficiality when art is separated from experience. Indeed, once we are separated from a true thing, the search for that thing becomes eternal.

  As much as I hate AI, I think AI itself should be considered an artistic reflection of machine experience. But by elevating that, we lower ourselves and forget the true meaning of sharing art for the purposes of human connection. So we are giving up a legacy and tradition for economic short-term advantage and the opiate-like qualities of advanced technology.

  It's a sad process and one I think we should fight against, although I acknowledge I am in the minority.

• by cesaref on 12/21/24, 6:10 PM

  The problem is broader than this. There is a tradition of using photography to record real world events (photojournalism) which has been quite broadly adopted within our cultures - we believe a photograph as reflecting events that have happened.

  The problem with these AI generated 'realistic photojournalist' images is that they erode the belief in these images as being factual representations of real world events.

  Just think of the impact that, say, war photography has had on the world, and our understanding of the horrors that our governments decisions have had on people's lives. Would Nick Ut's 'The terror of war' have had the impact it did if AI image generation was available at the time? I believe there was at the time an attempt to say it was staged, but there are many many ways of dismissing an image these days.

  So, I think we have lost something, but it's much greater than the connection with a subject that the author is concerned with.

• by jmathai on 12/21/24, 8:22 PM

  I may be in the minority, but I don’t see any appeal to AI generated art. I’m not sure which positive emotion it is supposed to evoke.

  I also dislike heavily edited photos for the same reason. At some point it is no longer real. That point is debatable, but AI generated art is the complete end of the spectrum of not real.

  Do people enjoy looking at nice things which humans (or, perhaps God/science if we are talking about nature) did not create? Its a genuine question because I don’t get it myself.

• by acomjean on 12/21/24, 5:48 PM

  I was new to New York in the late 90s. I watched some people playing card games for money (3 card monte scam). I took out my camera and click. Every head turned towards me. “No pictures”, I nodded and muttered something back incoherent as if I didn’t speak quite understand what the fuss was about. They kept playing.

  It’s different now when everyone has a camera and the results are available instantly.

  I have to go back through my photos and sort and group more. This is something I feel ai would be supper helpful with.

• by gdubs on 12/21/24, 5:59 PM

  Thought experiment here would be: what if simulation theory is correct? Than there'd be a deep irony here, because traditional photography would itself be operating in a kind of generative latent space.

• by benatkin on 12/21/24, 5:39 PM

  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.