This is interesting because again I think the camera phone comparison is a category error.
Camera phones are with you when inspiration strikes — when something reaches you as a person in your actual life — and there is an extraordinary battle to get a camera phone to take a really strong picture.
In so many ways they are much more challenging than non-phone cameras. They genuinely have created deep and meaningful new art traditions, provoked and annoyed photographers, shown us new real things we have not seen before, communicated experiences that were until then completely fleeting. Their limitations are obvious and frustrating and provocative, and they place the artist directly within the work. It's acutely social artwork because phones have social permission DSLRs do not.
I am probably an above average photographer but still a terrible phone photographer; people make marvels with them, and there is a community of artists pushing to make better things with them, and learning to use them can make you a better photographer in a deeper way. One of my favourite photos by someone I know is a phone camera image, and I have begun finally to get phone photos I like (and several that have been creatively useful in other ways).
AI image generators just do not have this strong a place in culture, because they derive only from creative work that already exists.
There is one, more narrow place for generative AI that I am maybe slightly more prepared to concede: they have some use in instantaneous internet parody because they communicate using the average of all things already known; parody is inherently derivative.
But I still find myself preferring the things bolted together in a frenzy in photoshop, because someone had to make very rushed, knowing choices to do that. They are less forgettable than AI memes, and as a general rule they have more cultural back story and heritage. (Whereas AI "heritage" is usually a back-and-forth modifying a single AI image)
In that sense, the medium is the message. AI is being used to trash-talk.
Camera phones are with you when inspiration strikes — when something reaches you as a person in your actual life — and there is an extraordinary battle to get a camera phone to take a really strong picture.
In so many ways they are much more challenging than non-phone cameras. They genuinely have created deep and meaningful new art traditions, provoked and annoyed photographers, shown us new real things we have not seen before, communicated experiences that were until then completely fleeting. Their limitations are obvious and frustrating and provocative, and they place the artist directly within the work. It's acutely social artwork because phones have social permission DSLRs do not.
I am probably an above average photographer but still a terrible phone photographer; people make marvels with them, and there is a community of artists pushing to make better things with them, and learning to use them can make you a better photographer in a deeper way. One of my favourite photos by someone I know is a phone camera image, and I have begun finally to get phone photos I like (and several that have been creatively useful in other ways).
AI image generators just do not have this strong a place in culture, because they derive only from creative work that already exists.
There is one, more narrow place for generative AI that I am maybe slightly more prepared to concede: they have some use in instantaneous internet parody because they communicate using the average of all things already known; parody is inherently derivative.
But I still find myself preferring the things bolted together in a frenzy in photoshop, because someone had to make very rushed, knowing choices to do that. They are less forgettable than AI memes, and as a general rule they have more cultural back story and heritage. (Whereas AI "heritage" is usually a back-and-forth modifying a single AI image)
In that sense, the medium is the message. AI is being used to trash-talk.