I had not previously appreciated the notion that photography captures the “particular”, in contrast to previous kinds of scientific imaging, such as drawing, that depict an “ideal” specimen (p33, Wilder 2011). In this way, both modes of scientific depiction reveal different modes of subjectivity: in the first case in choices of what particular specimen to capture, and in the second case by choosing which aspects of a type are considered “ideal”. Both are helpful in different ways: drawings in bird books capture the ideal to permit identification regardless of lighting or surrounding habitat, whereas a photo of a bird in this context is more likely to be seen as “proof” that you actually saw this species of bird.
In light of recent releases of AI based image generation algorithms such as GPT3 or Stable Diffusion, and controversy over an AI generated image winning a prize, after which its creator said “Art is dead, dude. It’s over. A.I. won. Humans lost.” (Roose, 2022). As someone who studies AI and also as a Painter, I have recently had to explain to AI folks how silly this claim sounds to artists: one may as well claim “Paint won, humans lost”. AI is no more an Artist than “paint” is an Artist: AI is a medium, with which agentic humans interact to create art. The value is inherent in this agency: that is why sites have sprung up to sell expert-created prompts to coax out certain images from these AI models (ie, https://promptbase.com) The same debates were had for photography – that photography would “kill” art – but as the Wilder reading showed, photography is subjective in the same way as other artistic media, demonstrating the value of the photographer. But somehow we seem to credulously ascribe agency to “AI”, whereas with photography, the claim was that it would remove agency.
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Wilder, Kelley. “Photography and Science.” University of Chicago Press, Jan. 2011.
Roose, Kevin. “An A.I.-Generated Picture Won an Art Prize. Artists Aren’t Happy.” The New York Times, 2 Sept. 2022. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/02/technology/ai-artificial-intelligence-artists.html.