It is not unusual for me to order my friends to take great pictures of me. If at all the photos come back and I am not thrilled with it, I order them to take another one until I am satisfied with the results. Often times than not, I blame the photographer if I am unsatisfied with the images. Sometimes I blame the camera or the lightening or the settings. I believe photography is art especially if the photographer has a great eye for it. However, in the reading, we learnt that throughout the years, there has been the debate of ‘if Photography is art or not?’ According to the reading, Baudelaire’s 1859 rebuke denotes that the presumed objectivity of a photograph was not yet recognized as a universal value. Baudelaire questioned the classification of photography as a form of art but also distrusted the claim that it worked as a seamless illustration of reality.
He mocked French aristocrats who believed that true art was an exact replication of nature.
In recent years, we see how AI is quickly gaining the reigns in the art and digital world, raising eyebrows of critics and evoking questions in its wake. Just like photography, AI involves a lot of human input to be able to achieve a favorable and mind-blowing result. The person behind it prompts it using the right descriptive words that would make the AI create something.
In recent years, AI has stirred a lot of debates about ethical issues and how it is robbing artists especially struggling and new artists their well-earned income, and this is not the way things were meant to be. Ethics should be in the forefront of this discussion as it will help create a level playing field for artists whose works are stolen by AI and never receive an acknowledgement or payment.
I concur with the reading that art is much more than what we see digitally on the internet and that the internet is a great tool for artists to get their work out there so as to earn a living. However, we have to accept the fact that AI-generated images are here to stay and so is human art too. Human art can also only flourish when laws are in place to protect artist rights and AI becomes controlled by ethics and laws. Until AI can take my photo like a human, I will continue to solicit a human to be behind the camera to take those captivating photos of me.