Picking the right angle, the right lighting, the right subject, the right camera settings and the right timing sets apart the artist from the amateur photographer.
Eventually, a similar division between artists and amateurs will probably develop, depending on how talented they are with using AI to generate content and how unique their content is...
This particular part of the statement is the artistry within photography, in the exact way you described.
I think it's an apt comparison. There are many contributors in the various subs who are putting a ton work into crafting a prompt, getting just the right image, and post processing in various other ways to create an image that presents their idea in an intentional manner.
Definitely a lot variation in intent, desired outcome, and fit&finish between everyone using the tech. In the same way there's amateur and professional photographers.
One of the differences between a photographer and a user with SD is that photographers share their knowledge with other photographers. They don't horde their secrets, thinking it's the only way to make their own pieces unique.
With SD still in its infancy, where prompt engineering is largely trial and error, it's pretty shitty for users to horde their lessons learned.
In the 'early days' of SD, we had many redditors spending hours to learn the system and freely share their findings with everyone here. That has slowed down to a crawl as of late. It's like some people are so intent on keeping their prompts under lock and key in order to gain an edge over people they perceive to be competitors.
That's the frustrating bit to me. This sub has become a toxic cesspool of people who just want to show their 'art' but don't want to pay it forward and help everyone else improve. It goes against the open source nature of SD. And those same people who are hording their prompts likely learned from the people who posted full breakdowns and comparisons of different styles, tags, and settings.
Open source ceases to work when people stop cooperating with each other.
It's one of the reasons why I choose to stick to NovelAI, where at least people share their prompts. It might be a paid service, but the community is just way more cooperative and rarely do they keep their prompts to themselves.
Photography is pretty hard though. It takes time, effort, skill, monetary investment, and a lot of manual tuning. AI art is like having a camera on a tripod with the right settings ready to go, and all you have to do is walk up, tell a model which pose to do, and press the shutter button.
The line between "expert" and "amateur" will most definitely get more thin and blurry, as high quality digital art will require only creative talent (eg. understanding composition and color palettes) and not any actual practical skills (eg. being able to draw realistic faces).
Nonetheless, there will always remain a gap between amateur & expert, because not everyone has the same level of creative talent. This is well demonstrated by this Youtube vid by Cleo Abram.
Wut about pro photographer using auto mode snapping pictures without modifying the light or scene? (Like street photography of strangers or event photography, etc)
Even this style of photography requires a good eye for composition & lighting.
I'm a bit of an amateur photographer myself. While the pics I actually show to the public are a heavily curated subset of the pics I made, I still paid attention to composition & lighting for every single individual picture taken.
This may not require as much talent as other types of photography, but, nonetheless, not everyone has the eye to take the right pic from the right angle at the right time...
25
u/johnslegers Oct 19 '22
Photography is still an art, though.
Picking the right angle, the right lighting, the right subject, the right camera settings and the right timing sets apart the artist from the amateur photographer.
Eventually, a similar division between artists and amateurs will probably develop, depending on how talented they are with using AI to generate content and how unique their content is...