Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 3/5

Evans: AI image generation requires human curation akin to photography

Benedict Evans · Remember AI? · Jul 18, 2022 · at 15:04

Tech analyst Benedict Evans debates whether generative AI like OpenAI's DALL-E produces real art, comparing prompt-based generation to photography.

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“It's like, you know, if I take a photograph, is the camera now the artist and not me? Well, no, it's me that decided what the picture was, and where to point it, and how to take it, and which of the 2000 pictures you took is, is the one. And, you know, I was talking about this on Twitter with somebody today, and I posted the kind of classic Cartier-Bresson picture of the guy kind of jumping over a puddle outside the Gare du Nord. And I think the story is, you know, he literally stuck his camera against a hole in a fence and clicked the button and looked at the contact sheet later and saw the image. But you wouldn't say like that's a random image or that, you know, the camera took the image. It's he looked and saw and chose. And the same thing with Dali. It's humans that are putting prompts in and it's humans that are choosing which are the ones that are good or interesting.”

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