How much did photography "stole" painter jobs ?

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Ziggurat@sh.itjust.works⁩ to ⁨nostupidquestions@lemmy.world⁩

With all the fuzz about IA image “stealing” illustrator job, I am curious about how much photography changed the art world in the 19th century.

There was a time where getting a portrait done was a relatively big thing, requiring several days of work for a painter, while you had to stand still for a while so the painter knew what you looked like, and then with photography, all you had to do was to stand still for a few minutes, and you’ll get a picture of you printed on paper the next day.

How did it impact the average painter who was getting paid to paint people once in their lifetime.

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NotAnonymousAtAll@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
It sure did have a big impact, comparable to what some people expect to happen soon with AI.

However, I think your framing misses the main point of why many artists today are wary about AI: They are not just being replaced, their own work is used as a building block for the tools that will replace them; and they were not asked for permission and don’t even get any compensation for that.

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- Vlyn@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  If you have a basic understanding how AI works then this argument doesn’t hold much water.
  
  Let’s take the human approach: I’m going to look at all the works of popular painters to learn their styles. Then I grab my painting tools and create similar works.
  
  No credit there, I still used all those other works as input and created by own based on them.
  
  With AI it’s the same, just in a much bigger capacity. If you ask AI to redraw the Mona Lisa you won’t get a 1:1 copy out, because the original doesn’t exist in the trained model, it’s just statistics.
  
  Same as if you tell a human to recreate the painting, no matter how good they are, they’ll never be able to perfectly reproduce the original work.
  
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  - ekky43@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    But it does hold water. The original image might not be contained within the model, but the fact that it was trained on stolen data makes it problematic. Even if humans do the same, an AI model is not a human, and therefore needs to adhere to different rules.
    
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  - C4d@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Let’s explore this further. When we look at the work of a human we can often see their influences (and they can often acknowledge them or even cite specific works). In a way, they are able to credit those they were inspired by.
    
    Would an “AI” be able to do the same? I’m guessing it probably can, but more as a statistical similarity to other works. I don’t know if it can cite its sources.
    
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  - NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    
    With AI it’s the same, just in a much bigger capacity.
    
    And this bigger capacity makes a huge difference.
    
    I try to give you an easy example:
    
    When a company wants to fell a tree, it is no big deal. When a company wants to fell 100.000 trees, you would maybe start to think if they should be allowed to do that. Environment and all. When a company wants to fell all the trees in the whole world, you would say No to that plan (hopefully) without much thinking.
    
    So, you see, scale makes a difference in nearly all decisions. Legal and other.
    
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Takapapatapaka@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I’m not an expert but i learned about this at university this one or two years ago. I’m not entirely sure of what i’m saying though, so take my word carefully and feel free to correct me.

From what i recall -and i think at least in western europe, i don’t know for other places-, before photography, it was quite expensive to get a portrait or a family portrait, mostly because of the time needed to pose. So it was something only nobles or rich bourgeois family could afford.

Then photography was invented. At first, it was mostly an amateur hobby : you had to be a handy(wo)man to get all the components needed, and in first times even to build your own device. There were no schools, no official degree, knowledge only passed from person to person.

So first “professional” photographers (i mean the first one to get paid) were not exactly professionals, most had no previous clients, or anything. Of course, their prices were much low than painters, so increasing number of people came to their shop. But it was for the most part “new” customers, middleclass people or families, would previously could not afford paintings.

So at first, they did not really stole painters’ jobs, they rather extended access to portraits to a new part of population. Now, when it became more popular, the less rich clients of painters tend to switch to photography : it felt modern, it was a kind of trend, and it was cheaper.

At that point, some of the painter’s client disappeared. But there were mostly to situations : big and renowned painters still got jobs, because noble people kind of considered photography a thing for common people. Modest painters, who had client amongst bourgeois, began to lose their jobs. I think that a part of them switched to photography at that point : i also think this is were photo editing began, because they could use their painter/drawer skills to erase or slightly modify the picture when it wasn’t “dry” (don’t know the specifics of photography at that time ^^').

So overall, if you compare like the XVII century and nowadays, of course painters lost their jobs. But from what i (think i) know, transition was pretty smooth, as it let time to painters to continue to painted for upper classes or to convert to photographers.

I pretty much agree with other people, not sure if the comparison with AI is perfect. But at least I think it might show that new techs mostly comes with two effect : replacing previous practices and creating new ones.

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C4d@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
A discussion around the extent to which painters were replaced by photographers (and professional photographers replaced by laypersons with smartphone cameras) isn’t going to quite be the same as a discussion about human illustrators being potentially replaced by “AI”.

I suspect the words “soul” and “character” (and derivatives thereof) to turn up more.

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- VivaceMoss@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I imagine a better analogy would be scribes talking about the printing press.
  
  Prior to the invention of the printing press, the endeavor of mass creation of copies of a book could employ dozens of highly trained, highly skilled workers whose recreations were frequently seen as an artistic endeavor as much as a literary one. When the printing press was introduced and didn’t carry illustrations in the margins or nice little flourishes on some of the letters, the works were considered “soulless” and “without character”
  
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