Art, science and reality
Generative AI is a step forward in the use of powerful computing techniques and a valuable tool if well deployed. But it is not intelligence in any human sense, nor a threat to jobs as much hyped.
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IT IS 1850. We are in Paris surrounded by an angry mob outside the deep red building in Boulevard des Capucines in which Louis Daguerre perfected, a few years back, the recording of a scene as a permanent image. The address is now the studio of Felix Nadar, the foremost exponent of the new art – or is it science – of photography.
Society is outraged, of course. It always is. Science has broken through the sacred walls of creative culture. A photograph by Nadar, whose portraiture is taking Paris by storm, is surely the end of art; the end of human creativity as we know it.
Charles Baudelaire, the French man of letters who later became the subject of some of Nadar’s greatest pictures, railed against the new image-making machinery: “A revengeful God has answered the supplications of the multitude. His Messiah was Monsieur Daguerre. And the multitude said: ‘… Art means Photography’.” Now, instead, we listen to the fulminations of writers, scientists, pundits, politicians and even (if misquoted) its inventors against artificial intelligence or AI.
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