It would be a lot more interesting to point out the differences and similarities yourself. But then if you wanted an interesting discussion you wouldn’t be posting trite flamebait in the first place, would you?

The biggest lesson I am learning recently is that technologists will bend over backwards to gaslight the public to excuse their own myopia.

1826 - The Heliograph - 8+ hours

1839 - The Daguerreotype - 15–30 Mins

1841 - The Calotype - 1–2 Mins

1851 - Wet Plate Collodion - 2–20 Secs

1871 - The Dry Plate - < 1 Second.

So it took 45 years to perfect the process so you could take an instant image. Yet we complain after 4 years of LLMs that they're not good enough.

I so severely doubt this to the point I'd say this statement is false.

As we go toward the past art was expensive and rare. Better quality landscape/portraits were exceptionally rare and really only commissioned by those with money, which again was a smaller portion of the population in the time before cameras. It's likely there are more high quality paintings now per capita than there were ever in the past, and the issue is not production, but exposure to the high quality ones. Maybe this is what you mean by 'miss out'?

In addition the general increase in wealth coupled with the cost of art supplies dropping this opens up a massive room for lower quality art to fill the gap. In the past canvas was typically more expensive so sucky pictures would get painted over.

This is a non sequitur. Cameras have not replaced paintings, assuming this is the inference. Instead, they serve only to be an additional medium for the same concerns quoted:

  The process, which is an iterative one, is what leads you 
  towards understanding what you actually want to make, 
  whether you were aware of it or not at the beginning.

You wouldn't have known that, going by all the bellyaching and whining from the artists of the day.

Guess what, they got over it. You will too.

Did you imagine yourself then, as your are now, hunched over a glowing rectangle. Demanding imperiously that the world share your contempt for the sublime. Share your jaundiced view of those that pour the whole of themselves into the act of creation, so that everyone might once again be graced with wonder anew.

I hope you can find a work of art that breaks you free of your resentment.

I took the liberty of pasting it to chatgpt and asked it to write another paragraph in the same style:

Perhaps it is easier to sneer than to feel, to dull the edges of awe before it dares to wound you with longing. Cynicism is a tidy shelter: no drafts of hope, no risk of being moved. But it is also a small room, airless, where nothing grows. Somewhere beyond that glowing rectangle, the world is still doing its reckless, generous thing—colors insisting on being seen, sounds reaching out without permission, hands shaping meaning out of nothing. You could meet it again, if you chose, not as a judge but as a witness, and remember that wonder is not naïveté. It is courage, practiced quietly.

What I wanted to show is that, clearly different from a camera or other devices, AI can copy originality. OPs comment was pretty original in it's wording, and gpt came pretty close imo. It really wasn't meant as a low effort comment

'sides, I'm also neurocute af and feel acutely endangered by stuff that's effectively channeled: expressions which represent coherent agentic thought, yet are not bound to the volition of any individual embodied organism by regular personal accountability. If psychology is any indication, as non-augmented humans we're already not consciously aware of half our driving forces, and that's been trouble enough throughout history. How do you find it at all safe for the environment to broadcast Big Nobody's thoughts towards sentient beings?

AI is the linguistic instrument of those who cast away their capacity for bona fide verbal cognition as a condition of entering the hierarchy. They're a rather dangerous bunch, what with no beans to spill or marbles to lose. Subtle too, "somehow" got all normies working for 'em and usually not even knowing it till it's too late. Tell em I said hi!

> You wouldn't have known that, going by all the bellyaching and whining from the artists of the day.

> Guess what, they got over it.

You conveniently omitted my next sentence, which contradicts your position and reads thusly:

  Instead, they serve only to be an additional medium for the 
  same concerns quoted ...

This statement is assumptive and gratuitous.

Thoughtful retorts such as this are deserving of the same esteem one affords the "rubber v glue"[0] idiom.

As such, I must oblige.

0 - https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/I%27m+rubber%2c+you%27r...

Prediction is difficult, especially of the future.

Some commentators dismissed this trend towards photography as simply a beneficial weeding out of second-raters. For example, the writer Louis Figuier commented that photography did art a service by putting mediocre artists out of business, for their only goal was exact imitation. Similarly, Baudelaire described photography as the “refuge of failed painters with too little talent”. In his view, art was derived from imagination, judgment and feeling but photography was mere reproduction which cheapened the products of the beautiful [23].

https://www.artinsociety.com/pt-1-initial-impacts.html#:~:te...

People felt (wrongly) that traditional representational forms like portraiture were threatened by photography. Happily, instead of killing any existing genres, we got some interesting new ones.