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AI is the enemy of Art
Except Enemies Want Something
In the year 1850s, Photographer Nadar captured many photos of French poet Charles Baudelaire. Intrestingly enough Charles Baudelaire was very critical of photography and called it threat to art, he famously said “refuge to every would be painter”
According to him, it was invading the territories of art, the photographic industry had become “art’s most mortal enemy”. He believed that confusing the functions of art and technology prevented either from being properly fulfilled.
For Baudelaire, true art was a product of the human soul, dreams, and imagination. Photography, by contrast, was a purely mechanical process that only copied the physical world. He mocked the “mad fools” who believed that an exact, realistic copy of nature was the absolute pinnacle of art.
Almost 170 years later, the idea is stil relevant. The question going around now is whether AI is the enemy of art. People ask it the way they once asked about the camera, the gramophone, the synthesizer, Photoshop. Each time the answer turned out to be some version of no. Each time the people who said yes got mocked a generation later. So the safe move is to say no again and look sophisticated.
But maybe this time its different.
