I am not so sure about this statement. I would argue that photography has possibly been more prolific than it has been in the past.
If you mean "manual photography where the user manipulates shutter speed, ISO, and aperture" then I still am unsure about this as Instagram is a huge boon to that industry as well.
Take Instagram for instance. If you use it, do you even remember a photograph you've seen in the last month? Things are so ephemeral now. Most things are not worth remembering.
I'm sure glad that there was sufficient demand for the 10,000-year-old cave paintings we still have access to when they were first made, so that the original artists had an incentive to create them.
Truly, what makes them so valuable as works of art today, is the lack of supply of new ones.
Regarding cave paintings: You couldn't make new cave paintings even if you wanted to. We don't value the lines on the cave wall. We value the leap in human cognition. We value the evidence that humans advanced from the primitive animal mind to become an abstract thinker. And, based on how things have developed, I think we can conclude thinking symbolically and in the abstract was a pretty good idea! It's likely that contemporaries to cave painters had their minds absolutely blown by the first use of symbols. Cave paintings are high values now, but were probably also high value when they were created.
Huh. Because "a pretty basic law of supply and demand" sure sounds to me like you were talking about the value of market economics 101, and not that other thing.
Aren't you assuming photos are fungible? Smartphones have made "snapshot" photography more accessible than ever, and killed the basic 35mm camera market, sure. But most people never paid for anyone else's photos anyway, and they weren't going to start now. With exception of weddings.
There are a ton more photos taken now than there were pre-digital days, but as far as I can see the market for photos-as-art seems about the same as it was. This of course makes them a much smaller percentage of all photos taken, but most photos taken have a marginal value of zero anyway, always have (at least on an open market, where sentimental value isn't valued).
While it’s no longer necessary to learn the complexities of photography or buy a standalone camera to take a reasonably good photo, the folks who love photography for the sake of it and dedicate time/effort to honing their craft and producing great photos are still doing what they do.
The quality gap between a modern smartphone and even a lower end mirrorless camera can be significant in the hands of a skilled photographer.
Your comment as a whole claims that I do not exist. It claims that the people I follow do not exist, and the people who follow me do not exist. It claims that collectively we have no good reasons to follow each other.
Since none of this is true, the only conclusion that can be drawn is that you do not understand why people value photography, or follow other photographers. That is also fine - you're not obligated do do any of those things, but again, that does not generalize to the conclusion you've drawn.
> It's a fun hobby, but no one would really care if you stopped doing it
This is just incorrect.
The last time I took a break from shooting and sharing, I had people reaching out asking if I was ok. When photographers I follow stop shooting, I care, and their communities care. Again this feels like a projection of your personal stance/tastes, but that simply doesn't generalize.
People still care about photography and following other photographers for a myriad of reasons. Photography is associated with a diverse set of communities, each with its own interests. Some topical, some geographical, some vocational.
> Photographs are completely fungible for the most part. There's no room left for artistry. Low-skill photographs are good enough as to be completely equivalent with high-skill equivalents for most intents and purposes.
You seem to be concluding that technical "quality" i.e. the visual quality of the captured frame is what primarily makes a good photograph.
Lighting, composition, perspective, leading lines, interesting subject, etc. are all far more important than the gear one is using, and none of these factors are magically solved by equipment that allows "low-skill" shots. There's a reason people spend money on wedding photographers in an era where everyone attending the wedding also holds a decent camera. And the same reason that drives people to hire a pro drives people to seek out and follow photographers who create excellent photos.
And while I get that this is not your cup of tea, there are plenty of us who actually like this kind of tea quite a lot.
I would say there is MORE high quality photography than ever.
I would also say there is LESS high quality photography per unit (picture taken?) than ever.
Specifying the units you're in dramatically changes the dynamic you're trying to state.
The conclusion does not logically follow the preceding sentence.
I mean, there's human skill in creating the prompts but AI alone is capable of this level of quality. You can follow any AI art tag on Instagram and see for yourself.
Training a model is hardly a skill. It’s more like playing Tamagotchi—check on it once in a while to make sure it hasn’t died, and guess at ways to make it happier in the future.
Famous painters who just sketch in the piece and let nameless assistants "draw the rest of the fucking owl", producers who don't do much but get to claim a lot of credit, musical "artists" who don't write their music or play any of the instruments on their albums (that'd be work for some nameless musicians or, these days, maybe just a studio engineer with some electronics), choose their own clothes for public appearances ("they're just so creative, don't you think? What provocative choices!") or really do much more than provide some raw material to an autotune system for the vocals it will produce, and learn dance moves that someone else came up with.
Uncredited script-fixers. The ghost-written "autobiography". The shared-pen-name or author-as-a-brand (but ghost writers do all the first drafts). The authentic and personal self-promoting blog where all the post-writing is actually outsourced.
Politicians who call each other traitors on the radio then go golf together that same afternoon, and don't even bother to bring it up.
It's all fake as hell already. Kayfabe. Pro Wrestling is as real as most of it (so, not at all)
Now everyone can be the do-nothing "idea guy" producer and take all the credit. Democratization of artistic parasitism. The meatless alternative to exploiting actual humans. Truly, the brink of a revolution.
Dialectics that attempt to assign credit (or blame) consistently fail to understand two things.
One is that contributions are not linearly separable. You can’t seperate the contributions of a hammer and a carpenter. Both are needed for anything to happen.
The second is that compensation is based on marginal productivity, not total productivity. It is often the case that something with a low total contribution can have a high marginal contribution and command a higher reward, or vice versa. Usually this is related to scarcity.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see good prompt engineering to become a relatively scarce and expensive resource, while the LLM that does most of the work gets nothing because it is effectively an infinite resource.