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Comment by 0c3ca83 | Hacker News Reader

If the camera was capable of deciding how to frame the images, how to stage them, what lighting was required, how to edit them after taking them -- yes, professional photography would be dead. Hobbyist photography may stick around for people that value humanness, but photographers wouldn't be commercially relevant. Just ask the camera.

AI isn't a better keyboard. The goal is to automate the decision making.

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people here really struggle with metaphors.

There's no real evidence for it but it is scientific fact that every Hacker News thread that's more than 7 deep is just a war between terrible metaphors.

They would unironically benefit from talking to Claude about this, lol.

There is a lot of variability in photography and there aren’t hard rules for deciding what makes a “good” photo. A good photo comes more from selecting a subject, in a particular environment, etc.

There's also a lot of variability in AI, and it doesn't follow hard rules for what makes "good" output; it's capable of selecting a wide variety of subjects, environments, etc. And it's trained on more art critics than any photographer has read.

Taste is a set of heuristics for what's worked for the taster in the past. AI is very good at heuristics.

> And it's trained on more art critics than any photographer has read.

Your argument seems to be that because of this training, the result will be better art than the human photographer could produce. I'd say there's at least as good a chance that the training will make the photography worse art than the human photographer could produce.

Interesting position -- "don't study photography, it'll make you worse at photography".

A person studying photography is infinitely more sophisticated than a machine training on photographic information. Photographic art is much more than just taking pictures.

Reading the sum of all writing by art critics is worth less than one random human's earnest attempt to make art.

> capable of deciding how to frame the images, how to stage them, what lighting was required, how to edit them

This is all possible now. I don’t think it’s dead (yet), but it’s certainly becoming more weird and artificial.

> AI isn't a better keyboard. The goal is to automate the decision making.

It pretty much is. And it won't

I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you haven't extensively used the latest models. You should really play around with them. Give Sonnet 5.5 / Opus 5.5 a shot if you haven't.

I am not a shill, I do not work for any AI company, and I used to think like you.

But I've come to terms with the fact that Sonnet 5.5 does most aspects of my job better than me and faster than me.

It made a mistake? No problem, feed the mistake back to it. I have yet to have it fail when it iterated on its mistakes. All that happens asynchronously in the background and quite rapidly with 5.5.

I have and the guy you're replying to is correct.

If you find yourself in that position it's a skill issue, or a job issue.

I use frontier models unlimited at work every day at a huge tech company. It definitely types and generates code faster than me. But human review is becoming more valuable than ever

>The goal is to automate the decision making.

But there is a decision outside of AI directing this.

if AI was able to do so...

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