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zug_zug | 3 days ago

I'm sure this has been written about but here's what happens long term - images are commoditized and lose their emotional appeal.

Probably about half of us here remember photos before the cell phone era. They were rare, and special, and you'd have a few photos per YEAR to look back on. The feel of photos back then, was at least 100x stronger than now. They were a special item, could be given as a gift. But once they became freely available that same amount of emotion is now split across many thousands of photos. (not saying this is good or bad, just increased supply reducing value of each item)

With image/art generation the same thing will happen and I can already feel it happening. Things that used to be beautiful or fantastic looking now just feel flat and AI-ish. If claymation scenes can be generated in 1s, and I see a million claymation diagrams a year, then claymation will lose its charm. If I see a million fake Tom Cruise videos, then it oversaturates my desire for desire for all Tom Cruise movies.

What a time to be alive.

discuss

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thewebguyd|3 days ago

I believe this is the reason for a return to interest in analog media with both my generation (millenials) and gen-z. I do wedding photography on the side, and the past ~2 years have seen a huge increase in requests for film photography, either exclusively film or as an add-on to digital. Offering film has been one of the best things I've done for my side hustle.

Likewise with the sort of resurgence of vinyl, and the obsession over "old" point and shoot digicams.

giancarlostoro|3 days ago

The best weddings I've been to had a photo booth where you can have photos printed out (any number) and texted to you. I think that's the best way to do it. I agree, people like physical photos still. I've bought my wife several different ways to print photos, including a smaller portable printer, and one of those Instant photo cameras.

klaussilveira|3 days ago

Interesting how this matches the Matrix timeline. According to Agent Smith, 1999 represented the height of human civilization before things started to decline.

Not only 1999 prevents humans from becoming too advanced and invent new AI again, it is a believable and comfortable era. A perfect time, perfectly balanced between analog and digital.

xnx|3 days ago

> huge increase in requests for film photography

Also for VHS camcorder footage

mjr00|3 days ago

This is something I predicted when image/music/other creative art models first came out, as many were crying that art as a medium was dead thanks to Stable Diffusion. And it does seem like I've been right (so far).

The introduction of massive of low-quality creations has made high-quality art much more in demand. Low-quality AI art and music has become a huge blinking indicator that says "SLOP". Hand-made, uniquely styled, quality art now has a "luxury goods" vibe, and people are willing to pay a premium.

porphyra|3 days ago

When film photography came out in the 1830s, painters and intellectuals were really mad about it commoditizing and cheapening images compared to paintings.

* On first seeing a photograph around 1840, the influential French painter Paul Delaroche proclaimed, "From today, painting is dead!" [1]

* Charles Baudelaire, in 1859: "As the photographic industry was the refuge of all failed painters, too ill-equipped or too lazy to complete their studies, this universal infatuation bore not only the character of blindness and imbecility, but also the color of vengeance. [...] it is obvious that this industry, by invading the territories of art, has become art’s most mortal enemy" [2]

[1] https://www.barnesfoundation.org/whats-on/early-photography

[2] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/10/16/photo-mortal/

skerit|3 days ago

> They were rare, and special, and you'd have a few photos per YEAR to look back on. The feel of photos back then, was at least 100x stronger than now. [...] But once they became freely available that same amount of emotion is now split across many thousands of photos

I don't think I fully agree. Sure people make so many photo's that they don't have the time or the will to start looking through them all.

You can't just whip out your phone and start scrolling through thousands of photo's with friends. It would get so boring so fast.

But if you put some effort into making a nice little selection of the best photo's, that emotion is 100% still there.

Someone|3 days ago

And there’s software to help you with that. For example, using faces, time stamps and GPS info iOS creates collections for you.

Yes, it’s crude, and you have to do the face tagging, but I think it’s a huge improvement over not having that.

Bewelge|3 days ago

So now the value is created through curation. Before it was inherent at creation. If you never curate it might seem like it lost value in comparison.

verelo|3 days ago

Had a meeting with a friend the other day, discussing the 'times' and all that is happening around us.

I sit here thinking how wonderful and terrible of a time it is. If you can afford to sit in the stands and watch, it's exciting. There's never been so much change in such a short period of time. But if you're in the arena, or expecting to end up in the arena at some point, what terrifying moments lay ahead of you.

I never thought I'd say this, but I expect the arena is where I'll end up...I've enjoyed my time in the stands, but I'm running low on energy, capital and the will to keep trying.

ngruhn|3 days ago

Wait what does the arena stand for?

electrosphere|3 days ago

It reminds me of the Star Wars content thats come out recently - before there was the Original Trilogy which we all watched many times and the lines became iconic. Since then it's all become a mismash and blur of mediocrity due to over-exposure.

(except The Mandalorian, and I can't believe I'm using the word "content" :/)

edit: Totally forgot about Andor & Rogue One sorry, great film and two seasons of top-notch storytelling.

mghackerlady|3 days ago

Rogue One was very good, to the point that I consider it on equal standing to the original trilogy and prequels

adammarples|3 days ago

It's a blur of mediocrity due to its mediocrity, not its overexposure

hackyhacky|3 days ago

> except The Mandalorian,

To each their own, but I think Andor is, by far, the best post-ROTJ output.

the_af|3 days ago

> except The Mandalorian

Mandalorian started strong, with cool spaghetti Western vibes, and then ended up devolving into mediocrity too. In my opinion.

Haven't watched Andor yet.

TaupeRanger|3 days ago

Andor is fantastic. The good content still stands out. Mediocre content will have to compete with AI slop at an increasing rate.

ex-aws-dude|3 days ago

That is something that annoys me with fandoms

You could ask "how many more movies should we make?" and the answer would be "there is no limit, I always want more"

"I like this thing therefore more of it is obviously better"

I think it takes maturity to say "I like this thing and I don't want more of it."

com2kid|3 days ago

> They were rare, and special, and you'd have a few photos per YEAR to look back on. The feel of photos back then, was at least 100x stronger than now. They were a special item, could be given as a gift. But once they became freely available that same amount of emotion is now split across many thousands of photos. (not saying this is good or bad, just increased supply reducing value of each item)

I take a hundred photos on a trip, my phone uses AI (not even the new fancy AI, but old 5-10 year old stuff to detect smiling faces and people in frame) to pull out less than a dozen that are worth keeping. Once a month or so I get fed a reminder of some past trip.

This isn't any different than before. The number of photos taken is greater, but the overall number of worthwhile photos from a given trip is about the same.

Brybry|3 days ago

To add to this, on family trips in the 90s we would take a few disposable cameras and each was ~27 shots.

And we were lucky if even 1 picture per roll was worth keeping long term. And my family almost never looks through those photo albums.

Digital picture frames with a curated rotation of old scans and new digital pictures are what made pictures great for my family.

mrbonner|3 days ago

You know, all of a sudden, I am starting to lose interest in meticulously drawn Mermaid diagrams in README, perfect grammar and spelling in doc reviews, or neat generated general photographs. They are all correctly presented, of course. But the ideas are mostly wrong, too.

I guess my stick figure hand drawn diagrams, a doc with few mistakes in grammar or spelling would be seen as more worthy to read as long as my ideas are sound. Right? :-)

bonoboTP|3 days ago

Yes, genuineness, authenticity, quirky imperfection will be prized. But presumably some of that can also be trained into the models so...

If this becomes a trust signal, you can prepare for next gen models to do stick figure hand-drawn-like diagrams with spelling mistakes.

patwolf|3 days ago

The first time I got a photo scanner, I was blown away that I could see myself on a screen. I eventually got a digital camera, and the novelty started to wear off. Now I can make myself the lead in a blockbuster movie, but that feels boring.

clint|3 days ago

I lived plenty of my life prior to the cell phone era (born early 80s).

I do not have the same feeling you seem to have about photos from this era. Some are fine, sure, but looking back on them, most of them are very bad photos and most do not capture anything close to what I'd call an emotional feeling.

I would go so far as to say 99% of the photos from my life prior to 2000s really suck, like really badly. Some also degrade visually and lose their impact over time.

Since you couldn't be sure what you caught more than often what is captured is poorly framed, blurry, weird, poorly timed, and often left out a lot of stuff that was actually going on. You also had to try and be super selective because each photograph had a real tangible cost.

Conversely, I find being able to take many photos in quick succession and across a long period of time at a very high clarity allows me to select a photo that most closely matches my feeling in those moments at that event.

Even more so with AI photos. Although many models cannot do this well, their abilities get better each day and can allow you to compose or edit/modify a photo in such a way that matches your internal feelings rather than the blandness of what is essentially a random photo of random stuff that may or may not convey an emotion anywhere near to what I was feeling or remember feeling in that moment.

Aerroon|3 days ago

I don't fully agree. Perhaps you're right when it comes to images as a whole, but I think individual images themselves still capture that emotional value for me.

Even if there were a million fake Tom Cruise movies I would still like Edge of Tomorrow (even if it had been AI made).

zug_zug|3 days ago

Yeah I mean edge of tomorrow is a great concept though and would have worked without him. Whereas a movie that’s got less going for it like MI 5 will seem bland once he’s commodified

rootusrootus|3 days ago

> a few photos per YEAR to look back on

I totally get this, but on the other hand, we have definitely benefited from being able to take more photos. I have some older friends (pushing 80 or so) who sucked at taking photos, so 9 of 10 photos they have from their prime adult years raising their family are blurry to the point of not recognizing the people if you don't already know who they are.

They have great photos from the last 15-20 years, but of course they do, phone cameras are vastly superior to the point-and-shoot cameras from the 70s, and when you reflexively shoot a dozen photos every time you pose for a picture your odds are way better that one will come out clear, everyone looking at the camera, smiling, etc.

TiredOfLife|3 days ago

Probably some of us here remember paintings before the photography era. They were rare, and special, and you'd have a few painting per YEAR to look back on. The feel of paintings back then, was at least 100x stronger than now. They were a special item, could be given as a gift. But once they became freely available that same amount of emotion is now split across many thousands of photos. (not saying this is good or bad, just increased supply reducing value of each item)

blindriver|3 days ago

> images are commoditized and lose their emotional appeal.

No, ALL CONTENT is asymptotically approaching 0. This includes photos, videos, stories, app features, even code. Code is now worthless. If you want better security from generated code, wait 2 months and it will be better. If you want a photo, you just prompt and it will generate it on the fly.

AI will be generating movies and videos on the fly, either legally or illegally infringing on IP. Do you want a movie where Deadpool fights The Hulk? Easy. And just like how ad technology knows your preferences, each movie will be individually tailored to YOUR liking just so that your engagement will increase. Do you like happy endings? Deadpool and Hulk will join forces and defeat Thanos. Do you prefer dark endings? Deadpool and Hulk fight until they float off into the Sun and get atomized but keep regenerating for eternity.

If you want to see a photo of you and your family from 15 years ago, it will generate slightly better versions of yourself and your wife and maximize how cute your kids look. This is the world we are facing now, where authenticity is meaningless. And while YOU may not prefer it, think about the kids who aren't born yet and will grow up in a world where this exists.

jplusequalt|3 days ago

I can't tell if you are advocating for such a future or not.

imiric|3 days ago

> AI will be generating movies and videos on the fly, either legally or illegally infringing on IP.

> If you want to see a photo of you and your family from 15 years ago, it will generate slightly better versions of yourself and your wife and maximize how cute your kids look.

Sure, but why would any of this media have any emotional significance?

The reason we enjoy media of friends and family is because it depicts a moment in the life of our loved ones. A fake image or video of them is of absolutely zero value to anyone.

The reason we enjoy cinema is because a talented group of people had an interesting story to tell and brought it to life in a memorable way. Me, or a random person with no filmmaking talent, prompting a tool to generate a particular scene wouldn't be interesting at all. Talented individuals will also rely on this technology, of course, but a demand for human creativity will still exist, possibly even stronger than today, once everyone is exhausted from the flood of shitty Deadpool vs Hulk videos.

I suspect the same will eventually happen with every other product these tools are currently commoditizing, including software.

All of this seems like a neat technology in search of a problem to solve, while actually introducing countless societal problems we haven't even begun to acknowledge, let alone address. But it sure is a great money and power grab opportunity for giant corporations to further extend their reach. And they have the gall to tell us it will bring world prosperity. Most of these sociopathic assholes should be prosecuted and jailed. And you, dear reader who is generously employed by these companies, are complacent with all of this.

staticassertion|3 days ago

I really don't get that. I look at pictures I've taken in a digital world and I'm moved, just as I am when I see pre-digital pictures. Perhaps older images are sometimes "more special" but that's an artifact of the distance between who I was then vs now. Why would I stop feeling an emotional attachment to photos just because I have many? I really can not understand this at all.

dfxm12|3 days ago

I think you're being tricked by nostalgia. It's about the fact that of course older photos you remember have a stronger emotional tie to you (they've had more time to form that bond), and it just so happens that older photos are not digital.

In my experience, a digital photo of myself and my partner used as the lock screen of my phone has the same emotional weight as the one sitting on my desk (which is a print out of a digital photo). Additionally, printing out a photo of you and your partner and gifting it to them has the same weight as going through childhood photo. A scrapbook of a recent vacation filled with printed digital photos evokes memories just as vividly as one from the 80s. On the flip side of this, a photo in a box in the basement has the same weight as a photo sitting in the cloud.

I'll offer you some more food for thought: are Aardman Animations films charming because they use claymation? Or is it the creative force of people like Nick Park and Peter Lord?

torginus|3 days ago

Considering half of the memes are still rage comics drawn with MSPaint i'm kind of skeptical of this statement.

thoughtlede|3 days ago

Strictly speaking, I don't think it is the generation or creation that diminishes their value. it is the consumption.

You said it too:

> If I see a million fake Tom Cruise videos, then it oversaturates my desire for desire for all Tom Cruise movies.

The trick of course is to keep yourself from seeing that content.

The other nuance is that as long as real performance remains unique, which so far it is, we can appreciate more what flesh and blood brings to the table. For example, I can appreciate the reality of the people in a picture or a video that is captured by a regular camera; it's AI version lacks that spunk (for now).

Note that iPhone in its default settings is already altering the reality, so AI generation is far right on that slippery axis.

Perhaps, AI and VR would be the reason why our real hangouts would be more appreciated even if they become rare events in the future.

rhubarbtree|3 days ago

As Grayson Perry described the instagram age: “photography rains down on us like sewage from the sky.”

Mars008|3 days ago

There is more to that, globalization. Now we have 8 billions humans. They are connected to the same infospace (internet) and share much more and more diverse content. Which means a lot more of emotional/interesting/helpful things. While each of them becomes less emotional.

Well, world changes dramatically. Connected old folks are like neanderthals in big city now. However not connected are still living locally in their minds. Youngsters are just accepting the world as it is. Nobody is amused by computers and cameras anymore. (at least in developed areas)

And with all that the worst is yet to come...

mrandish|3 days ago

> They were rare, and special, and you'd have a few photos per YEAR to look back on.

My generation generally only had photos from birthdays, holidays, vacations, weddings, graduations and reunions. We looked at the three albums which contained every family photo often and I know them all by heart.

My kid was born in 2009 and our family digital album has nearly 1,000 photos per year of her life. And she's seen virtually none of them and seems to have little interest in ever seeing them since she creates so many of her own photos every day which are ephemeral.

bonoboTP|3 days ago

I guess some of the appeal of those sparse photos is the element of fantasy and imagination. Wondering what it could have been. Looking at a low quality yellowing wedding photo of your grandma... It allows you to think and wonder. Seeing it in 4K video or a volumetric 4D gaussian splat in VR robs you of all that sentimental mystery.

Nostalgia and idealization of the past is also harder when you have a more representative cross section of past moments.

bryanrasmussen|3 days ago

https://medium.com/luminasticity/art-as-a-tool-for-storing-m...

"One of the primary properties of anything with Mana is a feeling of uniqueness. That one has never encountered something like this before, and therefore it is important. The uniqueness of the thing is a property that pulls you in to focus more closely, to attempt to understand more closely why the thing is unique."

ForHackernews|3 days ago

There's already a book about this: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935)[0]

> The conditions for an analogous insight are more favorable in the present. And if changes in the medium of contemporary perception can be comprehended as decay of the aura, it is possible to show its social causes.

[0] https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf

esafak|3 days ago

There is still room for art. Any photographer sees lots of pictures, but can tell the good from the bad, and find pleasure. They don't dismiss photography altogether.

Razengan|3 days ago

Every time in human civilization there's a new technology, existing humans rail against it and want the Good Old Days back, existing children grow up to get used to it, the generation-to-be-born knows it as the normal baseline, then maybe future generations rediscover the past and take the best things about how things used to be without being held back by how bad they were. (see retro games made after retro games died)

Bombthecat|3 days ago

Yeah, pixel games are huge now.

But I think it's more because of growing up with it have now pc, money. Not because people rediscover pixel games.

vunderba|3 days ago

> If I see a million fake Tom Cruise videos, then it oversaturates my desire for desire for all Tom Cruise movies.

I often call this over-saturation the media equivalent of semantic satiation. Anything commoditized or mass-manufactured isn't going to have emotional appeal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_satiation

mannanj|3 days ago

I've often had an "addictive" personality and now I see it as an over satiation, in a semantic way, sort of thing. When I found something I liked I would over saturate my self in it, and lose interest and move on faster than others I knew.

Feels like what you described describes that inner personality trait better than I have heard before.

ChaitanyaSai|3 days ago

Agree. But there are some use-cases where images can still be of huge help. Making textbooks come alive for instance. We are trying to do that and make a whole bunch of Indian textbooks into comics and free for students. (zerobyheart.com if anyone's interested and would like to make suggestions; the panel-to-panel continuity is still off and something we are working on )

nathan_compton|3 days ago

People here like to say "Commoditize your Compliment" but to a company the size of google or amazon literally EVERYTHING is your compliment. Too bad no philosopher or political scientist or economist every thought about this stuff before or we might have some kind of plan to make the future less miserable and alienating.

NoGravitas|3 days ago

> Too bad no philosopher or political scientist or economist every thought about this stuff before

I see what you did there and know exactly the political economist you are talking about, but if you Speak His Name, the shrieking hordes descend.

soperj|3 days ago

> you'd have a few photos per YEAR to look back on

My parents took way more photos with film than I do with my cellphone camera.

obscurette|3 days ago

While it wasn't really rare, it was far from common. It was almost full time hobby back then. (I grew up in sixties/seventies.)

_trampeltier|3 days ago

A kind of the same happend to music. With a LP or a tape, you had to listen to all songs. Later with a CD you just skipped the not so good songs. And with MP3, you don't even bothered to save not so good songs. And now with TikTok etc. a song just have to be 20sec but has to bang hard for this short time.

theshackleford|3 days ago

> They were rare > and special > and you'd have a few photos per YEAR to look back on.

None of these things are true for me as a millennial in the 35-45 age group. And my family was poor to boot, and we were still drowning in photos and photo albums.

dwd|2 days ago

> If I see a million fake Tom Cruise videos, then it oversaturates my desire for desire for all Tom Cruise movies.

In economic terms it's diminishing marginal utility.

lukol|3 days ago

Don't disagree but being the social animals we are, images and videos will never not be important. Things will always feel better when I can connect it with a friendly face.

EForEndeavour|3 days ago

The source, personal significance, and intent of images and videos will matter a lot, though. I'll cherish photos of my family members forever, regardless of technical excellence.

Or a photo of my freshman dorm room during exam season. Subpar image quality, lousy lighting, etc. but so many memories, positive and negative, are elicited by that fleeting glimpse from an era of excitement, boredom, stress, uncertainty, and optimism, not knowing where I was going in life, when I'd ever look back at that snapshot, but deciding on a whim to grab it during a break from cramming topics now long forgotten.

But I roll my eyes at the idea of injecting my likeness into a short clip depicting random over-the-top action sequences, no matter how photorealistic, because I've never wanted to do that.

fortzi|3 days ago

This.

Unimaginable abundance may sound good (it does to me), but scarcity has value too. We might just find put that its value is too important. I just hope that if we do, it’s not too late.

Mars008|3 days ago

There is something that's not easy to scale: humans. Live concerts, performance, etc. They are local

squidsoup|3 days ago

> The feel of photos back then, was at least 100x stronger than now. They were a special item, could be given as a gift.

I think this is still true if you shoot film today.

casey2|3 days ago

IMO this would be a positive side effect were it true. Do you really long for the day Hollywood exploited your emotions for profit?

GaggiX|3 days ago

You can still buy a Polaroid, there is one factory left in the world able to produce the film required but they still make them.

ctmnt|3 days ago

“Still” isn’t the right word. Once Polaroid stopped making the film, closed their factories, and sold or junked their machines, their supplies did the same, and so some of the components stopped being manufactured and available for purchase. What’s sold now as Polaroid film was a reinvention of the same idea. And it’s notably not as good. The dwindling stock of unused true Polaroid film is getting absurdly expensive as a result.

The one factory you refer to was the last one, and was purchased by the Impossible Project (now Polaroid BV). So they were able to save one set of machines. But the actual process of making the film was lost. So it’s an old set of machines making a new but similar product.

999900000999|3 days ago

Your photos of your dog mean nothing to me.

I have a photo of a friend I’ve since drifted from, it’s her in her army fatigues after basic. She was had just went through a horrible divorce and that was a shining achievement for her.

The story behind the photo is what makes it matter.

Not the format.

However I will agree AI is a poor substitute. You’ll have people creating AI photos of a fake marriage and fake pets in a big fake house, while they sleep in a bunk bed in a halfway house.

pancakeguy|3 days ago

This is the same argument illustrators made upon the invention of photography.

bonoboTP|3 days ago

To what extent were they correct and to what extent not? Is their correctness also linked to the correctness of the similar argument today or you're just noting the analogy?

tallesborges92|3 days ago

Agree the same is happening with tools and services

seydor|3 days ago

contrary to that i use it to restore old pictures and it has increased their emotional appeal

jpadkins|3 days ago

scarcity creates value. Good observation, never thought of AI images this way.

Bratmon|3 days ago

You're presenting this as an argument against AI, but really it's an argument against all human endeavor.

https://xkcd.com/915/

Papazsazsa|3 days ago

You're presenting this as an argument against snobbery, but really it's an argument against all humanity.

sarreph|3 days ago

> They were rare, and special, and you'd have a few photos per YEAR to look back on.

Um yeah I don't know. I fully resonate with the _emotional_ appeal here, but realistically I remember going round to people's houses to be shown analog photo albums that nobody was that bothered about seeing, because they didn't really care -- they weren't their photos.

The special photos (a few a year) still exists in digital form.