Typing fluffy black cat, 4k, cinematic lighting for the thousandth time, it hit me: I was using a supercomputer to do something aggressively banal: to manufacture a fake photograph of something that already exists in millions of variations.
Whether generating moody pictures of nonexistent coffee shops or asking ChatGPT to make this email professional, we all treat a stochastic synthesizer like a glorified filing clerk.
GenAI is a dream machine. To understand why we’re using it wrong, we need to talk about the original hater: Charles Baudelaire.
/Imagine: It’s Paris, 1859. Photography is the new rage, except to Charles Baudelaire. He writes a scathing review of the Salon of 1859, calling photography 'art's most mortal enemy' and a refuge for 'failed painters.'
Some photographers, sensitive souls that they were, pushed back. They did not want to be seen as mere machine operators. So, to prove they were real artists, they spent decades manipulating their images to look like ‘art’: soft focus, scratched negatives, atmospheric printing processes. They called it Pictorialism.
1904: Photography trying to look like a painting.
2025: AI trying to look like a photograph.
We are living through the Pictorialist phase of AI.
Insecure about this weird, glossy, infinite intelligence, we dress it up in the comfort of the past. We beg the model for film grain or Kodak Portra 400 to make it feel tangible. Photography eventually outgrew this; we learned its grammar: what it's good at, what it lies about, and how it persuades.
AI hasn't developed that grammar yet. We don't have stable aesthetic norms or social uses that feel native to the medium. But there's a clue in London, 19 July 1938.
Salvador Dalí finally meets Sigmund Freud after three failed attempts. Freud is now a refugee in London, and Dalí has one shot to impress him. He brings Metamorphosis of Narcissus, a painting on critical paranoia, hoping for an engaging discussion.
Instead, Freud treated him like a patient. He reportedly responded:
“It is not the unconscious I seek in your pictures, but the conscious.”