LOS ANGELES (Noema Magazine) -- In 1835, William Henry Fox Talbot finally succeeded in producing a crude photograph of his country estate. He triumphantly declared that his was the first house ever known to have drawn its own picture. Fox Talbot described the calotype, his contribution to the photomechanical process, as an eradication of human intervention. In Talbot’s description, the photogenic drawing was formed “by the mere action of Light upon sensitive paper.” Photography offered nature a “pencil” with which to render herself via optical and chemical means alone.
Fox Talbot’s self-drawing house is a useful reminder that the development of the photograph is an automation story. By the mid-nineteenth century, rendering a detailed image no longer needed to be outsourced to a draftsman because the process could be completed instantly with a camera. Proponents of the technology emphasized that not only was photography more precise than the human hand — it was faster and cheaper.
The elimination of human fallibility was one of photography’s biggest selling points, but this prompted passionate debates about the new medium’s implications for visual culture. Could images made largely by a machine be considered art? If so, where did human creativity fit in this process?
The answer, negotiated after a century of messy non-consensus, established photography as a form of objective mechanical documentation and creative human expression simultaneously. It embodied two conflicting approaches. One determined that authorship of an image existed largely on the ends — in the framing of an image and its development — but the camera filled in the rest. The other maintained that photography was influenced by a human operator at every step, representing a creative process akin to drawing with light. While the second argument helped photography secure copyright protections, it was the first that made the medium compatible with an industrializing Europe and drove its commercial proliferation.
As the twenty-first century becomes increasingly automated, attempts to pinpoint where human agency exists in a technologically mediated process grow more frantic. Images generated with artificial intelligence by companies like OpenAI and Stablilty.ai are spurring questions remarkably like those that emerged with the advent of the photograph. By typing a sentence into the equivalent of Google search, users can generate “new” images compiled from images scraped across the internet, some mysteriously and others dubiously. The result has been a flood of AI-generated images in places previously exclusive to human authors. Painting competitions, commercial graphic design and the genre of portraiture have all since collided with the technology in troubling ways.
The fine arts were thought to be a final hold-out of mortal inventiveness, but the surprising quality of AI-generated images is prompting deeper questions about the nature of human creativity. How can you automate a process that is itself indicative of human expression? A lawsuit filed early this year against Stability AI hinges on whether originality is exclusive to human creators. Adjusting copyright law to address this issue will likely have a tremendous impact on creative economies. If the history of the photograph tells us anything, it’s that the debate won’t be settled quickly, straightforwardly or by the institutions we typically associate with cultural gatekeeping. The process will, however, tell us a lot about the cultural conditions that help us make sense of emergent technologies.