Pieter - it has little to do with drawing a line. If an alleged bakery cake looks and tastes more like a Twinkie, then I call it junk food too. But as these
artificial means of generating imagery get easier than ever, at what point does it become an outright substitute for actual human creativity? You can go ask the actors and script writers guild on strike in Hollywood right now if it's a significant issue or not. I'll just keep doing what I've always done -
spit out anything unpalatable.
Yeah, yeah, one can go clear back to P.H. Emerson categorizing even dodging and burning as a sin, even though he allowed spotting out annoying little specular reflections. All photography is a form of illusionism, and not actual visual reality as our own eyes see it. It's inherently selective. But
there is a vast difference between such selection, in its many potential implications, from sheer fabrication. Painting with a PS or Ai program isn't photography - it's painting, and usually lazy hokey painting. Big difference, in my opinion. And I know darn well which side of that divide I'm on. When I want to be a painter instead, well, that's what brushes and paint are for (though the past few days, that's only amounted to some house repair painting). When I want to be a photographer, that's what a camera is for. And there is so incredibly much out there still worthy of actual photography, that I pity anyone who has to resort to Artificial Idiocy to try to mimic it.
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