“From today, painting is dead!”
French painter Paul Delaroche allegedly said in 1839 after seeing the daguerreotype. While it’s likely he never actually said this, the myth persists because it encapsulates a timeless anxiety: every technological leap in creativity comes with fears that it might replace what came before it. Delaroche actually praised photography as “a great advantage for art”.
Photography’s real critics were much louder. In 1859, French poet Charles Baudelaire infamously wrote that photography was “art’s most mortal enemy”, and that “the photographic industry was the refuge of all failed painters, too ill-equipped or too lazy to complete their studies”. Baudelaire wasn’t alone in his opinion that photography wasn’t art - here’s an excerpt from The Crayon magazine in 1855:
“However ingenious the processes or surprising the results of photography, it must be remembered that this art only aspires to copy, it cannot invent. The camera, it is true, is a most accurate copyist, but it is no substitute for original thought or invention. Nor can it supply that refined feeling and sentiment which animate the productions of a man of genius, and so long as invention and feeling constitute essential qualities in a work of art, photography can never assume a higher rank than engraving”.
Sound familiar? Swap “photography” for “AI art,” and you’ve got today’s debate. And yet today, photographs hang beside paintings in museums around the world.
Claire Silver concept art for her Gucci collaboration.
“AI is a camera for the imagination” - Claire Silver
From personal experience, I’ve learned that using AI to achieve a very specific result can actually be quite challenging. Sometimes it can take hundreds of iterations to arrive at a result I’m somewhat happy with. Even then it still might not exactly how I imagined it, and require further post-processing. Maybe I’m not great at prompting, but the fact remains: using AI to achieve a specific vision is not as simple as pushing a button. The same goes for photography - I could snap a quick phone pic, or I could spend hours in the studio, taking thousands of shots to end up with a handful I’m truly proud of. Because of this, the argument that using AI is too easy to be considered art doesn’t hold up for me. Click a button on my camera is also easy, but taking good photos? That’s hard.
As a photographer, I sometimes ask myself: why go through all the trouble to scout locations, work with models, haul heavy equipment, and edit photos when I could just sit at home and use AI to generate something similar to what I had in mind? The truth is, I’ve tried—and the results never come out exactly as I imagined. Something is always slightly off, so I regenerate the prompt over and over until I get something I like, but it’s still not exactly what I envisioned. Not only that, but sitting at home and talking to my computer isn’t nearly as fun or challenging as organizing and completing a photoshoot. It can be frustrating, but it’s also immensely rewarding when I finally get “the shot” I’d been chasing.
This video started as a photo that I took/edited. I then added new elements in Midjourney, and animated it with Runway.
AI won’t erase human creativity but redefine it.
Delaroche’s mythical quote lives on because it distills the spirit of innovation anxiety. Luckily, we can learn from history:
Painting survived the camera, and human creativity will survive AI.
Tools don’t replace vision - they amplify it.