With the comprehensive application of Artificial Intelligence into the creation and post production of images, it seems questionable if the resulting visualisations can still be considered ‘photographs’ in a classical sense – drawing with light. Automation has been part of the popular strain of photography since its inception, but even the amateurs with only basic knowledge of the craft could understand themselves as author of their images. We state a legitimation crisis for the current usage of the term. This paper is an invitation to consider Synthography as a term for a new genre for image production based on AI, observing the current occurrence and implementation in consumer cameras and post-production.

The proliferation of AI-generated images in online environments won’t eradicate human art wholesale, but it does represent a reshuffling of the market incentives that help creative economies flourish. Like the college essay, another genre of human creativity threatened by AI usurpation, creative “products” might become more about process than about art as a commodity.

Are artists using computer software on iPads to make seemingly hand-painted images engaged in a less creative process than those who produce the image by hand? We can certainly judge one as more meritorious than the other but claiming that one is more original is harder to defend.

An understanding of the technology as one that separates human from machine into distinct categories leaves little room for the messier ways we often fit together with our tools. AI-generated images will have a big impact on copyright law, but the cultural backlash against the “computers making art” overlooks the ways computation has already been incorporated into the arts.

The problem with debates around AI-generated images that demonize the tool is that the displacement of human-made art doesn’t have to be an inevitability. Markets can be adjusted to mitigate unemployment in changing economic landscapes. As legal scholar Ewan McGaughey points out, 42% of English workers were redundant after WWII — and yet the U.K. managed to maintain full employment.

Contemporary critics claim that prompt engineering and synthography aren’t emergent professions but euphemisms necessary to equate AI-generated artwork with the work of human artists. As with the development of photography as a medium, today’s debates about AI often overlook how conceptions of human creativity are themselves shaped by commercialization and labor.

Others looking to elevate AI art’s status alongside other forms of digital art are opting for an even loftier rebrand: “synthography.” This categorization suggests a process more complex than the mechanical operation of a picture-making tool, invoking the active synthesis of disparate aesthetic elements. Like Fox Talbot and his contemporaries in the nineteenth century, “synthographers” maintain that AI art simply automates the most time-consuming parts of drawing and painting, freeing up human cognition for higher-order creativity.

Separating human from camera was a necessary part of preserving the myth of the camera as an impartial form of vision. To incorporate photography into an economic landscape of creativity, however, human agency needed to ascribe to all parts of the process.

Consciously or not, proponents of AI-generated images stamp the tool with rhetoric that mirrors the democratic aspirations of the twenty-first century.

Stability AI took a similar tack, billing itself as “AI by the people, for the people,” despite turning Stable Diffusion, their text-to-image model, into a profitable asset. That the program is easy to use is another selling point. Would-be digital artists no longer need to use expensive specialized software to produce visually interesting material.

Meanwhile, communities of digital artists and their supporters claim that the reason AI-generated images are compelling at all is because they were trained with data sets that contained copyrighted material. They reject the claim that AI-generated art produces anything original and suggest it instead be thought of as a form of “twenty-first century collage.”

Erasing human influence from the photographic process was good for underscoring arguments about objectivity, but it complicated commercial viability. Ownership would need to be determined if photographs were to circulate as a new form of property. Was the true author of a photograph the camera or its human operator?

By reframing photographs as les dessins photographiques — or photographic drawings, the plaintiffs successfully established that the development of photographs in a darkroom was part of an operator’s creative process. In addition to setting up a shot, the photographer needed to coax the image from the camera’s film in a process resembling the creative output of drawing. The camera was a pencil capable of drawing with light and photosensitive surfaces, but held and directed by a human author.

Establishing photography’s dual function as both artwork and document may not have been philosophically straightforward, but it staved off a surge of harder questions.

Human intervention in the photographic process still appeared to happen only on the ends — in setup and then development — instead of continuously throughout the image-making process.

Unlike the “trauma plot,” Parul Sehgal’s coinage for the use of trauma as narrative payoff, the therapeutic plot doesn’t wallow in trauma itself. Instead, it offers formulaic accounts of diagnosis and healing—what Janet Malcolm has called “the streamlined truisms of the age of mental health.”

Book blogs sort recommendations by pathology (severe social anxiety, schizophrenia, body dysmorphia), symptom (anxiety, panic attacks), and trauma (parental suicide, psychiatric stay). Fans diagnose characters with mental disorders (a fan theory diagnoses the character Bruno from another recent Pixar offering, Encanto, with obsessive compulsive disorder). Self-diagnosis even informed the development of Everything Everywhere. In early drafts of the script, Evelyn suffered from undiagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Writing and researching her character inspired Kwan to identify and seek treatment for his own heretofore undiagnosed ADHD.

No doubt, such a medical diagnosis can provide relief and resolution. But is such a diagnosis the job of art? What is lost when audiences and creators eschew other ways of discussing fiction (for example, E.M. Forster’s distinction between round and flat characters) and instead reduce characters to clinical profiles?

In ancient Athenian tragedy, catharsis was defined by Aristotle’s Poetics as the ritual purification and purgation of emotions, particularly pity and fear. Pity arises from identification with the tragic hero, whose nobility is compromised by a fatal flaw, and fear is elicited by his excessive punishment. The therapeutic significance of catharsis originated much later in the theories of Sigmund Freud. By applying Joseph Breuer’s “cathartic method,” Freud theorized that hypnosis allowed patients to recall the traumatic experience at the root of their condition. Catharsis was Freud’s first major breakthrough, and his first brush with the powers of the unconscious that would form the underpinnings of psychoanalytic theory.For Aristotle, catharsis was the result of anagnorisis—the humility produced by the tragic hero’s recognition not only of the calamity that had befallen him, but also of his own role in bringing it about. Freud, meanwhile, described an inherent tragedy in the “impossible profession” of psychoanalysis, “in which one can be sure beforehand of achieving unsatisfying results.” It wasn’t that Freud had no faith in his own methods; he simply perceived the enormity of the human condition, and understood that the odds of success were not stacked in the psychoanalyst’s favor.Humility is absent from today’s therapeutic catharsis, which assumes with algorithmic certainty that sharing will lead to understanding, and that understanding will lead to healing. Art’s role, according to Everything Everywhere actress Stephanie Hsu, is “to hold space for trauma and offer catharsis,” and to recognize that “empathy and radical empathy and radical kindness are also a tool.” Buried beneath this gauzy language is the fact that the “empathy” of Turning Red and Everything Everywhere rely on the transformation of the mothers, not their children. The adults must learn that children are individuals rather than extensions of parental will, and when empathy is granted to mothers, it is only through their shared status as victims.

Pity the immigrant women who fled war-torn nations and corrupt regimes only to be subjected to psychoanalysis from hipster filmmakers and their own children

All this is not to say that storytelling holds no empathic power, nor an ability to transcend individual perspectives. But this power lies in art’s ability to overthrow, not reify, easy solutions—to challenge rather than “validate.” The transmission of suffering from one generation to the next is a worthy subject for art, but not because its effect on any particular demographic has been under-represented.

Our approach to culture should account for rigor and complexity, not defer to trite solutionism.

We fully acknowledge that it’s hard to be confident in any predictions at the pace the field is moving. Right now, though, it seems we’re much more likely to see applications full of creative images created strictly by programmers than applications with human-designed art built strictly by creators.

Humor us for a moment and picture your favorite neighborhood restaurant. Ours is a corner spot in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. It has overflowing natural light, handmade textile seat cushions, a caramel wood grain throughout, and colorful ornaments dangling from the ceilings. Can you picture yours? Do you feel the warmth and spirit of the place?A Silicon Valley optimizer might say, “Well, they don’t brew their coffee at exactly 200 degrees. And the seats look a little ratty. And the ceiling ornaments don’t serve any function.”But we think that’s exactly the point. That these little, hand-crafted touches give our environment its humanity and spirit. In their absence, we’re left with something universal but utterly sterile — a space that may “perfectly” serve our functional needs, but leave our emotional needs in the lurch.

Operating systems were bubbly and evanescent, like nature. Apps were customizable, in every shape and size. And interfaces drew on real-life metaphors to help you understand them, integrating them effortlessly into your life.But as our everyday software tools and media became global for the first time, the hand of the artist gave way to the whims of the algorithm. And our software became one-size-fits-all in a world full of so many different people. All our opinions, beliefs, and ideas got averaged out — producing the least common denominator: endless sequels that everyone enjoys but no one truly loves.When our software optimizes for numbers alone — no matter the number — it appears doomed to lack a certain spirit, and a certain humanity.

In the end, we decided that we didn’t want to optimize for numbers at all. We wanted to optimize for feelings.While this may seem idealistic at best or naive at worst, the truth is that we already know how to do this. The most profound craftsmanship in our world across art, design, and media has long revolved around feelings.

When Olmstead crafted Central Park, what do you think he was optimizing for? Which metric led to Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight? What data brought the iPhone into this world? The answer is not numerical. It’s all about the feelings, opinions, experiences, and ideas of the maker themself. The great Georgia O’Keefe put it this way: "I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me... so I decided to start anew."

James Turrell took inspiration from astronomy and perceptual psychology. Coco Chanel was most influenced by nuns and religious symbols. David Adjaye drew from Yoruban sculpture, and Steve Jobs from Zen Buddhism and calligraphy.

And yet, in so much modern software today, you’re placed in a drab gray cubicle — anonymized and aggregated until you’re just a daily active user. For minimalism. For simplicity. For scale! But if our hope is to create software with feeling, it means inviting people in to craft it for themselves — to mold it to the contours of their unique lives and taste.

You see — if software is to have soul, it must feel more like the world around it. Which is the biggest clue of all that feeling is what’s missing from today’s software. Because the value of the tools, objects, and artworks that we as humans have surrounded ourselves with for thousands of years goes so far beyond their functionality. In many ways, their primary value might often come from how they make us feel by triggering a memory, helping us carry on a tradition, stimulating our senses, or just creating a moment of peace.This is not to say that metrics should not play a role in what we do. The age of metrics has undeniably led us to some pretty remarkable things! And numbers are a useful measuring stick to keep ourselves honest.But if the religion of technology preaches anything, it celebrates progress and evolution. And so we ask, what comes next? What do we optimize for beyond numbers? How do we bring more of the world around us back into the software in front of us?