In 1839, Louis Daguerre wrote to a friend
"I have captured the light and stopped its flight. The sun itself will draw my paintings".
This idea surely seemed divinatory.
Yet when Daguerre revealed his invention to the world, photography, the general public went completely crazy.
It's true, there was no reference to understand this advent of painting that no longer needed a painter.
It was like creating music without a musician.
It was a moment so strange, so abstract, so devoid of analogy that all the people of our era could not understand it.
At least until today.
Nearly two centuries later, something new and "far beyond anything we can imagine" has once again emerged.
Something brilliant and unexpected, something that destabilizes everything we knew and believed.
The art of AI.
The wonder we feel when a moment of imagination manifests itself on the screen...
It's the wonder our great-great grandparents felt when a moment in time and space manifested itself on a metal plate.
Here we are again.
Some of the artists who have rightly earned their monopoly on this magic are suddenly scared, angry, vulnerable.
Some are attacking the new machines with a hammer, the algorithms with a hammer.
Others embrace them, breaking once unbreakable rules, to produce works of art once impossible to create.
Unlike what happened back then, we have the hindsight.
We have already performed this simulation.
History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme, because human psychology remains the same.
It is within these familiar rhythms of history and human behavior that we hope to better understand this moment and the future.
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