If the camera was capable of deciding how to frame the images, how to stage them, what lighting was required, how to edit them after taking them -- yes, professional photography would be dead. Hobbyist photography may stick around for people that value humanness, but photographers wouldn't be commercially relevant. Just ask the camera.

AI isn't a better keyboard. The goal is to automate the decision making.

More like saying painting is dead because people can now take photographs.

Of course, you won't make a living painting. A handful of people might, but it isn't a career choice worth taking.

Yeah I probably know more photographers than ever. Maybe an apt comparison given the wild amount of AI and processing that goes into the average iPhone photo as well.

This analogy is not the greatest. It's more like painters got obsoleted not because of cameras itself but because what people actually wanted was not artistic mastery and celestial strokes of the brush, they wanted simple, accurate portrayals of life's events. The mastery over the brush was an unfortunate necessity for a while to achieve that pedestrian aim. We didn't get what we wanted and once we did the awesome and breathtaking skill of the artist turned out to be an unnecessary over-indexing on a very particular and highly specific skill. It's still awesome and cameras cannot replicate that skill in the slightest, but that skill is not and never was what we actually wanted.

I suspect the same is happening in tech. Nobody asks for software engineering. They just want simple basic accounting of life's events. They didn't ask for kernels, FreeBSD, Ruby on Rails, interrupt handlers, register allocations, APIs, Python, Golang, Rust, HTML, containerization, USB and passkeys. They wanted a way to register that party A bought a bunch of Bs and Cs and that it was paid for using Ds. That person X is in control of Y and that this control was active in period Y through Z. I can keep going for a while. None of the bullshit we created was ever essential complexity. We are drowning in astronomical and I mean biblical amounts of accidental complexity and I feel our paintbrush moment is getting nearer by the day.

A lot of the reason for hiring a photographer is the raw number of shots you need to take at some events. If someone needs to be dedicated to the task all day, you may as well have someone with experience.

Software isn't dead, thinking is dead (or dying).

I dated a professional photographer for a while.

Yes, she knew an assload about lighting, composition, etc.

But her primary skill was marketing herself. Next most important was the editing. Lightroom and such.

You would be surprised how easy it is to take an awesome photo. But you can't just deliver an awesome photo to your clients when you're a pro, you have to deliver photos that look like what they want to remember, not necessarily what the camera captured

Isn't it more like saying professional portrait painting is dead because everyone has access to a camera today that does a better job and costs significantly less? A phone camera is just an extension of digital photography, which is an extension of film photography, which first drove the massive shift in replacement and is most similar to AI as a metaphor.

Interesting read on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_...

Except that this isn't a good analogy.