Ansel Adams, a generative HI (human intelligence)

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The estate of Ansel Adams complained to Adobe on Threads about images generated by invoking an "Ansel Adams-style" landscape. Using genai to produce content that is "in the style" of an artist goes against Adobe's Generative AI content policy. I am neither impressed by Adobe's enforcement of its own policy (or its ability to enforce it) nor am I enthused with the rather kitschy output the prompt yielded.

But that gives me a chance to point out one 1931 photograph by Ansel Adams, not of a landscape but of a pair of scissors and thread, aptly titled "Scissors and Thread". While Adams' style is recognizable, what is fascinating is the generative process: he dropped the thread dozens of times until he was satisfied with the pattern. In other words, he generated dozens of possible "solutions" to his problem (creating an interesting pattern) until he found what he was looking for. I don't know whether he knew ahead of time what configuration he wanted but he probably sought a fluid and natural pose of the thread, and I don't know if he was able to modify his dropping method to reinforce the micro-patterns he liked, but we can assume that it was a fairly inefficient process. In the end, it is the eye of the artist intersecting with the generative output that lead to this photograph. In this case, it turns out the generative process is a human exploiting the physics of a falling thread: it is an example of genHI, generative human intelligence.

In the same vein, we can think of other generative agents: physical, chemical, algorithmic. But it is the eye of the {artist, engineer, human} that gives meaning to the generative output.