Ah, the Franklin Expedition: "There is little the British love more than the noble failure."
The article states: "....this daguerreotype is the only known original photograph of him in existence."
The arrow of 'progress' points away from originality. An oil painting of someone's mug is an 'original.' A Daguerreotype is a quasi-orignal. A photograph, current analog style, is an 'original negative' that makes as many 'identically original non-original copies' as you would like; add a color offset press and suddenly far, far more copies appear than you could possibly ever like. With digital the whole original concept goes by the wayside. And with generative AI even digital photography gets overtaken when it comes to 'original.'
A lot of folks get sartorially twisted over GAI. I don't - it's just another tool. Instead of generating an internal image of a scene in our heads from a language description of the scene, GAI creates an image of the scene directly and everybody sees the same scene. Hopefully there is some reference to ground truth somewhere, but it seems to be optional. We all have our personal view of reality, why not the AI?. Though I think imagination will always trump GAI. I wonder if anyone if anyone has fed Dante or Revelations into a GAI (I'm sure the answer is yes).
I had the idea in the 80's that something wasn't real until it became virtual. I was working feverishly on a large software project at the time, so yes, that thought was brought forth in a fever dream.
As the world of computing has evolved over my lifetime - and I have gone from being all ga-ga over my first toying with a PDP-8 to being all jaded over AI - the Virtual=Real postulate seems to hold its own.
Que sera, sera (and I hate Doris Day).
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