Raw LLM Responses

⁠@counterzero2377 “Democratization” usually refers to making some field more accessible by lowering the barrier to entry. For example: Photography used to be a very specialized profession. You needed very large and expensive equipment, and typically needed your own studio. You needed to also know how to properly take photos and develop them. This meant that it was solely the domain of people wealthy enough to afford the massive startup cost and could spend the time to learn the laborious process. However, as technology progressed, cameras got smaller, more affordable, and easier to use. This made it a lot easier for people to get into photography, especially at an amateur or a hobbyist level. Nowadays all you really need is a disposable camera (or your smartphone if you already have one) to do photography. Professional photographers still exist, but now you’re paying for their expertise, access to their more specialized equipment, etc. The term is a buzzword in tech circles because many fields have been democratized through tech products. Publishing got democratized through Microsoft Publisher and Word, and website building can be considered democratized through stuff like WordPress and other tools. This is what AI art products are pitching: that they are “democratizing” art by lowering the barrier to entry. Of course, this is disingenuous as art really doesn’t have much of a barrier to entry: all you really need is pencil and paper. Even digital art can be done with something like Paint. Side note: when talking about democratization, the people pitching these technologies often position themselves as underdogs rebelling against an “elite” who are gatekeeping a field by intentionally making it hard to get into. Whether they are being genuine or if they’re just trying to sell you something varies pretty heavily.