When New Media Arrive: Baudelaire, Photography, and the Anxiety of AI

New Media. AI image

Introduction

When a new technology enters the artistic field, it rarely does so quietly. More often, it unsettles hierarchies, redistributes authority, and provokes fierce resistance from those whose status was secured under older conditions. The current controversies surrounding large language models and generative images belong to this long historical pattern. A dramatic precedent can be found in Charles Baudelaire’s 1859 text Le public moderne et la photographie, where the poet launches a vitriolic attack against the newly emerging medium of photography. Reading this essay today, one is struck not only by the violence of Baudelaire’s language, but also by the familiarity of its argumentative structure.

This article argues that contemporary anxieties about artificial intelligence reproduce the same moral and aesthetic logic that informed Baudelaire’s denunciation of photography. Despite the apparent inversion of their complaints (mechanical realism in the nineteenth century, statistical hallucination in the twenty-first) both debates reveal a deeper struggle over authorship, authority, and the legitimacy of automated creation.

Baudelaire and the Shock of Photography

Baudelaire does not merely criticize photography; he denounces it with remarkable ferocity. He situates its emergence in what he calls ces jours déplorables (“these deplorable times”), blaming the new medium for confirming la sottise (“stupidity”) of the public and for contributing to the erosion of what he names the divine element of the artistic spirit. Photography becomes, in his account, the idol of a foule idolâtre (“idolatrous crowd”), incapable of discernment and intoxicated by technical novelty.

The vocabulary is relentless. Enthusiasm for photographic images is described as a form of fanatisme extraordinaire (“extraordinary fanaticism”), driven by l’aveuglement et l’imbécillité (“blindness and imbecility”). Photographers themselves fare no better: the photographic industry is portrayed as a refuge for painters who are trop mal doués ou trop paresseux (“too poorly gifted or too lazy”) to complete their artistic training. What may sound excessive or theatrical to a contemporary reader should not obscure the seriousness of the anxiety being expressed. Baudelaire is witnessing the arrival of a medium that threatens to redefine what counts as art, who may produce it, and by what criteria it should be judged.

Reality Without Transformation

At the heart of Baudelaire’s critique lies a specific conception of artistic creation. What troubles him is not the depiction of the real world as such, but the belief that art could consist in nothing more than its faithful duplication. He mocks the contemporary credo according to which art ne peut être que la reproduction exacte de la nature (“can only be the exact reproduction of nature”). If an industry can provide such results automatically, then, so the public reasons, art has reached its absolute form.

For Baudelaire, this is a disastrous confusion of functions. Art, as he understands it, requires transformation, selection, and the active intervention of the artist’s interior life. Photography, by contrast, threatens to reduce creation to passive registration. The painter, he laments, becomes increasingly inclined to depict non pas ce qu’il rêve, mais ce qu’il voit (“not what he dreams, but what he sees”). Dream, reverie, and imagination gradually give way to optical fidelity.

This is why Baudelaire is willing to grant photography a legitimate role, but only within strict limits. Let it serve science, memory, and documentation. Let it preserve ruins, manuscripts, and travel impressions. In such domains, he concedes, rien de mieux (“nothing could be better”). The danger arises when this mechanical process encroaches upon le domaine de l’impalpable et de l’imaginaire (“the domain of the intangible and the imaginary”), where value depends on what the human being adds from within. There, Baudelaire warns, the consequences are cultural and spiritual impoverishment.

AI, LLMs, and the Return of Moral Panic

Fast forward to the twenty-first century, and the arrival of large language models has provoked reactions that follow a distinctly similar pattern. Writers, artists, and academics express alarm at tools capable of generating fluent prose or compelling images in seconds. Once again, the vocabulary is moralizing and accusatory. AI use is described as “cheating,” “plagiarism,” or intellectual fraud. In some circles, reliance on such tools, even for revision or stylistic refinement, is taken as proof that one is no longer a “real” writer.

Public intellectuals have reinforced this rhetoric. Noam Chomsky, for instance, has characterized large language models in sharply dismissive terms, presenting them as systems that simulate knowledge without possessing it. Here again, the concern is not merely technical. It is ethical and existential. Authorship, effort, and authenticity appear to be under threat.

Yet the substance of the complaint has shifted in a revealing way. Where Baudelaire feared a medium that clung too closely to reality, critics of artificial intelligence now accuse it of lacking reality altogether, producing images and texts that are hallucinatory, derivative, and unmoored. The charge is no longer excessive realism, but excessive fantasy.

A Shared Structure Beneath Opposite Objections

Despite this inversion, the underlying logic remains constant. In both cases, a technology automates part of the creative process and makes it accessible to the many rather than the few. This democratization unsettles established distinctions between amateur and professional, tool and artwork, assistance and authorship. What presents itself as a debate about aesthetics is also a struggle over authority, legitimacy, and cultural prestige.

Baudelaire already grasped this dynamic when he warned of the contagious power of crowds and the gradual reshaping of perception. A public trained to admire technical results as beauty, he feared, would lose its sensitivity to ce qu’il y a de plus éthéré et de plus immatériel (“that which is most ethereal and immaterial”). Contemporary critics echo this concern when they argue that constant exposure to machine-generated content will dull judgment and flatten sensibility. In both moments, the fear is not simply that art will change, but that it will forget itself.

Conclusion

Baudelaire’s polemic against photography reminds us that artistic media have always evolved through conflict. His objections, while extreme, illuminate a recurring tension between creation and automation, imagination and procedure. Contemporary debates about artificial intelligence repeat this structure in altered form, revealing less about the intrinsic nature of new tools than about the values they unsettle.

If history is any guide, future readers may find our present anxieties as revealing, and as time-bound, as Baudelaire’s denunciations of the camera. What persists across these moments is not a stable definition of art, but a recurrent fear that something essential is being lost whenever creativity becomes easier, faster, and more widely distributed.

Bibliography

Baudelaire, Charles. Le public moderne et la photographie. In Curiosités esthétiques, 1859.
Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. 1936.
Chomsky, Noam et al. “The False Promise of ChatGPT.” The New York Times, 2023.
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. MIT Press, 2001.
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977.
Gombrich, E. H. Art and Illusion. Princeton University Press, 1960.