Educating people about such a technical topic seems very difficult especially since people get emotional of their work being used.
I know because I'm literally working on setting up Dreambooth to do what I'd otherwise have to pay an artist to do.
And not only is it replacing artists, it's using their own work to do so. None of these could exist without being trained on the original artwork.
Surely you can imagine why they're largely not happy?
Landscapes are another matter. Try finding any photo of a landscape that is half as sublime as the landscape paintings made by the Hudson river school. An effective painter can improve upon optical reality in a way that beggers belief. They do this with a clever mix of increasing contrast and affinity in a way that would be almost impossible for a photographer.
A quote attributed to Mark Twain says “A photograph is a most important document, and there is nothing more damning to go down to posterity than a silly, foolish smile caught and fixed forever.“
Not sure I would agree with that. Granted there may be a cultural component in the mix somewhere, but as someone who has painted from observation many faces, the fugitive nature of a smile presents almost insurmountable problems. Franz Hals (below) could do it because he painted insanely quickly.
https://www.art-prints-on-demand.com/a/hals-frans/thelaughin...
https://images.prismic.io/barnebys/a671f804-2e03-4541-afa0-9...
https://az333960.vo.msecnd.net/images-9/laughing-boy-frans-h...
They key issue is that a smile involves the eyes as much as the face. This cannot be faked without the frozen effect: example:
https://images7.alphacoders.com/694/694598.jpg
As for photography, the long exposures of early photography made the capture of anything fugitive an impossibility. However, the moment that snapshot photography was invented (Kodaks Box Brownie) smiles were being photographed all the time.
