Well, the first and foremost is to annoy the French, as they've decided that freedom of panorama doesn't apply to their cities, and they enforce intellectual property rights over photographs people take of the building (technically the lights, so you can photograph it in the day, but you're violating IP if you do it at night) so they can charge license fees. This is, in my book, more than enough reason to pirate faux-eiffel towers, and also to unleash a giant robot or dinosaur of some stripe on Paris.
To place the tower in other contexts, locations, and times (such as being destroyed by a giant robot or dinosaur of some stripe).
To provide an accuracy benchmark as it a recognizable complex structure.
To serve as a background element in a larger project.
Because even when my hands worked right I hated drawing backgrounds, and I doubt I'm alone there.
Did I mention it annoys the French?
You need a combination of elements that no extant photos combine. There's thousands upon thousands of photographs of radio rooms on warships, but none from a POV sitting at the controls, very few that are in full modern color, and zero that are in the state of specific disrepair I needed for my project. If it hadn't been an issue with POV I could photoshop around it on a day when my arthritis isn't killing me, but I prefer to use that time to do the photoshop tasks that are more fun and that the bots can't do to my specifications.
Done on a whim because 90% of gen-AI users are using it as a toy. Every spirograph picture was essentially the same, didn't stop millions of kids from making dozens to hundred of them each.
I am reminded of when people would just say this about photographs and the Mona Lisa. "Why does anyone need to photograph the Mona Lisa? We've got tons of photos already/we have the Mona Lisa." as well as the opposite "why bother going to see the most photographed painting in history?"
But as my art and art history professors would frequently point out, a photograph of the Mona Lisa is not the painting, it is a representation of it, but there is no perfect reproduction, and as such each one is its own work. The photographs are in different contexts and thus provide different experiences. A gen of the tower is not a photograph of the tower. In many situations, that can be seen as a bug, but in just as many, it can be a feature.
origamiaround
andulkaphoto
pixelskylines
snowghoul
blakekathryn
