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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   15940 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

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Another social experiment regarding AI art: A Twitter user posts a real Monet painting and says it's AI. The results are about what you'd expect. A few people say they can't tell the difference, but a lot of people arrogantly claim the "AI-generated" image is complete trash. Lots of very confident-sounding nonsense about "composition", color theory, brushstrokes, random little details about the plants, etc. Reddit discussions are here and here. The response afterwards seems to mostly center around a motte-and-bailey that pretends nobody made any claims about how AI does on the formal qualities of artwork, but that human art is still vastly better due to vague notions of "artistic intent".

The Left's antipathy towards AI art is well-known by this point. I did a small experiment to see if the Right was as susceptible and can report that at least some users are. It seems like the Right is split with some users being open to AI art on pragmatic grounds, some liking it simply due to the Left hating it, and some are just as opposed as the Left and let it cloud their judgement. I posted some modded AI artwork for Slay the Spire 2 on /v/ and had a decent chunk of users saying the usual "ugh this looks terrible". Then I started including official card art from the game for comparison while still implying it was all AI-generated, and the response got even worse. The card art for Abrasive, Squash, and Secret Technique attracted particular scorn. Again, this is human-made art that revealed preferences show nobody really has a problem with, yet the responses they got when people thought they were AI included the following:

You're posting stuff your average pixiv prompt jockey would consider low quality.

That genuinely looks like MSPaint quality.

This looks like shit doe. But I guess AIjeets don't have taste.

By "this good" do you mean like cheap clip-art? Or do you think that's actually good art?

I mean the most likely longterm outcome here is that in a decade or two AI art will just be accepted as another genre/medium and people will move onto the next thing to criticize as being too artificial or easy. Maybe AI-Cubed Art where AI-prompts are used which take all the soul and skill out of the original generation of AI art?

I imagine something more like professional sports developing: you'll have a large group of people augmenting their abilities artificially, stridently condemning the act of doing so, while society keeps a polite fiction that they aren't. The role of the artist becomes to hide their tracks well so they can perform without the stench of hypocrisy.

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