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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:
Even I'm a little (pleasantly) surprised at how vehement the anti-AI-art backlash is. During the early days of DALL-E 2, there were people on this very forum swearing that the only people who could possibly care about whether art was made by a human or not were professional artists themselves who were worried about losing income. Or maybe ideologically motivated leftists; but certainly no one else. But even on forums that have nothing whatsoever to do with AI, art, or politics, I commonly see people expressing their disdain for AI art, scrutinizing any art that does get posted for signs of AI use, etc. AI is simply not "cool". At least some people do care about how art gets made. (Others don't, of course. It's an issue that people at large are genuinely split on.)
I fully acknowledge that experiments like the twitter experiment you linked to do make the anti-AI crowd look silly. But I'm willing to bite the bullet and say that it doesn't matter in the end. If you take two pixel-by-pixel identical artworks, one made by a human and one made by an AI (or at least, the kinds of AI we have today, using the methods that today's AI systems use -- this isn't a simple chauvinism in favor of carbon over silicon as an underlying substrate), the AI image is simply worse, because (very briefly and roughly) human effort has intrinsic value, connecting with other humans has intrinsic value, the total historical and social context of an artwork has intrinsic value, etc. So it's perfectly fine for people to update their assessment of a given artwork when they learn more about its provenance.
There's a certain type of mind, over-represented among the singulatarians, that's deeply uncomfortable with the entire notion of power relations and social status on a fundamental level. You can see this on full display in Scott's recent posts about artistic taste, and how uncomfortable he was that anyone would allow themselves to be blinded by extraneous (social) factors that are unrelated to "the intrinsic properties of the artwork itself". If it can't be codified in a system of clear and repeatable rules, then it should be extinguished by the light of reason. If the AI can do exactly what Monet does, then the AI should be held in exactly the same level of esteem as Monet, whatever level that ultimately works out to be; continuing to ascribe a special aura to Monet that is not extended to the AI would be arbitrary and irrational. You would just be saying that Monet is "cool" because he's already cool, basically. But status games are eternal. You can redistribute wealth, you can redistribute opportunities, you can democratize access to the means of production; but you can't redistribute coolness. Not until we develop the ability to directly control people's minds, I suppose. Maybe we will soon enough.
It just doesn't, though.
Ever seen the movie Holes? Or read the book? The work describes a juvenile detention facility on a dry lake bed where the inmates 'develop character' by digging deep holes and then filling them in again. Imagine, the plot of the Holes long past and the facility demolished, you're considering purchasing some land on the dry lake bed. Do you think the land where all those pointless holes were dug and filled in is worth more than the next plot over, identical in every measurable way, where they weren't? This is not a small amount of human effort! In total, I bet it's more than 99.9% of paintings. There's a human connection, not merely to a single artist, but to a story that, in our world, makes for an OK movie, and same for the historical and social context.
I think if you're trying to sell this land and promote it on that basis, you'll get laughed at. Not only will most buyers not be willing to pay more, I doubt you'll find even one single one who would. Maybe if there were more history -- the site of some politically relevant atrocity, say -- you'd find someone somewhere who wants to build a museum there or whatever. But for a moderately shitty juvie location? Not likely.
Imagine they didn't fill the holes in. This is land that was actually altered by a huge amount of human labor! Unfortunately, that alteration wasn't landscaping or gardening or a pool, it was a bunch of pointless holes. Bet you couldn't sell this land for anywhere close to what you could get for the unaltered plot next door.
This is the just the labor theory of value, and it's false. The value of a person's labor is not measured in sweat, it's measured by how much someone is willing to pay for the result. Now, (some) people are (currently) willing to pay more for the same pixels produced by a human, though I suspect that number is smaller than it seems. First, most people aren't willing to pay for (static, visual) art period. But mainly, I think people who buy art are willing to pay more for human-made pixels because the AI actually can't generate the same pixels. AI art can be good and god knows human art can be awful, but if you want the highest quality art, commissioning a 99th percentile human is your best bet. And if they're buying the art to include in project, because they're scared of luddite backlash.
But sure, there's some number of people who do genuinely value the human effort that went into it... but that's still not intrinsic value. There's literally no such thing. Value doesn't exist outside of a market context (defined broadly: any system in which one or more people exchange things for other things). Value is inherently subjective, so those people aren't wrong. But they're not right either.
With all sincerity, yes. That would be quite an interesting backstory!
So how much you think they should mark up the listing for that?
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