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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.
I think people should be open about the social and contextual reasons they like a piece of artwork without having to pretend there’s something intrinsically special about the piece itself.
Humans just don’t like seeing replicas and care about authenticity, and it has nothing to do with the aesthetic value of the piece - that’s a red herring. If you’re in a museum looking at, let’s say, Palaeolithic stone axes, you might feel certain emotions or a sense of connection to humanity’s distant past. Then if you learned the collection was made by a boomer in the 90s in the Palaeolithic style, you’d be disappointed, regardless of whether the axes looked “good” or not, since they’re literally just crude chipped stones with hardly any aesthetic values on their own.
AI art is a replica of human creativity, it feels hollow because there’s no one to connect to, but it has nothing to do with the quality of the output itself.
People find it difficult to appreciate things they don’t pay for. Pay close attention sometime to an office or cafeteria setting at work on days where free food and drinks or a highly discounted menu is available. People will leave half drank soda bottles on the table, won’t recycle, chips fall on the floor; and none of it comes at any cost or with any responsibility to those being served. If I tell you this option comes along once a year, most people be much more measured and let nothing go to waste.
Or if you want another example, recall how kids collected Pokémon cards back in the day. If I told you I had a foil Charizard card that’d be quite impressive. If the guy next to me had a foil, “1st edition” stamp on a Charizard card, the “limited edition” factor makes it much more valuable because of its scarcity.
In my own life I’m a huge fan of horror cinema. I’ve loved the Halloween franchise for as long as I can remember watching it as a kid. And I have quite a lot of horror memorabilia. I have a signed John Carpenter kitchen knife, several autographed items, and other rare collectibles that practically make a shrine I’ve got dedicated to the genre itself. The cinematic masterpiece of all these franchises and aesthetics and the historical “link” it has to the items I own gives me a great sense of feeling attached and connected to the things I enjoy that I wouldn’t otherwise have.
I actually think most trading cards aren't far off from Bored Ape NFTs at the end of the day. Companies love to put gambling in everything these days from mobile apps, to the random toy boxes that take up an entire aisle at my local Walmart. I think gambling was the first supernormal stimulus that humans discovered - randomness that our brains desperately want to find patterns in.
But like other supernormal stimuli, I think they are best avoided. Play LCGs instead of TCGs, or proxy your TCG cards (or buy singles and play cheaper formats like pauper if you really must buy in to the ecosystem.) They should be game pieces, not another supernormal stimulus like all the phone apps or porn sites try to be these days.
Yeah the current arc of the TCG market feels sufficiently mature that it's gotta be close to another big correction, but I don't think that necessarily renders the whole thing valueless. Even NFTs haven't like literally gone to zero even if you've obviously gotten absolutely fucked if you got in anywhere near the top.
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