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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:
I did a post a while back about how slop has always existed and AI slop doesn't change that. Slop art has existed since at least the 50s, and you've probably seen more of it in real life than you have actual art. They're called decor paintings and they're mass produced in Asia. You buy them at places like Hobby Lobby or those starving artist exhibitions they have in ballrooms of chain hotels. They may have a dozen paintings that are almost identical, all organized based on general style and color scheme so they'll match the rug and upholstery. They could have done the same experiment 50 years ago to prove that the guy on the street couldn't tell the imitation Winslow Homer from a cheap motel wall from the real thing.
If you want to get highbrow about the whole thing, watch the Orson Welles documentary F for Fake. It's about hoaxes in general, but he focuses on an art forger named Elmyr de Hory, who would fake the style of recognized (and deceased) artists and pass them off as works that were newly discovered. He ended up getting caught and spent time in jail, but it raises questions about the nature of what we value in art. The same can be said about the desire to have an original. If the only thing you care about is the immediate aesthetic impact, then the going rate for a Monet should be about $250, which is the price the Met sells reproductions for. Cheaper if you get a print. The frame will cost more than the painting. But that's obviously not the case, and it never has been the case, and nothing about AI will change that.
I agree with this take, and predict that AI will disrupt marketing and stock imagery a lot, but fine art relatively little.
Fine art will almost certainly survive if only to continue serving as a defacto entry point to money laundering.
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