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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.
To be cynical, how many of them only care because it's become somewhat polarized? If it had instead gone the route of "AI is left-aligned, because it allows the poor and underprivileged without money or time for training to create art and collaborate", and anyone against AI was getting pilloried on social media in certain circles, I have a hunch that there'd be some (but not all) reversing their dtance.
I've wondered about the reception of AI art compared to hip hop in the 80s. Similar claims were made then, about plagiarism, the dilution of musical art, electronic instruments merely aping the real thing etc. I think what's different this time, or why the democratization idea doesn't go far, is because AI is a development given to us by a small number of wealthy nerds, and deeply corporate. Hip hop was DIY, and welled up from poor neighborhoods populated by people who are considered the antithesis of nerds.
I think the key point is that AI art is hitting the business of relatively low-skill commission artists.
I'm active in TTRPG subreddits and periodically see people post commissions of their characters: sometimes they have some neat stuff going on but the artistic merit is almost always lacking (the first result I found was this), and slapping a vague description into an image generator is going to produce something way more impressive pretty much every time. Yeah it might not hit the exact note you were looking for, but that's true of commissions too, and you can't tell the artist to go back and try again for free.
Porn is another example where the bottom's getting cut off: AI struggles with details and you have to use weaker models to generate any sort of adult stuff, but the bottom end is really bad, and you get to customize it as much as you want and churn out as many attempts as you want for free on a local model.
These people are often trying to do this as their job, which means their workday involves sitting around and posting on the Internet a lot, and they're often doing that for hobbies too. They also saw AI coming before most people did, because the early adopters playing around with Stable Diffusion would have been visible in their corners of the Internet. So they're initially the only ones who care about it, and being extremely online (and as artists, overwhelmingly left-wing) they know how to leverage progressive terminology to make their points. By the time it propagates out to the normies, the claim's been staked.
I have an online friend who briefly became 'the guy' for a fetish in the furry community since he started as just kinda doing very-vanilla art, then one time included something that wasn't the fetish he became known for but was like adjacent enough that his DMs started getting filled with people looking for that kinda content. Then, despite not particularly liking the fetish in question, he eventually folded after somebody offered him about 5x his going rate for something low-key in that space.
6 months later he's making like a good middle-class professional income for his developing country essentially being a fulltime fetish artist since it had kinda snowballed from there. And like his art skills are fine but we're not exactly talking a Renaissance Master. I haven't asked him, but I'd be shocked if the rise of AI hadn't absolutely nuked that line of art production even if some purists complain since you can knock together SOMETHING a lot quicker/cheaper, and AI has a lot more patience for infinite re-do requests than a human artist with limited time. Porn's also just uniquely suited to be hit by AI since it's either 'vanilla stuff tends to be super formulaic and there is an infinite sample basis' or 'more exotic stuff having an AI you can endlessly dictate your very particular desires to is more practical than having an artslave'
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