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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:
Issue with this discussion is that there's different ways of "appreciating" art to begin with. AI can definitely replace functional art uses like for corporate advertising or fetishes or as someone else mentioned game modding.
But fine art can't be replaced by AI. Not because it lacks the human element (most humans can't make it in the fine art world!) but because fine art is personal. Monet is a talented artist sure but half the draw of owning a piece is that you own a Monet. John from Ohio can not make a Monet. AI can not make a Monet. Only Monet himself could make a Monet. They can do his style, they might even be technically better than Monet himself. Doesn't really matter.
It's the same thing that happens with other fine art pieces. It's often not the what as it is the who. Anyone can tape a banana to a wall. No one but Maurizio Cattelan can make a Maurizio Cattelan banana on wall. His reputation and fame in the world as a satirist is the value. That's why his sold for 6.2 million and your art sells for nothing.
You can see this even in how we ordinary folk still say things like "It's a Monet", even we recognize the fame is the main value. And also important it needs to be the real original. People aren't paying 10 million for replica Action Comics #1. Most people aren't hanging a replica Mona Lisa on their wall. It's not the human value, it's the personal value. AI art can not do this. It is not exclusive enough and it is not personal enough. Because everyone can have a Midjourney, no one really can.
If Picasso's last act on earth was to prompt an AI to make him an image then he immediately died, I'm sure somebody would be interested in licensing/buying that image on some level as an expression of his life's output. Which obviously an absurd hypothetical but how is AI not just another tool?
It absolutely is a tool, but I think that the amount of microdecisions made per artistic subunit matters to a lot of people.
In a human made novel, there are hundreds of microdecisions per page. Choices to use one word and not another.
With AI stories, the nature of prompting is that there end up being far fewer human microdecisions per page. I would guess 10:1 is a good conservative estimate of the typical case in both instances.
Some people want to know that a human being might have consciously or unconsciously used this word in this sentence, which works as foreshadowing for this section later in the book. With an AI assisted story, most such cases are going to be complete serendipity with no greater intention or meaning added by the human author of the piece.
Depends on the level of editing prowess I'd say. Something like the Will Stancil show involves a ton of storyboarding and curating generations per my understanding. It's hard not to point at the Will Stancil show and say that it isn't art even if it is derivative.
https://x.com/i/status/1922851901084672173
I also unironically agree with this take. That aigen is unequivocally art in the expression of trolling and a point of view.
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