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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'm fascinated that you've labeled this as a left/right thing. Is that true? Have there been studies? Am I the only one that was unaware of this dynamic?
Anyway, the whole thing I think requires two components that we see with AI content discourse: (1) a deep distrust in the systems involved and (2) a belief that you have seen behind the curtain and can discern what's actually true. It's not just art, people are very quick to call out writing as AI when it's not. It turns out that actually most people are really not good at telling the difference unless it's particularly egregious. There are many who are alarmed by this state of affairs and are overcompensating by declaring everything AI.
But the thing is, we are right to distrust the systems! As AI imagery and content gets better and better, there will be no reliable way to tell real from fake. Whether it's marketers hyping a product, trolls being troll-y, or political actors spreading messaging and propaganda for whatever reason, it's happening at a scale that's never been seen before due to how easy it is to churn out content. The news publishers and aggregators are no longer gatekeepers and haven't been for a long time. Someone says something is or is not fake and you have no way to verify it or to know whether you can trust this internet rando (if they even are a real person). Eventually what you will probably see is just more motivated reasoning where everything that supports your side is true and everything that goes against it is clearly shitty AI slop from propaganda machines, and the "two screens" phenomenon is just going to accelerate.
Only vibes for now. If I had to guess it's something like 55% of people don't care as long the end-product is high quality, 30% are anti AI with some being very loud, and 15% are explicitly pro AI. This is pretty uniform across the political spectrum from the far right to the center left, and then there's a discontinuity at the far left where it's closer to 30% don't care, 65% anti AI, and maybe 5% pro AI.
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The only place I see the left right distinction is in online spaces where right adjacent ai enthusiasts claim the distinction is there.
In real life every conservative I know is very AI skeptical and the people least skeptical are your tech savvy blue tribers (like programmers) and those folks seem split between enthusiastic or doomers
Blue tribe conservatives seem to love AI. Red tribe conservatives seem to see it as an interesting new technology that has future applications, but which isn't ready for prime time.
Again, I don’t see this anywhere except people on the internet saying this is so.
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People are quick to call out writing as AI when the writer won't admit it is AI. This isn't apophenia — it's distrust.
Are you doing a bit here?
I'm suggesting that the most likely reason someone is calling out writing as AI "when it's not" is that the person saying it is not is not telling the truth. How many times has one particular poster here been accused of using AI, denying it, and then sheepishly admitting that he "polished" it with AI? And yes, I'm making a little joke by doing it with one of the most obvious AI patterns.
On the off-chance that you're referring to me, I'd appreciate evidence that I've ever denied using AI when asked (when I've actually used it, which isn't most of the time). Au contraire, I make it a point to admit that I have, if asked, including being painfully specific with proof-of-work when I have it.
Here is a specific example:
https://www.themotte.org/post/3690/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/434542?context=8#context
I can't think of who else you might be referring to, barring perhaps our dear friend @BurdensomeCount, and even he had the grace to admit to it when specifically challenged. By me. With my mod hat on. I suppose we have had our share of bad-actors who try to get away with AI spam, but that's the kind of thing that gets caught by the moderation filter or explicitly warned/banned.
If you mean someone else entirely, then please disregard, though preferably not before you clarify things.
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There's AI-adversity on both sides of the political debate but I'd say the Left Wing tends to be more vocal since it hits on more of their chosen political angles outside of the tackiness/non-tackiness of AI content itself.
Environmentalism with the 'data centers using water' thing, wealth inequality, the vast majority of compensated creative roles in society tend to lean left-wing and it's a direct pressure on that as a line of work.
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