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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:
To just repeat myself:
Why yes, if you lie to people, you can trick them into thinking that AI art was made by humans, or that human art is made by AI. It's a complicated world and that's possible. But you shouldn't be surprised when people respond to that with extreme hostility.
People are frequently bad at understanding the reasons for their convictions. In this case, the conviction that it's important for art to be made by humans, or that the social context of art matters to how it's received, is being muddled up with the idea of abstract quality.
However, underneath that, I think people do value knowing that such-and-such picture is the result of a real human being exercising skill. Effort and creativity are things that we can and do value. It's acceptable to care about these things in themselves, for their own sake.
On a last note, in my experience there hasn't been any particular valence to opposition to AI art? I don't think it's that 'the Left' with a capital L hates AI art. I think everyone hates AI art. There are very, very few people who like this technology. Consider, briefly, that the people who like this technology are themselves the unrepresentative freaks.
If somebody spends an hour refining the perfect prompt and parsing through attempts at AI-gen isn't that still room for creative decisionmaking?
In this case the prompt is the real human creation and should ideally be posted before the picture.
Why wouldn't the result of the AI generation also be the human creation? Saying that the prompt is the "real human creation" is analogous to claiming that "waving a brush in front of you is the real human creation" in a painting, the painting is just the artifact that results from the paint, brush, and canvas atoms interacting with each other as a consequence of that waving. It'd certainly be cool if we got to see that with every painting, though.
The prompt is where the creative decisionmaking is, as the poster above said. And no, the waving of the brush would be the analogy for the movements of fingers on the keyboard while typing the prompt.
And waving the brush is where the creative decisionmaking is in painting, which is why it's analogous to the prompt (waving the brush would be analogous to the movements for the fingers when we're talking about typing out a poem or essay or somesuch). The painting is merely an artifact that remains as the result of that creative decisionmaking. And that artifact is what people generally consider the actual creative work or "art," not the decisionmaking itself.
I disagree, it applies just as well to typing the prompt. Why wouldn't it be? Both are processes that aren't really legible if you watch them without witnessing the result, with the result as its output.
Ultimately, what the AI outputs based on that result just doesn't interest me, empirically. It works as pure visual illustration/stimulation, sure. Art isn't really about that for me.
Because the text prompt isn't the actual result, unlike in the case of a poem. It's merely a conduit by which the final result is created, transferring the human's creative decisions to the final artifact. Most accurately, the waving of the hand would be analogous to the finger movements AND the prompt, as ephemeral things that exist momentarily in order to transfer the human's intents to the final piece.
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