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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:
It's funny to watch people squirm, yes, but plebes making a bad argument for their position doesn't mean there aren't good arguments for it. The bottom line is "Well, you can't tell the difference" is not actually an acceptable criterion for an ersatz, and AI is not even related to this principle.
If you walk into an artisan coffee shop and the baristas correctly sniff you out as an unwashed peasant, that in no way justifies them replacing your high-altitude Kenyan light roast with Folgers ash and sniggering at you as you blissfully drink up. If a nearby patron looks over to see who's smoking and gracefully informs you that you may have been bamboozled, you'd be rightly upset. If the baristas respond with "Look, we assumed you couldn't tell the difference and decided to save money. But if you insist, we'll do a proper double-blind test, and if we can reject the unwashed peasant hypothesis at p=.05, you get your money back, but if not, sorry," you'd be justified in being incensed at them at never returning to that establishment again, despite the fact that they're correct. This is basically the AI scenario above, just without any AI, which shows that the argument has nothing to do with AI (you just gotta add AI to everything nowadays and pretend it was relevant). The same principle applies everywhere: a jeweler selling quartz instead of diamond, a luthier giving you a street cat instead of a Strad, etc.
Now, as this is a rationalist forum, I have to assume at least half of people are going to be like "um, but I personally am totally fine with drinking ash, decorating my home with pyrite, and listening to my daughter summon the street cats, so what's the big deal?" Well, I'm glad you asked:
First, just because you can't tell the difference doesn't mean there isn't a difference, and being consistently exposed to correct labeling is how you learn to tell the difference! You can, in fact, with relatively little effort, learn to tell the difference between a good Kenyan coffee and Folgers ash, but you can only do this if these are honestly labeled in the first place. Having a malicious barista exploiting your lack of culture inhibits you from learning the difference and becoming cultured.
Second, quality is usually grounded in general principals that actually make a lot of sense. For example, good coffee beans are largely a matter of exploiting stress responses in bean development, and bad coffee beans are basically fat beans (much like the People of Walmart buying them, incidentally), which is why high-quality beans often come from high-altitude plantations -- it's difficult for the coffee to grow there! -- and why they tend to be expensive. The fact that there is a pretty real correspondence between "good/poor quality human" and "good/poor quality coffee bean" and that this is basically consistent with other interesting trends in agriculture is the kind of thing you never notice if your worldview just stops at "Well I couldn't tell the difference."
Third, provenance is an essential form of discrimination for learning about the world. I can fabricate a bunch of Egyptian artifacts and sell them to you under the logic "well, you clearly can't tell the difference, so what's the big deal?" The big deal is by studying my fraudulent artifacts, you will likely come to false conclusions about what was actually going on in ancient Egypt. And yes, this is a constant source of trouble in fields like anthropology and paleontology, which often gives these fields a bad name, but the problem isn't the fields themselves: it's that polite society prevents dealing with fraudsters at the level of violence required to actually prevent fraud. Fraud of this sort is destruction of knowledge about the past, in the sense that information can be destroyed by burying it in enough noise (aka, "Is the Library of Babel full or empty?" Well, it contains zero information entropy!)
Anyway, part of the reason progressives have such difficulty articulating their case is that being concerned with authenticity and provenance is not at all compatible with the rest of what they do. Concern with authenticity and provenance lands one squarely at "Ok, then transwomen aren't women, Africans with German passports aren't German, and fresh agitprop from Disney released under the Star Wars brand they bought isn't Star Wars." You can't whine about the value of artists and faithfully representing their intent, then march off and re-release Classic WoW with the male and female genders removed.
I was with you until then. Rogue One, the first two seasons of the Mandalorian and Andor were some of the best Star Wars stuff since the 80s. And as much as the sequels were soulless derivative nonsense, you can’t say “only the good shows/films are Star Wars” otherwise you’d have to discard 90% of the franchise including the prequels too.
Rogue One bored me shitless. I don't even remember anyone's name. The kind of thing that would have been a comic book or something back in the day.
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