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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.
What they say is that a print of the Mona Lisa wouldn't be like the real thing because the eyes wouldn't track you round the room. I have seen the painted replica Mona Lisa (by one of Leonardo's students) at Leonardo's home in Amboise, and the eyes on that did track me round the room (much more effectively because the room wasn't rammed), so I am suspicious that this claim would turn out to be false if you had a high-quality giclee print.
That said, the class of people who want to put large quantities of fine art on their walls but can't afford decent paintings buy modern, signed limited-edition prints and not giclees of Old Masters. I think this is straightforwardly snobbery-driven, but I don't really understand the mechanism (although I realise I have unthinkingly done the same thing decorating my own house).
I think this is a complex class based thing. There are probably seven or eight clearly defined social sub-classes of upper middle class people; the home of two childless widely published academics and the home of an investment banker - big law lawyer couple with three kids and the house of two doctors who live in a second-tier city but consider themselves to be particularly cultured and the home of the chair or chief executive of a major arts or humanities nonprofit and the country home of an insurance executive and a veteran homemaker in local county life descended from the minor gentry will all be vastly different in nevertheless predictable ways.
In general, prints of old masters were for a long time considered somewhat trashy as a hangover from the Trumpian 80s, following which new money Essex types in the UK and white ethnics in the US decorating their homes in sort of gold leaf rococo or baroque pastiche complete with titanic gold-framed prints was considered the thing to distance oneself from if one wanted to be more respectably PMC (even if one was from, or only one generation removed from, the very same background) by the early-mid ‘90s. Today I think that’s changing, since 2018 or so when the Deano and McMansion types had for some years adopted a twisted version of 2000s beige Scandi minimalism the upper-middle class meta has clearly returned to full-on maximalism complete with a lot of (even in dreary London) very dark 19th century living rooms and antique shop clutter.
You have seen through me. We were at the leading edge of the trend when we redecorated our Victorian terrace (rowhouse for Americans) in the original coffee-and-crimson colour scheme in 2017. The stated reason is that the reflections when direct sunlight shines on beige walls cause various autistic family members to have sensory issues.
I think it can work in those late georgian / regency terraces with high ceilings on the first or raised ground floor. And, with enough care taken, in very modern apartment buildings with a nice contrast if they have floor to ceiling glass windows (some people consider this trashy, I will accept their judgment).
Scandi minimalism with off-white colours is a costly signal of cleanliness - it looks awful if cluttered, messy, or grubby. So if you can pull it off either you are very zen about material possessions, or you are very careful about tidiness and can probably afford a SAHM and/or servants.
Victorian maximalism copes much better with mild dirt and mess. (For the OG Victorians, mostly coal smoke - it was impossible to keep anything clean in smog-era London). We have two boys.
Not a fan of Scandi minimalism at all, it reminds me of middle age Dutch iconoclasm. Coffee is just a much nicer colour scheme if you want to actually live in your home (I reserve judgment on crimson, to me if you overdo it you risk your house looking like a bordello).
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