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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   19080 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

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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:

You're posting stuff your average pixiv prompt jockey would consider low quality.

That genuinely looks like MSPaint quality.

This looks like shit doe. But I guess AIjeets don't have taste.

By "this good" do you mean like cheap clip-art? Or do you think that's actually good art?

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.

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.

That's because paying money imposes an obligation to not cheat you regardless of how good your reasons are. Reading reddit is free.

First, just because you can't tell the difference doesn't mean there isn't a difference

It isn't absolute proof, but that's a general problem with proving anything that's hard to measure. Widespread enough inability to tell the difference is certainly evidence that there's no difference.

And yes, provenance matters, but where do you draw the line between "they can't articulate their reasons but they are good" and "their reasons are bad"? (Ignoring for the moment the issue of Monet losing his eyesight.) You can't just indefinitely steelman bad reasons. At some point you have to be able to say that someone's reasons are bad and not make up better ones.

(I also think your examples aren't provenance. Even for transwomen, if we had Culture-level technology or magic that could completely change someone's sex so that the only difference was that transwomen had different provenance, the trans issue would be very different.)

(I also think your examples aren't provenance. Even for transwomen, if we had Culture-level technology or magic that could completely change someone's sex so that the only difference was that transwomen had different provenance, the trans issue would be very different.)

What about psychology? The male brain is very different from the female brain, in multiple ways. At the level of transhumanism we are talking about, you could give transwomen a female brain as well, I guess, but could they still be meaningfully said to be the same person after that?

From "Changing Emotions" by Eliezer Yudkowsky:

What about sex? (Somehow it’s always about sex, at least when it’s men asking the question.) Remapping the connections from the remapped somatic areas to the pleasure center will… give you a vagina-shaped penis, more or less. That doesn’t make you a woman. You’d still be attracted to girls, and no, that would not make you a lesbian; it would make you a normal, masculine man wearing a female body like a suit of clothing.

What would it take for a man to actually become the female version of themselves?

Well… what does that sentence even mean? I am reminded of someone who replied to the statement “Obama would not have become President if he hadn’t been black” by saying “If Obama hadn’t been black, he wouldn’t have been Obama” i.e. “There is no non-black Obama who could fail to become President”. (You know you’re in trouble when non-actual possible worlds start having political implications.)

The person you would have been if you’d been born with an X chromosome in place of your Y chromosome (or vice versa) isn’t you. If you had a twin female sister, the two of you would not be the same person. There are genes on your Y chromosome that tweaked your brain to some extent, helping to construct your personal identity—alleles with no analogue on the X chromosome. There is no version of you, even genetically, who is the opposite sex.

And if we halt your body, swap out your Y chromosome for your father’s X chromosome, and restart your body… well. That doesn’t sound too safe, does it? Your neurons are already wired in a male pattern, just as your body already developed in a male pattern. I don’t know what happens to your testicles, and I don’t know what happens to your brain, either. Maybe your circuits would slowly start to rewire themselves under the influence of the new genetic instructions. At best you’d end up as a half-baked cross between male brain and female brain. At worst you’d go into a permanent epileptic fit and die—we’re dealing with circumstances way outside the evolutionary context under which the brain was optimized for robustness. Either way, your brain would not look like your twin sister’s brain that had developed as female from the beginning.

So to actually become female...

We’re talking about a massive transformation here, billions of neurons and trillions of synapses rearranged. Not just form, but content—just like a male judo expert would need skills repatterned to become a female judo expert, so too, you know how to operate a male brain but not a female brain. You are the equivalent of a judo expert at one, but not the other. You have cognitive reflexes, and consciously learned cognitive skills as well.

If I fell asleep and woke up as a true woman—not in body, but in brain—I don’t think I’d call her “me”. The change is too sharp, if it happens all at once.

Transform the brain gradually? Hm… now we have to design the intermediate stages, and make sure the intermediate stages make self-consistent sense. Evolution built and optimized a self-consistent male brain and a self-consistent female brain; it didn’t design the parts to be stable during an intermediate transition between the two. Maybe you’ve got to redesign other parts of the brain just to keep working through the transition.

What happens when, as a woman, you think back to your memory of looking at Angelina Jolie photos as a man? How do you empathize with your past self of the opposite sex? Do you flee in horror from the person you were? Are all your life’s memories distant and alien things? How can you remember, when your memory is a recorded activation pattern for neural circuits that no longer exist in their old forms? Do we rewrite all your memories, too?

Well… maybe we could retain your old male brainware through the transformation, and set up a dual system of male and female circuits… such that you are currently female, but retain the ability to recall and empathize with your past memories as if they were running on the same male brainware that originally laid them down...

Sounds complicated, doesn’t it? It seems that to transform a male brain into someone who can be a real female, we can’t just rewrite you as a female brain. That just kills you and replaces you with someone re-imagined as a different person. Instead we have to rewrite you as a more complex brain with a novel, non-ancestral architecture that can cross-operate in realtime between male and female modes, so that a female can process male memories with a remembered context that includes the male brainware that laid them down.

To make you female, and yet still you, we have to step outside the human design space in order to preserve continuity with your male self.

And when your little adventure is over and you go back to being a man—if you still want to, because even if your past self wanted to go back afterward, why should that desire be binding on your present self?—then we’ve got to keep the dual architecture so you don’t throw up every time you remember what you did on your vacation.

Assuming you did have sex as a woman, rather than fending off all comers because because they didn’t look like they were interested in a long-term relationship.

But then, you probably would experiment. You’ll never have been a little girl, and you won’t remember going through high school where any girl who slept with a boy was called a slut by the other girls. You’ll remember a very atypical past for a woman—but there’s no way to fix that while keeping you the same person.

And all that was just what it takes to ranma around within human-space, from the male pole to the female pole and back again.

What if you wanted to move outside the human space entirely?

In one sense, a sex change is admittedly close to a worst-case scenario: a fixed target not optimized for an easy transition from your present location; involving, not just new brain areas, but massive coordinated changes to brain areas already in place.

It might be a lot easier to just add one more emotion to those already there. Maybe.

In another sense, though, a sex change is close to a best-case scenario: the prototype of your destination is already extensively tested as a coherent mind, and known to function well within a human society that already has a place for it (including companions to talk to).

It might be a lot harder to enter uncharted territory. Maybe.

I’m not saying—of course—that it could never, ever be done. But it’s another instance of the great chicken-and-egg dilemma that is the whole story of present-day humanity, the great challenge that intelligent life faces in its flowering: growing up is a grownup-level problem. You could try to build a cleanly-designed artificial grownup (self-improving Friendly AI) to foresee the pathway ahead and chart out a nonfatal course. Or you could plunge ahead yourself, and hope that you grew faster than your problems did.

I think you could write down a list of assumptions about what people would expect a magically perfect gender swap to include. And I think this list would be reasonably consistent from person to person, even if Eliezer can't compress that list of assumptions into an algorithm which says "for every gender-specific trait no matter what it is, do X".

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