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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:
A slight tangent. About a year back, I made a Rimworld mod. Minuscule in scope: a handful of infantry-grade railguns, designed to work exclusively with Combat Extended, a popular and (depending on who you ask) deeply contentious mod.
CE is something I refuse to play without. It transforms vanilla Rimworld's ranged combat from "two blind, drunk, concussed gangbangers shooting airsoft pistols at each other" into something resembling tactical depth and realism. Every self-respecting gun nut has it installed.
(Sorry Zorba. Rimworld combat is dogshit. I've been on CE since at least Alpha 14.)
The trouble with adding weapons is that they require art. Sprites, at the bare minimum. I am not an artist. For years, going back to early Stable Diffusion, I had been trying to coax AI image generators into producing decent guns in the Rimworld style, with results ranging from "comically bad" to "merely embarrassing". I gave up several times. That changed with GPT Image 1 and Nano Banana, which, after a fair bit of prompting and selection, finally produced passable output.
I should specify that the vanilla artwork for Rimworld is also awful. Nobody plays it for the graphics. The guns are particularly egregious; they look like plastic goop, especially if you use mods that let you zoom the camera in. Most self-respecting modders make their art to substantially higher standards, even if the game itself doesn't reward photorealism.
(Sorry again Zorba, but it's true.)
What I ended up with was decent. Probably well above the average amateur human artist-modder, though not as good as the best.
I also tried to get the AI of the day to write the code for me. This did not go well. Rimworld code is niche, Combat Extended code is niche-squared, and the available models simply weren't up to the task. It also might have been a skill issue on my end.
In the end, I wrote the code myself, asking for guidance on the Discord and lifting scaffolding from open-source and permissively licensed mods. The result wasn't perfect, but it worked.
Then came the part I was actually dreading. I posted the finished product, AI-generated art included, for feedback. I expected a shitstorm and I got one, though smaller than feared, and largely confined to one reasonably famous modder. He is best known (or most notorious) for using what can be charitably described as fetish art for the thumbnails of his mods, regardless of their actual content. To my pleasant surprise, the majority of the other modders were either neutral or supportive (one of them, I believe, lurks here, hi). I told him to get bent and stick to the fetish art. I explained that I was making free content, in my spare time, and that his gatekeeping was somewhere between unwarranted and retarded. I even said that I fully expect my own profession, the one that pays the bills, to get automated eventually. I can't stop that. I'm just enjoying the newfound ability to work around my utter lack of talent at the visual arts. The reception of this position was, again, better than I had any right to expect. Most Rimworld modders work for free, and they understand that even a small mod represents real opportunity cost.
The mod went up. It was unabashedly niche, but over a hundred people downloaded it and a dozen favorited it.
That was almost a year ago. Recently, bored, I considered making a better version with the new tools at my disposal. In hindsight, I should have used my Claude Max plan for the code, but I now know enough to bumble through. I made new art assets and posted them for feedback. Enough time had passed that most people had forgotten the original controversy and were appreciative. Then, on cue, that same jerk-off showed up, and we had our usual sparring match. I was expecting it. What I wasn't expecting was that, even after the AI-generated nature of the new assets was disclosed, the majority continued being supportive.
That included some seriously talented modders, ones known for producing high quality art. It warms the cockles of my heart to see people being reasonable, or at least on my side. Their verdict was that the art was now better than average, up to the standards of the best human work being done in Rimworld. The guns even made sense from a design/realism standpoint, GPT-Image 2 in particular is remarkably intelligent, and it knows what distinguishes a near future but plausible railgun from a standard firearm in Hollywood furniture. Prompting it is a piece of cake.
I'll probably get to a proper version after my exam. The interesting thing is the trajectory: making the art itself went from impossible, to a PITA, to nearly trivial. Maybe I'll tackle something more ambitious. I have thoughts about Rimworld's medical system and its approach to mental health and psychology. I've helped on a mod that fixes some of the issues, though my role there is best described as "local doctor you can ping for advice on trauma medicine". I've done freelance consulting on much larger projects, including some tactical shooters. A few systems in Gray Zone Warfare (a Tarkov competitor) made it in on my recommendation. Good times.
The best part of the anti-AI controversy is how easy it is to ignore the detractors, particularly when you aren't trying to make money off any of this. All I want is the opportunity to make cool things, for my own enjoyment and that of others. If someone isn't cool with that, that is their problem.
Interesting story. I've played a ton of modded Rimworld, though I've not made any mods for it myself. I have made mods for games like Vic 3 (here's one of my mods) and AoW4, and have used AI for the art. Nobody said anything, though granted my mods don't have a ton of users or anything. But still, it seems like there's a weird parallel world going on where all you might get is a snide comment here and there, while on the other hand are threads like this excoriating AI use in mods in pretty harsh terms. If anything it seems like the anti-AI hysteria has only gotten worse over the past few years.
I've had the displeasure of seeing that Reddit thread. The takes in it are so bad that they're known to the state of California to cause cancer.
Fortunate, the people chimping out in public are not the same people who make mods. I don't know about the VIC 3 modding community, but the CE discord is chill. My mod didn't get much backlash while published, and there are plenty of mostly AI made mods that do way more in terms of mechanics of depth, all without popular outcry. The people on the subreddit can cry away, they have no real power over things.
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