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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:
I'm fascinated that you've labeled this as a left/right thing. Is that true? Have there been studies? Am I the only one that was unaware of this dynamic?
Anyway, the whole thing I think requires two components that we see with AI content discourse: (1) a deep distrust in the systems involved and (2) a belief that you have seen behind the curtain and can discern what's actually true. It's not just art, people are very quick to call out writing as AI when it's not. It turns out that actually most people are really not good at telling the difference unless it's particularly egregious. There are many who are alarmed by this state of affairs and are overcompensating by declaring everything AI.
But the thing is, we are right to distrust the systems! As AI imagery and content gets better and better, there will be no reliable way to tell real from fake. Whether it's marketers hyping a product, trolls being troll-y, or political actors spreading messaging and propaganda for whatever reason, it's happening at a scale that's never been seen before due to how easy it is to churn out content. The news publishers and aggregators are no longer gatekeepers and haven't been for a long time. Someone says something is or is not fake and you have no way to verify it or to know whether you can trust this internet rando (if they even are a real person). Eventually what you will probably see is just more motivated reasoning where everything that supports your side is true and everything that goes against it is clearly shitty AI slop from propaganda machines, and the "two screens" phenomenon is just going to accelerate.
There are a lot of leftist spaces where you would get a better response saying, “I think the West takes in too many immigrants,” than you would saying, “I think AI art is good.”
Some leftists think the technology itself is intrinsically evil, but almost all of them think that the people building the tech are evil oligarchs who can’t wait to banish 99% of the population to the permanent underclass (or worse).
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