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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:
Restating and extending this:
In theory I have no qualms with AI art, in practice I’ve yet to see a (knowingly) AI-assisted work I consider decent.
I suspect because (at least to me) originality and relatability (i.e. taste) are important in art; language and diffusion models especially lack both, and they lack the (predictable, easy) control necessary for the artist to infuse theirs.
An artist with taste can make incredible art in B&W, pixel, low-poly, etc. The medium is less important, and those being easy mediums to control, allow the artist to express themselves more accurately.
I think, like how AI for code is another abstraction, AI for art is another medium. Some people disagree, partly because today’s AI is a poor abstraction; likewise, today’s AI is a poor medium, because of the aforementioned lack of control.
Art requires a huge degree of specificity to create its effects, so trusting AI prompts to get what you want is like trying to wield a giant mallet to repair a delicate wristwatch. To give an example of the specificity often required, in this image, the artist chose to highly stylize the bars in the way he did to create an effect of solidity and imperviousness, in order to convey the extent to which the character on the other side was locked there, and that's just one detail among many for just one comic frame among many in a very long manga book. Zeroing in on the bars in particular while also controlling all the other details and framing with AI would be incredibly difficult and arduous. It would probably be faster for a skilled artist just to draw them himself, not even counting the superior quality (especially in terms of exactness) he would undoubtedly achieve. Furthermore, while there are many non-artists who claim they have 'ideas in their head' just as good as the man who drew this scene, the truth is that in order to conceive this scene in its full panoply of detail, you need to have a highly developed artistic skillset in the first place. That is to say, to even know that you ought to stylize the bars in a given way to achieve a particular effect, you need to already be fairly well trained in this kind of art, what its potentials are and how they are craft-wise achieved, because the art is more in its buildup of details and controlled effects than any central, floating idea. So the notion that AI would allow non-artists to get those ideas out of their heads and onto the page through bypassing the actual need to learn the foundations of a craft ends up being inert.
Why would that be the case?
It won't allow them to get their ideas in same detail as a trained artist but it's worlds better than getting nothing onto the page which is the remaining option when you take away AI.
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