Someone Shared a Real Monet Painting as AI and Asked for Critiques

mayliu2000

We didn't get worse at judging art. We just got better at doubting everything.

throw310822

I love how people hallucinate all sorts of bs when given the right prompt.

saaaaaam

“One person even took the time to write out an 850-word breakdown of the AI work’s shortcomings.” But they didn’t. The “breakdown” they link to is clearly and glaringly AI-authored. “ Fair warning before I dig in: this image is actually a very competent rendition. It's doing more right than most AI Monet pastiches. But you asked what makes it inferior to a real Monet, so here's the honest breakdown. What's missing — the physical object” Plus the whole piece is just “someone did something and now here are a bunch of tweets”. What an utterly pointless piece of churnalism.

sambapa

Plot twist: critics are bots (just like me)

tasuki

Ah, this warms my heart. Now if only the people who were at first so willing to participate in this experiment engaged in more self-reflection and less rage...

lifeisstillgood

But this is why we have “experts”. It’s like the guy playing a Stradivarius on the NYC subway. Most people can’t distinguish ok from brilliant, in a subject they don’t understand. Most humans cannot distinguish slop code from decent code but I assume most HNers can. However I can’t tell you why one electrical wiring job is better than another unless it looks untidy. Once you get passed a minimum level of decent we have to rely on experts and the communal agreement of experts to decide. Sometimes that easy (is the electrical wiring on fire) sometimes it’s much harder. (Insert controversial wiring discussion here) I suspect The same applies here.

frankohn

When judging art, like when judging wine, there is very little objectivity: people have some expectations and preconcepts about what is good and what is bad and they emit their judgement mostly based on their preconcepts. In this case they have been "primed" (this is a real psychology concept) that it was AI and they invented a lot of reasons to explain why that was bad AI slop, but that happened just because they where "primed" on AI. If the post was about a lost, wonderful Monet, found for the first time the comments would have been about how typical Monet it was and how beautiful the choice of colors and the water reflects or whatever. This is also seen when blind-tasting wines when prestigious "grands crus" are classed as bad whereas humble, mostly unknown, wines gets great appreciations. When people say that a wine is "great" or "extraordinary" is mostly because they have been primed to think it must be extraordinary, because of the name, the presentation, the prestige etc. This problem is always true in the domains like art and philosophy where there is no ground truth and everyone can say very much what they want and it can be never be proved wrong neither right. Actually, in philosophy, all the branches that developed to be grounded on facts and ground truth have been given a different name and separated from philosophy so what remains in philosophy is just the empty words. People are much more humble when they are asked about an hard-science question or judgement. I am also having fun about all the hate about AI that people express, this is almost comical. You can almost literally see their little ego that feels menaced by the AI and they react based on fear and anger. Of course this doesn't mean there aren't real problems about AI use but the way people react irrationally is just fun to observe.

futune

Are the comments real? I guess this is kind of the recursive version of the purported phenomenon, but, are we sure all those comments aren't just bot generated outrage so people can have big engagement by feeling superiour or whatever?

BlackFly

Rarely do people get the right takeaway from this effect. Take a normal bottle of red wine and some top tier, swap them around so the ordinary is in the expensive bottle and vice versa. Serve them. People prefer the ordinary wine in the expensive bottle. Bad takeaway: taste is meaningless. Good takeaway: qualia depends on many contextual cues beyond the obvious. Part of the appreciation of Monet is the fact that it was made by Monet. The art pieces 4′33″ or Black Square are early examples of this within the are world. Many pieces will have you saying, my 8 year old could have done this, so why is this piece famous? Critiques and appreciation are often not literal because we cannot properly express these subconscious effects.

franze

Last summer I created and printed out a book "Claude Code - An Autobiography" written by Claude Code. Read it on the beach during vacation. It was a hallucinated mess. And, not the worst book I have ever read. Entertaining. So, if AI would wrote the perfect book, would you read it? Or do we need to be able to relate to the creator/ author to really appreciate it? Do we need to appreciate something to enjoy it?

SyntaxErrorist

People were not judging the painting in isolation, they were judging the story attached to it. Once they heard AI every brushstroke became suspicious.

DeathArrow

As always in life, prejudices and biases are much more powerful than the objective truth for a vast amount of people. We can see every day.

ionwake

Reminds me of this https://i.pinimg.com/564x/8b/c4/2b/8bc42b444a733069f0933abc4...

kergonath

> “I’m no artist but a real Monet actually looks like a real place…” Some people have no clue about the concept of Impressionism.

harel

People want importance. To feel, or more accurately, to show that they "Know". That they "Care". They are experts in this or that. They are this, they are that. Whatever it is they are "selling" or to whichever group they want to belong to - they play that part they conceive is theirs. I love exercises like this - they expose this. Float it right up to the surface. It's poetic.

lz400

It could be the painting is real and those comments were written by AI

3qk1ashg

That only tells us that pro-AI people lie to elicit the desired responses on Twitter. Since lying is their default mode, this is not surprising. If you tell the neighborhood that the new guy who moves in is a criminal, virtually all people will believe it as well and not use their own judgement. Of course on Twitter there won't be any art critics, perhaps the responses are all AI bots.

ajdude

Original source is [dup] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48134400 Albeit the original source was flagged.

xnx

People are really eating up this engagement bait. This is getting reposted everywhere.

happytoexplain

1. AI can now be indistinguishable from reality in many cases. 2. Many people hate AI art, not just when it looks bad, but also conceptually. 3. Perception is very easily influenced by many factors. So given those three facts, this outcome is obvious (and yes, it's cherry-picked, but I'm referring to the big picture), and I'm not sure why I don't see this a lot more often as a form of trolling or dishonest "evidence" that disliking AI art is a bad thing - maybe I'm too pessimistic.