4 ms·

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

58 points by ZeljkoS 5mo ago

mayliu2000 5mo ago
We didn't get worse at judging art. We just got better at doubting everything.
- cyanydeez 5mo ago
  Art isn't special, as far as I can tell, it's just a shared cultural perception. This social experiment is a double edge sword. Both the critics of AI art and AI art enthusiasts are playing a primarily cultural game that can't be satisified by mere inspection of the work itself. The same way the "white supremacists" aren't identifiable by their skin color.
  - joe_mamba 5mo ago
    >Art isn't special, as far as I can tell, it's just a shared cultural perception. This. The Mona Lisa didn't get famous until it got stolen. Famous paintings are just 3D NFTs for the wealthy elite, doesn't mean they're more beautiful than paintings made by noname authors.
    - lifeisstillgood 5mo ago
      The Mona Lisa was famous before the 20th C because da Vinci carried it around for 20 years saying “this is the greatest painting I have ever done”. That kept it famous for 500 years. It then gained modern new media celebrity by getting nicked (and because the person who stole it did not do it for cash but because he thought it was the greatest painting ever) So it’s hard for people to judge brilliance themselves, but we can rely on other peoples judgement if enough people follow the crowd or put enough passion in. (Not saying that makes it right - science is not a democracy, but it’s a great heuristic for 8 billion people)
      - applfanboysbgon 5mo ago
        Yeah, but da Vinci's art sucks. It was good for its time, when the entire world population was 400m and literally 90% of those people were farmers and only the very well-to-do had the time and resources to practice a non-practical craft. Now we have a population of 8 billion, everyone has access to incredible art tools for a fraction of a month's minimum wage, there is an absolute wealth of information including books and in-depth video tutorials for everyone to learn from, and countless millions of people have time to try their hand at art. The quality of art produced today absolutely blows away the Mona Lisa, which might as well be garbage. The only reason people pretend to like it and most of the rest of the 'fine art' is an emperor has no clothes schtick, a sort of snobby social game where everyone has to act like it's so special and good because that makes you cultured, even though there are literally millions of art pieces produced today of vastly superior quality but which are not famous.
        kergonath 5mo ago
        > The quality of art produced today absolutely blows away the Mona Lisa I don’t like the Mona Lisa, but this is shortsighted. I agree that more people would tend to generate more instances of good art, it has nothing to do with the tools or the technical aspects. The point of art is beauty and emotion. Better tools do not always help and in fact modern art is often famously opaque and inaccessible. > The only reason people pretend to like it and most of the rest of the 'fine art' is an emperor has no clothes schtick, a sort of snobby cultural pressure where everyone has to act like it's so special and good because that makes you cultured It’s all subjective. People liking something you don’t does not make them brainwashed, and it does not make you better. If you are genuinely interested in this, you could have a read at this https://dynomight.net/bourdieu/ https://dynomight.net/bourdieu/ . It’s a bit more subtle than you say.
        applfanboysbgon 5mo ago
        > The point of art is beauty and emotion I feel nothing when I look at the Mona Lisa, and even accounting for subjectivity, I would honestly be surprised if very many do. You can get an art snob to wax poetic with fifteen paragraphs about what emotions it's meant to convey in you, or alternatively, you could just look at good art produced today which evokes emotions on its own merit, without needing somebody to tell you why and what emotions it's supposed to evoke in you. > People liking something you don’t does not make them brainwashed It very much does when you get to the points of comical absurdity like this bullshit[1] and that bullshit[2]. Once people are committed to the social status game of art snobbery, they have to take it further and further, justifying the artistic merit of increasingly meritless 'art', lest they reveal their snobbery was fake all along, and then you have a blank fucking canvas selling for millions. It's not even that people like something I don't, but rather that the idea they actually like it at all is a charade. [1]https://nypost.com/2024/12/03/lifestyle/blank-pure-white-art-canvas-expected-to-sell-for-over-1-5m/ https://nypost.com/2024/12/03/lifestyle/blank-pure-white-art... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No._5,_1948 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No._5,_1948 --- Skimming the article you linked, I don't think it's in contention with what I'm saying? It essentially points out that "taste" is not about actually liking something, but responding to social incentives, which is exactly what I mean by a social status game.
- lifeisstillgood 5mo ago
  I think that might be most insightful comment here (even including mine!)
throw310822 5mo ago
I love how people hallucinate all sorts of bs when given the right prompt.
- jml78 5mo ago
  Personally, I always found it interesting that people called it hallucinations. I have two kids. My youngest is a person who everyone has met. Yes, I am trying to work on this shit with him but people would say he is one of those people who is confidently incorrect. My youngest will just bullshit through any topic and a lot of the time he thinks he is correct. I personally think just stating shit as fact when you have no idea is a common issue with NNs. Drives me crazy because both my kids have heard me say, “I don’t know, we will have to go look it up” more than I have an answer. Because I don’t do it. But fuck if my youngest won’t just make shit up instead of saying he doesn’t know. LLMs are asked a question so they are gonna give you an answer just like many humans whether they have a clue about what they are talking about or not
- twolegs 5mo ago
  [dead]
saaaaaam 5mo ago
“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.
- gitaarik 5mo ago
  Yeah the 850 worded one is certainly AI, but I don't think it disproves the whole article. It's not an official study either, but things in between are allowed to be written about too.
sambapa 5mo ago
Plot twist: critics are bots (just like me)
- bitlax 5mo ago
  Plot twist: Monet is actually garbage
tasuki 5mo ago
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 5mo ago
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.
- smallnix 5mo ago
  But why do we have to rely on experts to experience 'proper' art? My naive thought was, that Art is not like a bridge, which would collapse if built by amateur's. But perhaps art has effects on us which are beneficial and these would actually 'collapse'.
  - dgellow 5mo ago
    Experts can help frame and understand an art piece. They can provide information regarding the craft, how the piece fits with other work from that time, what were the cultural influences, how the life of the artist influenced the work, etc. but you never had to rely on experts to experience or identify what proper art is. However at the end of the day art is a social concept, it’s something we negotiate between us, humans, and people are attracted to what they believe is considered good and important by others
    - lifeisstillgood 5mo ago
      Thanks … nicely put That helps me frame the experts vs science idea. Science is just the parts that evidence does not disprove. Expertise is understanding how the various explanations we have with science fits together, framing it as it were, and using that understanding to make sensible directional choices. Of course those predictions may later be proven wrong (light is a wave, waves need mediums, ether must exist) but they are more likely than guessing
Ozzie-D 5mo ago
[flagged]
kergonath 5mo ago
> “I’m no artist but a real Monet actually looks like a real place…” Some people have no clue about the concept of Impressionism.
frankohn 5mo ago
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 5mo ago
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?
- SilasX 5mo ago
  Yeah I'm hesitant to take a strong opinion on this given how many of the replies could themselves be AI, or humans counter-trolling by baiting him to say "aha! I got you!" to the most over-the-top examples. That said, it has definitely pulled some real humans out of the woodwork to give their real opinion that "yes, I'm influenced/duped by context and that's a good thing". And that's an accomplishment.
BlackFly 5mo ago
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.
- lukko 5mo ago
  Exactly - context is everything in art, in how it's experienced and how it is created. I think it's important to note that a jpg of Monet is not fully experiencing the painting in any sense. Colours will not be accurately captured, the texture, the framing, the scale - it's sort of like getting a heavily watered down version of the expensive wine, saying it's cheap wine, and asking what people think.
  - kergonath 5mo ago
    > Colours will not be accurately captured Even looking at the real thing, as most pigments degrade with age. There is no way of experiencing it as it was painted.
  - surgical_fire 5mo ago
    This reminds me the day I went to see in person Starry Night Over The Rhone. I am not exactly an art person, but I once was explained why that painting is a big deal, the whole impasto thing, etc. I get there and there's an horde of morons taking selfies next to the painting, and another horde of morons taking photos of the painting. I just wanted to observe a bit the depth of the carved layers of ink and how light reflected on them. Why bother taking a photo when I can find professional high definition photos of it online? In the end I was unable to observe anything. It was sort of a let down, and the experience made me hate people a wee bit more than before. Nobody wanted to fucking look at the painting.
franze 5mo ago
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?
- DeathArrow 5mo ago
  >So, if AI would wrote the perfect book There is no perfect book. If it was a technical book, I would read it, I don't see why not. But if supposedly AI wrote a good novel, I wouldn't read it probably, because I am interested in how humans are creative, not the AI. But I wouldn't probably declare the book as junk, either.
- fellerts 5mo ago
  I'm reminded by this short story posted to HN a couple months ago: https://nearzero.software/p/warranty-void-if-regenerated https://nearzero.software/p/warranty-void-if-regenerated The discussion is interesting as many people didn't catch that it was mostly written by Claude: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47431237 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47431237
- mingus88 5mo ago
  It’s odd to frame it like this. How about: A powerful enough LLM trained on great books can output something indistinguishable to most people as a great book. Would you read it? Appreciate it? Sure I’d read it. At least some of it. If I knew it was AI I don’t think I’d need to finish it because I know it’s not actually an influential work that has a place in literary history. If I didn’t know it was AI, I’d probably read the whole thing and have funny opinions of it because by definition I probably couldn’t tell the difference. We are all here on the internet reading comments by bots to pass the time. It’s been that way for a long time and we all still enjoy doing it. The “quality” of what we are reading is going up but what else really changes?
- wongarsu 5mo ago
  Depends on the genre I guess? Ironically I think AI could potentially write great Sci-Fi. Both the "explore the interplay of society and technology by looking at a theoretical future" kind and the "look at ourselves through the lens of an outsider by moving an equivalent situation to an alien planet" kind. In fact those might benefit from the slightly outside perspective. The "Western, but in space" kind might work less well, for the same reasons a romance novel written by AI wouldn't be something I'd be interested in All of this assuming a quality level far above the current SotA. You could maybe approach it with current models through very careful iterative prompting, including a thorough planning phase. But on its own the reasoning part of AI is far from good enough right now
SyntaxErrorist 5mo ago
People were not judging the painting in isolation, they were judging the story attached to it. Once they heard AI every brushstroke became suspicious.
- kergonath 5mo ago
  Even without hearing it. Just look at how often people throw "AI slop" around to disparage comments they don’t like here, and the list of bullshit "tells" that supposedly identify AI posts. The simple fact that what they see could have been made by a LLM pushes some people to be cynical, worse versions of themselves.
DeathArrow 5mo ago
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 5mo ago
Reminds me of this https://i.pinimg.com/564x/8b/c4/2b/8bc42b444a733069f0933abc42f8d2c0.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/564x/8b/c4/2b/8bc42b444a733069f0933abc4...
harel 5mo ago
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 5mo ago
It could be the painting is real and those comments were written by AI
3qk1ashg 5mo ago
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 5mo ago
Original source is [dup] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48134400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48134400 Albeit the original source was flagged.
xnx 5mo ago
People are really eating up this engagement bait. This is getting reposted everywhere.
happytoexplain 5mo ago
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.
ChrisArchitect 5mo ago
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48134400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48134400
spiffytech 5mo ago
I once lucked into a private tour of a Monet gallery. I asked the curator, "these paintings just don't look great, why should I be impressed?" The curator responded that Monet, and impressionism in general, were a reaction to the then-new invention of paint sold in tubes. Previously a painter had to mix pigment powder right when they painted. So they usually couldn't paint outdoors where the wind would blow the powder, and they couldn't capture rapidly-evolving scenes. Tube paint changed that. Impressionists started painting things in motion, or in shifting lighting like dawn. Their paintings were designed not to look good close up, but to be viewed at a distance, where the "pixelation" (so to speak) resolved into a coherent picture. They skipped on fine detail to capture something as fast as they could, because they could never do that before. I still don't care for impressionism on an aesthetic level, but I learned something that day about art history and why some people appreciate art that I don't.
- sam_lowry_ 5mo ago
  Lots of techical innivations enabled impressionism, but I would argue that synthetic ultramarine is the biggest one. One should visit the Orsay museum to understand it, its curators know their job: impressionist paintings seem to glow from inside in the dim gallery. Screens are bad at showing these colors, one still needs personal experience to get it.

58 points by ZeljkoS 5mo ago

mayliu2000 5mo ago

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

cyanydeez 5mo ago
Art isn't special, as far as I can tell, it's just a shared cultural perception. This social experiment is a double edge sword. Both the critics of AI art and AI art enthusiasts are playing a primarily cultural game that can't be satisified by mere inspection of the work itself. The same way the "white supremacists" aren't identifiable by their skin color.
- joe_mamba 5mo ago
  >Art isn't special, as far as I can tell, it's just a shared cultural perception. This. The Mona Lisa didn't get famous until it got stolen. Famous paintings are just 3D NFTs for the wealthy elite, doesn't mean they're more beautiful than paintings made by noname authors.
  - lifeisstillgood 5mo ago
    The Mona Lisa was famous before the 20th C because da Vinci carried it around for 20 years saying “this is the greatest painting I have ever done”. That kept it famous for 500 years. It then gained modern new media celebrity by getting nicked (and because the person who stole it did not do it for cash but because he thought it was the greatest painting ever) So it’s hard for people to judge brilliance themselves, but we can rely on other peoples judgement if enough people follow the crowd or put enough passion in. (Not saying that makes it right - science is not a democracy, but it’s a great heuristic for 8 billion people)
    - applfanboysbgon 5mo ago
      Yeah, but da Vinci's art sucks. It was good for its time, when the entire world population was 400m and literally 90% of those people were farmers and only the very well-to-do had the time and resources to practice a non-practical craft. Now we have a population of 8 billion, everyone has access to incredible art tools for a fraction of a month's minimum wage, there is an absolute wealth of information including books and in-depth video tutorials for everyone to learn from, and countless millions of people have time to try their hand at art. The quality of art produced today absolutely blows away the Mona Lisa, which might as well be garbage. The only reason people pretend to like it and most of the rest of the 'fine art' is an emperor has no clothes schtick, a sort of snobby social game where everyone has to act like it's so special and good because that makes you cultured, even though there are literally millions of art pieces produced today of vastly superior quality but which are not famous.
      - kergonath 5mo ago
        > The quality of art produced today absolutely blows away the Mona Lisa I don’t like the Mona Lisa, but this is shortsighted. I agree that more people would tend to generate more instances of good art, it has nothing to do with the tools or the technical aspects. The point of art is beauty and emotion. Better tools do not always help and in fact modern art is often famously opaque and inaccessible. > The only reason people pretend to like it and most of the rest of the 'fine art' is an emperor has no clothes schtick, a sort of snobby cultural pressure where everyone has to act like it's so special and good because that makes you cultured It’s all subjective. People liking something you don’t does not make them brainwashed, and it does not make you better. If you are genuinely interested in this, you could have a read at this https://dynomight.net/bourdieu/ https://dynomight.net/bourdieu/ . It’s a bit more subtle than you say.
        applfanboysbgon 5mo ago
        > The point of art is beauty and emotion I feel nothing when I look at the Mona Lisa, and even accounting for subjectivity, I would honestly be surprised if very many do. You can get an art snob to wax poetic with fifteen paragraphs about what emotions it's meant to convey in you, or alternatively, you could just look at good art produced today which evokes emotions on its own merit, without needing somebody to tell you why and what emotions it's supposed to evoke in you. > People liking something you don’t does not make them brainwashed It very much does when you get to the points of comical absurdity like this bullshit[1] and that bullshit[2]. Once people are committed to the social status game of art snobbery, they have to take it further and further, justifying the artistic merit of increasingly meritless 'art', lest they reveal their snobbery was fake all along, and then you have a blank fucking canvas selling for millions. It's not even that people like something I don't, but rather that the idea they actually like it at all is a charade. [1]https://nypost.com/2024/12/03/lifestyle/blank-pure-white-art-canvas-expected-to-sell-for-over-1-5m/ https://nypost.com/2024/12/03/lifestyle/blank-pure-white-art... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No._5,_1948 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No._5,_1948 --- Skimming the article you linked, I don't think it's in contention with what I'm saying? It essentially points out that "taste" is not about actually liking something, but responding to social incentives, which is exactly what I mean by a social status game.
lifeisstillgood 5mo ago
I think that might be most insightful comment here (even including mine!)

throw310822 5mo ago

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

jml78 5mo ago
Personally, I always found it interesting that people called it hallucinations. I have two kids. My youngest is a person who everyone has met. Yes, I am trying to work on this shit with him but people would say he is one of those people who is confidently incorrect. My youngest will just bullshit through any topic and a lot of the time he thinks he is correct. I personally think just stating shit as fact when you have no idea is a common issue with NNs. Drives me crazy because both my kids have heard me say, “I don’t know, we will have to go look it up” more than I have an answer. Because I don’t do it. But fuck if my youngest won’t just make shit up instead of saying he doesn’t know. LLMs are asked a question so they are gonna give you an answer just like many humans whether they have a clue about what they are talking about or not
twolegs 5mo ago
[dead]

saaaaaam 5mo ago

“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.

gitaarik 5mo ago
Yeah the 850 worded one is certainly AI, but I don't think it disproves the whole article. It's not an official study either, but things in between are allowed to be written about too.

sambapa 5mo ago

Plot twist: critics are bots (just like me)

bitlax 5mo ago
Plot twist: Monet is actually garbage

tasuki 5mo ago

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 5mo ago

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.

smallnix 5mo ago
But why do we have to rely on experts to experience 'proper' art? My naive thought was, that Art is not like a bridge, which would collapse if built by amateur's. But perhaps art has effects on us which are beneficial and these would actually 'collapse'.
- dgellow 5mo ago
  Experts can help frame and understand an art piece. They can provide information regarding the craft, how the piece fits with other work from that time, what were the cultural influences, how the life of the artist influenced the work, etc. but you never had to rely on experts to experience or identify what proper art is. However at the end of the day art is a social concept, it’s something we negotiate between us, humans, and people are attracted to what they believe is considered good and important by others
  - lifeisstillgood 5mo ago
    Thanks … nicely put That helps me frame the experts vs science idea. Science is just the parts that evidence does not disprove. Expertise is understanding how the various explanations we have with science fits together, framing it as it were, and using that understanding to make sensible directional choices. Of course those predictions may later be proven wrong (light is a wave, waves need mediums, ether must exist) but they are more likely than guessing

Ozzie-D 5mo ago

[flagged]

kergonath 5mo ago

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

frankohn 5mo ago

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 5mo ago

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?

SilasX 5mo ago
Yeah I'm hesitant to take a strong opinion on this given how many of the replies could themselves be AI, or humans counter-trolling by baiting him to say "aha! I got you!" to the most over-the-top examples. That said, it has definitely pulled some real humans out of the woodwork to give their real opinion that "yes, I'm influenced/duped by context and that's a good thing". And that's an accomplishment.

BlackFly 5mo ago

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.

lukko 5mo ago
Exactly - context is everything in art, in how it's experienced and how it is created. I think it's important to note that a jpg of Monet is not fully experiencing the painting in any sense. Colours will not be accurately captured, the texture, the framing, the scale - it's sort of like getting a heavily watered down version of the expensive wine, saying it's cheap wine, and asking what people think.
- kergonath 5mo ago
  > Colours will not be accurately captured Even looking at the real thing, as most pigments degrade with age. There is no way of experiencing it as it was painted.
- surgical_fire 5mo ago
  This reminds me the day I went to see in person Starry Night Over The Rhone. I am not exactly an art person, but I once was explained why that painting is a big deal, the whole impasto thing, etc. I get there and there's an horde of morons taking selfies next to the painting, and another horde of morons taking photos of the painting. I just wanted to observe a bit the depth of the carved layers of ink and how light reflected on them. Why bother taking a photo when I can find professional high definition photos of it online? In the end I was unable to observe anything. It was sort of a let down, and the experience made me hate people a wee bit more than before. Nobody wanted to fucking look at the painting.

franze 5mo ago

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?

DeathArrow 5mo ago
>So, if AI would wrote the perfect book There is no perfect book. If it was a technical book, I would read it, I don't see why not. But if supposedly AI wrote a good novel, I wouldn't read it probably, because I am interested in how humans are creative, not the AI. But I wouldn't probably declare the book as junk, either.
fellerts 5mo ago
I'm reminded by this short story posted to HN a couple months ago: https://nearzero.software/p/warranty-void-if-regenerated https://nearzero.software/p/warranty-void-if-regenerated The discussion is interesting as many people didn't catch that it was mostly written by Claude: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47431237 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47431237
mingus88 5mo ago
It’s odd to frame it like this. How about: A powerful enough LLM trained on great books can output something indistinguishable to most people as a great book. Would you read it? Appreciate it? Sure I’d read it. At least some of it. If I knew it was AI I don’t think I’d need to finish it because I know it’s not actually an influential work that has a place in literary history. If I didn’t know it was AI, I’d probably read the whole thing and have funny opinions of it because by definition I probably couldn’t tell the difference. We are all here on the internet reading comments by bots to pass the time. It’s been that way for a long time and we all still enjoy doing it. The “quality” of what we are reading is going up but what else really changes?
wongarsu 5mo ago
Depends on the genre I guess? Ironically I think AI could potentially write great Sci-Fi. Both the "explore the interplay of society and technology by looking at a theoretical future" kind and the "look at ourselves through the lens of an outsider by moving an equivalent situation to an alien planet" kind. In fact those might benefit from the slightly outside perspective. The "Western, but in space" kind might work less well, for the same reasons a romance novel written by AI wouldn't be something I'd be interested in All of this assuming a quality level far above the current SotA. You could maybe approach it with current models through very careful iterative prompting, including a thorough planning phase. But on its own the reasoning part of AI is far from good enough right now

SyntaxErrorist 5mo ago

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

kergonath 5mo ago
Even without hearing it. Just look at how often people throw "AI slop" around to disparage comments they don’t like here, and the list of bullshit "tells" that supposedly identify AI posts. The simple fact that what they see could have been made by a LLM pushes some people to be cynical, worse versions of themselves.

DeathArrow 5mo ago

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 5mo ago

Reminds me of this https://i.pinimg.com/564x/8b/c4/2b/8bc42b444a733069f0933abc42f8d2c0.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/564x/8b/c4/2b/8bc42b444a733069f0933abc4...

harel 5mo ago

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 5mo ago

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

3qk1ashg 5mo ago

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 5mo ago

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

xnx 5mo ago

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

happytoexplain 5mo ago

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.

ChrisArchitect 5mo ago

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48134400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48134400

spiffytech 5mo ago

I once lucked into a private tour of a Monet gallery. I asked the curator, "these paintings just don't look great, why should I be impressed?" The curator responded that Monet, and impressionism in general, were a reaction to the then-new invention of paint sold in tubes. Previously a painter had to mix pigment powder right when they painted. So they usually couldn't paint outdoors where the wind would blow the powder, and they couldn't capture rapidly-evolving scenes. Tube paint changed that. Impressionists started painting things in motion, or in shifting lighting like dawn. Their paintings were designed not to look good close up, but to be viewed at a distance, where the "pixelation" (so to speak) resolved into a coherent picture. They skipped on fine detail to capture something as fast as they could, because they could never do that before. I still don't care for impressionism on an aesthetic level, but I learned something that day about art history and why some people appreciate art that I don't.

sam_lowry_ 5mo ago
Lots of techical innivations enabled impressionism, but I would argue that synthetic ultramarine is the biggest one. One should visit the Orsay museum to understand it, its curators know their job: impressionist paintings seem to glow from inside in the dim gallery. Screens are bad at showing these colors, one still needs personal experience to get it.