Fellow Artists, I’m Begging You to Pull Your Heads Out of the Sand About AI
I'm sorry, but it's not going away
Earlier this week, a Twitter user (@SHL0MS1) posted the following:
Some sample responses from the comments:
the reflection in AI art is just noise splattered right. monet actually understood how light behaves on water
no frame, no sense of the threshold between subject and object, just colors
Depth, contrast, and cohesion are the most obvious. There’s also no clear focal point.
Sure. It feels less lively. It lacks the texture, the rugged edges, the folds, the crevices and creases and bevels and topology of plastic arts. The fine, calculated highlights. The AI version is granulated pixelation, and it looks that way, it lacks the mess of humanity.
The punchline: it’s not AI generated. It’s a real Monet! (Specifically from his Water Lilies series; this particular one was painted in 1915 and is currently in Neue Pinakothek, Munich).
Of course, many commenters deleted their replies in embarrassment. Some insisted that the crop, digitization, lack of context, etc. made it tangibly different from the original, physical painting, so their critiques were still valid. A few even went as far as to say that even if it was a real Monet, it was an “inferior” Monet, anyways.
I’m no Monet expert. I didn’t comment at the time so you’ll just have to take my word for it, but my immediate gut reaction upon seeing the post was: wow, AI art’s really gotten good, I can’t really tell the difference between this and a real Monet at all. And clearly, that was the case for many, many other people as well.
Look, I’m an artist. Not professionally; it’s not my livelihood, which is probably why I’m able to comment on this from more of a distance than the working artists I see online and that I know in real life. But I’ve been drawing and painting since I was a child, and it’s one of my great joys in life, so I’m definitely emotionally invested in Art. And as an artist, I have to say… guys, you need to get your heads out of the sand.
AI art is Good now. Good in the technical sense, in the sense that a well-generated image will be able to fool 99% of people who see it—even discerning artists. Attempting to identify the “tells” of AI art has been a rapidly accelerating arms race: first it was hands (which, I’ll note, is something human artists infamously struggle with as well!). Then it was text. Then it was the piss-yellow filter. Like whack-a-mole, when one obvious flaw was fixed, another one would make itself known. But it looks like we’re finally running out of moles.
Another (actual) piece of AI art was making the rounds the other day. It was an AI-generated animated short created with a tool by Runway:
My personal opinion of the short: it’s fine. The visuals are on the level of a low-tier Dreamworks or Illumination film. The story/writing is aggressively mediocre. The voices still clearly carry that uncanny valley, flattened AI affect.
But nonetheless: holy crap. Remember when AI video used to look like this?
Gone are those days. Yet in the comments and quote tweets, this is what I see:
These suckers still think “typing words into ai to generate is them “making” anything
Looks like shit genuinely give up on your dreams
Acceptable! I don’t like the expression at 0:23 tho, it needs to be pushed more. Could you redo that expression?
What, you can’t?
Oh
And one of my personal favorites:
AI has evolved to perfectly imitate dubbed low-budget European animated films that get a 1 week theatrical run before getting dumped to Netflix
That’s a cheap dunk, and an accurate one, but… you get how that’s actually really impressive, right? You get how that’s very scary for artists, right? You get that the soulless Super Mario Bros. slop-quel made almost a billion at the box office, right?
Fellow artists: Pandora’s box has been opened. There really is no going back. I think non-tech people have been pattern-matching AI to the now-dead fads of yesteryear, like crypto, NFTs, and the Metaverse (long live Horizon Worlds), but even if you think certain people in the AI world are just trying to drum up hype, it’s undeniable at this point that AI has and will continue to have a profound impact on our society. You don’t have to like it, and indeed I personally find the gradual proliferation of low-effort, sloppy AI art both on- and offline to be very off-putting. But it’s happening, we can’t stop it, and at this point I’m sure I’ve seen plenty of AI images and videos that I haven’t been able to clock — and I’m probably in, like, the 90% percentile of being to identify these things!
I don’t know what the future of the art industry is gonna look like. I really hope we don’t end up in a world where AI-generated vertical videos are the de-facto default form of entertainment (although arguably they basically already are…). I really hope that there will always be a place for the human artistic vision, that artists will continue to get to make the art they want to make and that mediums like drawing and animation don’t go the way of (in the words of the great Timothée Chalamet) opera and ballet—that is, niche elite-coded forms of art, indefinitely confined to a corner of obscurity in the wider world of culture, relics of a bygone era. But if we want to avoid that, the first step is to acknowledge that we are indeed on that path, and that mockery and ridicule is no longer sufficient.
They’re on Substack, too, under the username (prepare yourself): 𒐪𒐪𒐪𒐪𒐪𒐪𒐪𒐪𒐪𒐪𒐪𒐪𒐪𒐪𒐪𒐪𒐪𒐪𒐪𒐪𒐪𒐪𒐪𒐪𒐪𒐪𒐪𒐪𒐪𒐪
The question of whether “AI art” is “Art” is not a question of verisimilitude. It is a question of expression - something that AI inherently lacks.
Art has meaning because someone made it. It is a form of self-expression. I can look at a photograph and admire the colors and composition. These qualities can evoke a powerful aesthetic response with no further context. But a photo of a sunset is not Art because it is beautiful. It is Art because SOMEONE took the picture, or penned the script, or performed the song. They did so for a reason, however mundane, even if only to convey a fleeting thought or lived moment of experience.
The hands are a red herring. AI art fails to be Art because it is not human-made. It is simulacra. OpenAI can trot out a shinier version of the Will Smith AI Spaghetti Video every year, and every year it will be no more Art than the first variation. There is no magical boundary line between Art and non-Art that is drawn* by “how good it looks.” This is the same line of thinking that leads your most snarky relative to point at a Jackson Pollock painting and say, “Yeah, right. My KID could draw that!” (To be clear, a child’s kindergarten turkey drawing is still Art, and often very powerful and meaningful Art.)
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When presented with this Water Lilies post, my reaction is not to consider the symmetry; the brushstrokes; the palette. I simply don’t care about any of that. If SCHL0M’s Water Lilies was generated by Claude, then I have no motivation to engage with the work as Art. The pixels are empty.
Except, apparently, SCHL0M’s Claude’s Water Lilies was not made by Claude. It was painted by Monet. So it is Art. This does not make me a fool**; it makes SCHL0M someone who does numbers on Twitter. Yes, nothing material about the work has changed, but it makes all the difference.
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I have certainly met people who believe that AI will fail for the specific reason that “it will never be as good as humans.” But in the grand scheme of things, this is a straw-man that exists in the replies of a Blue Checkmark engagement bait post. And why was that post made?
https://x.com/SHL0MS/status/2054835013758091577
(A post deserving of mockery and ridicule)
There is a dangerous rhetoric about the legitimacy of AI art. The constant online framing of AI as a disruptor to the artistic establishment has the result of blurring the lines between Art and Content. My worry is that this piece contributes to this rhetoric. Yes, AI art is not Art. But let’s be clear - AI art is not a substitute for Art, either. Its proliferation cheapens creative work, and trains the reader to be complacent with aesthetic over substance.
If, in 50 years, culture values human artistic vision, it will not be because we correctly observe AI passing the benchmark tests of technical excellence. It will be because we encourage people to value expression, connection, and self-reflection.
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*Pun not intended.
**Maybe it does make me someone who is gullible or lacking in art history knowledge!
I like a work of "art" (including music) because it is beautiful or interesting to me. I do not care if a human created it or a machine. I'm sorry if that upsets some but, I suspect, many people feel the same as I. Plenty of AI-created works are crap (to me) but I feel the same way about a lot of art I have seen in museums as well.