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Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

AI art enjoyers and missing the point of art: name a better duo.

No one has ever claimed AI cannot imitate a Monet, but however good the imitation, it still isn't art any more than a Xerox of a painting is art. This is the exact reason why most people feel bad after discovering that what they felt was work of human ingenuity, is just a fake, a simulacrum of it. The creation of art, arguably the most human of instincts, cannot be separated from the emotions and effort that went into it.

All this proves is that most people cannot tell if that picture is a Monet or not.

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> All this proves is that most people cannot tell if that picture is a Monet or not.

It proves that people don't actually know what they like about "art" or even why they think some art is good, and some is bad.

These people criticized and trashed a widely regarded, famous painting because they were told that it was a cheap imitation.

If the AI generated a real imitation and the Met hung it on their walls I guarantee these same people would celebrate it just the same because they are told that it is real.

> It proves that people don't actually know what they like about "art" or even why they think some art is good, and some is bad.

That's because those are famously difficult questions to answer.

> All this proves is that most people cannot tell if that picture is a Monet or not.

It goes beyond that. It proves that many people have an inherent bias against AI itself that's unrelated to whatever it generates. "This was made by AI, therefore it's bad in every way".

that's because when dealing with art, the "why" something was made can be as important as the "what"

... I mean, yes? People object to AI art (and generative AI in general) on ethical grounds, not just aesthetic ones. This is something anti-AI people are quite explicit about.

Exactly. I'd rather appreciate a bad piece of art made in earnest by a person.

That's precisely the difference between art and a commodity.

That's fair, but a lot of the attacks on AI art specifically point to perceived technical and compositional flaws. Heck, you still see people making "mangled fingers" jokes, and that hasn't been a thing in frontier models for a couple years now. Plus, a lot of the stylistic and "lacks creativity" critiques come from people churning out images with basic prompts on default settings; a modicum of effort makes it much more difficult to distinguish.

Good points, but consider what this post does prove: people’s arguments against AI art are shallow; they often attack the artifacts themselves instead of making your deeper argument.

I remember this old episode of Doctor Who where the Doctor scoffs at a postcard with the Mona Lisa on it and derides souless "art made by computers."

As a digital artist, of course I rolled my eyes at the time, but these days I just keep thinking about that storyline more and more.

We've basically transitioned to a world where digital art is almost the default, but I think the world is going to value physical art much more highly in the coming years.

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