Someone Shared a Real Monet Painting as AI and Asked for Critiques
petapixel.com
petapixel.com
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.
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.
Even looking at the real thing, as most pigments degrade with age. There is no way of experiencing it as it was painted.
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.
I don't think any picture you take with your cellphone will have as much detail as this.
The act of taking photos of paintings in museums is meaningless.
Note that they said "remember the details" not "capture the details."
No. I found some paintings I liked in a museum and took photos of them with a serious-at-the-time camera and uploaded them to wikimedia and found the endeavour worthwhile. Not all the paintings are super-famous and been scanned at infinite resolution!
For them often context is more important than the actual art. Lie about the context and their view of art changes completely. I would say these people have objectively bad taste in art. These are the worst kinds of people.
In respect to your point about jpeg, you could have had a jpeg marked as real and one ai, and you would have had all the same comments about how the real jpeg was much better for all kinds of reasons. There is going to be almost zero chance anyone commented how they did due to it being a JPEG, vs them thinking it was ai.
Some of the comments reflect this, critiquing the art for what it is, not for who it is from. But at the same time a lot of them clearly go in with the mindset that they don't like it, then try to rationalize that with art critique.
No one said -- Oh that's just what the default option was.
Everyone had a thought out reasoned answer why they did what they did. But the data showed none of them did that and they in fact just did what the default was and justified their choice afterwards.
I wish I could remember/find the podcast but I haven't been able to. It feels like an old freakonomics but I don't think it is.
Closer yet is “look at me! I am sexy and cool! Have sex with me!”.
“Taste” is social signalling, end to end, so strike me down.
I say this as someone who gets writeups of their work in design magazines fairly often - and I am not a designer - it’s just like dressing a theatre set with the correct objects to signal the thing you want to signal.
Fuck, I fed people cat food at a dinner party when I was 20 and they all said it was delicious pâté.
All artifice.
Yes, the context of who created a piece of art will have an affect on how you interpret it. But if the question of who/what created it can literally flip your interpretation between "it's genius" and "it's garbage", then that's the only thing you care about. All the actual characteristics of the thing itself are irrelevant. And if literally the only thing that matters about art is who created it, what exactly is the point of art?
https://sciencesnopes.blogspot.com/2013/05/about-that-wine-e...
It's mindless tribalism/wokism in different form.
Those that like wine just because they think it’s expensive just have objectively bad taste.
So your defence only works for people with objectively bad taste. It’s not something that applies to everyone.
Oxymoron.
While the idea that qualia depends on contextual cues might be valuable to understand how culture evolves, it's also indicative that that these cultural phenomena evolve to preserve in group/out group dynamics.
It's not so much, "taste is meaningless" and more, "taste is an arbitrary construction." These kinds of tests are the natural tools of the cynics and satirists of the world.
Critics and purveyors of the Fine Arts and Refined Tastes tend to get a little "up their own asses" about the things that they like.
So, while I agree that the framing of "taste is meaningless" is a bad take, it's valid to point out that there's natural humor here.
This kind of playful mockery is as old as the arts themselves. See: Diogenes.
“My opinion is that this brand is good because others have told me it is. My opinion is that it is expensive because it must in fact be good. The bottle looks old, therefore it is old, which means it must be good because anything good takes time. Everyone has told me how this is amazing, so I need to ensure my refined palette can identify the blah…blah..”
Opinions all the way down, rarely ever based on concrete objectivity. Even for Monet.
In abstract you take the same paintings, stick them in some old dead dudes attic in Nowhere, Montana because he just did them for fun, I’d be surprised if they even ended up at a yard sale.
And that is the point. Value is entirely subjective and built through opinions. If your opinion begins with “I don’t like this,” you don’t tend to then overlook the same characteristics you willingly ignored or even embellished when you believed you are expected to like said thing.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I love exercises like this - they expose this. Float it right up to the surface. It's poetic.
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?
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.
The discussion is interesting as many people didn't catch that it was mostly written by Claude: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47431237
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?
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
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.
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.
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)
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/ . It’s a bit more subtle than you say.
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... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No._5,_1948
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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.
They clearly don't really mean what they write and to suggest that "everyone" has access to incredible art tools in a world where millions don't even have reliable access to clean water is trite.
I'd also suggest your comment is rather more contrarian than mine. I laid out logical reasoning at length for my beliefs. You mostly gainsayed my comment, engaging with only one tiny pedantic point and otherwise ignoring what I said to instead insult me.
Albeit the original source was flagged.
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.
We can see every day.
Some people have no clue about the concept of Impressionism.
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.
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'.
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
In any case I do think there is value in the link you're making
Is a painting by AI art? Sure
Is a painting by Monet better than one painted by me? Most people would say yes.
Can some people explain why? Yes. They are not “experts” in the same way the Oxford Professor of nuclear physics is an expert but it is on the same scale.
Or possibly I am just hallucinating the argument because you prompted me to…
Consider the domestic power panel and wiring that is perfectly acceptable, but would 'splode outright if you moved it to an industrial setting and put it under an enterprise load.
Context matters.
Also experts in an art competition have the award to an ai art piece. It was only because they didn’t know it was ai. So no, even experts are susceptible to these issues.
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.
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
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.
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.