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

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

#51
post #23

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?

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?

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

#53
post #23

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?

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

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

#54
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.

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

#55
post #26

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 w…

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.

This is why John Cage's 4'33" mentioned above is genius. If you listen to the composition with sincerity and seriousness, you get the full, unadulterated (non-silent) experience as opposed to an interpretation.

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

#56
post #26

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 w…

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.

I feel really sorry for people that find context is key for art.

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.

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

#58

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 w…

The takeaway i see here is you attach "AI" to anything and people automatically go into AI-yuk mode.

It's mindless tribalism/wokism in different form.

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

#59

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 w…

It’s perfectly fine to like cheap wine and not like expensive wine.

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.

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

#60

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 ha…

I have a feeling like the lay person wouldn’t have made a comment, it’s only the people that think they are an expert that wouldn’t have confidently said why this painting is worse.

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.

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