Artificial Intelligence

[Brian Peacock]

I guess if you consider the painting, or any artwork, as a discrete object that stands apart from the processes that produces it, then this bit of mischief is kinda funny. People seemingly didn't rate the painting highly because it was AI rather than because it was unsuccessful or bad. But they can only do this because the object itself bears all the markers and attributes of the things we already understand as "paintings", and we understand that only because of our previous personal and cultural experience of paintings; of understanding what paintings are and the boundaries that separate them from other things, of how paintings are created, and of who has traditionally or historically created them. In other words, when we apprehend, experience, review &/or critique a painting we start with the idea of what makes the thing a painting in the first place, and part of that understanding is that paintings are made by people such that any critique of a painting involves a critique of the personal expression of the person who made it.

Generally, people don't overtly consider these kinds of ideas when they come across "a painting" -- mostly it's a "I know one when I see one" kind of thing -- but they're always there in the background; you can only know one when you see one because you already understand the conditions it needs to meet in order to be "a painting". Artists have been playing with that idea for over 100 years now.



The author of the article apparently finds it hilarious that people have brought their ideas of what paintings are, how they're created, and who makes them, to an image of a Monet, but then only focused on the "who" element to contextualise their overall judgement of it - as they were invited to do.

But while the article appears to forward the observation that people can't tell good art from bad, ultimately the author is really only sneering at people for not having a deep knowledge of Monet's artistic output. Nor do they acknowledging that good artists can make bad or unsuccessful art -- meaning some of the criticism of the art itself may have been legitimate even if the attribution was erroneous -- while implicitly assuming that all of Monet's output was "good art" because Monet was a "good artist". They elevated Monet's output while chiding people for elevating Monet's output.

Setting people up and then lambasting them for not knowing the difference between AI and Monet is a good troll I guess, if that's your kind of thing.

[pErvinalia]

A fair part of it is probably reflexive. In the photography community there is strong hate of generative AI. It's easy to imagine that this would bias the opinions of those that have a visceral dislike of AI.