What happened when 6.8m people were told real Monet art was AI
By Phill Agnew
AI content is polarizing. When users spot that AI was used in art, backlash often follows. So, let’s run a quick experiment.
Take a look at the picture below. I just generated an image, in the style of a Monet painting, using AI. I used the latest AI models trained on the world’s best artwork. Have a look, and think about what makes this image inferior to a real Monet painting. Think about what you like and what you don’t like about it.
Now, what if I told you that I lied? The image is a real Monet. A few weeks back, X user SHLOMS performed the same exercise. Let’s talk about what happened.
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The Post That Started It All
Over 1,300 people responded to SHLOMS’s post with resoundingly similar feedback. Almost everyone who replied said this AI art was pure crap.
They said it lacked “coherent composition.” The colors were an “incoherent muddle.” Some said it was “trying too hard.”
Others called the image “obvious AI slop.” They called it “garbage” and “borked nonsense with no sense of space.” Users picked holes in every aspect of the painting. They questioned its lack of meaning and how AI art simply lacks the magical quality imbued by human creativity.
But there’s a problem … this Monet painting is real.
The “AI” Painting That Fooled Thousands
SHOLMS lied. It was their version of a social experiment. They took a real (much-loved) Monet painting, pretended it was an AI-generated image, and then gauged the reaction.
I’ll be honest. My gut reaction to the X post was the same. I immediately thought it was slop. I tried to spot flaws and thought the colors were dull. And it turns out that all of us do this.
When we think art is created by AI, we tend to dislike it. In fact, when we think anything took no effort to build, we dislike it.
We follow what Andrea Morales, Lonnie L. Ostrom Chair in Business and professor in the Department of Marketing at Arizona State University, calls an “effort heuristic.” In other words, if something took two seconds to generate, we’ll hate it. If it took 15 years of craft to perfect, we’ll love it.
In a 2005 study published in the Journal of Consumer Research, Morales found that people will generally reward actions that took a great deal of effort. The study followed 46 participants who were in the market for a new home. They were told to hire a real estate agent to help them search. The agent reviewed their preferences and put together a personalized list of 10 apartments.
However, 23 of the participants were told the agent “did everything manually and spent nine hours building the list.” The other 23 were …read more
Source:: HubSpot Blog
