Comment by Chance-Device
21 hours ago
Yes, I think this is exactly right. The labelling of a thing as “AI Generated” or “AI Assisted” makes the viewer perceive it as worse in quality. And they really do think it’s worse.
It’s similar to a well known finding about price: people value things that are more expensive more, and tend to think they are of higher quality. You can give people the same thing for a high price or for free and they’ll say the high priced one is amazing the free one is lacklustre.
It’s like an optical illusion driven by labelling.
By many people’s criteria it automatically is worse, because part of what they value in art is thinking about the artist and their intentions behind their creation.
Similarly people may view an IKEA book stand as worse quality than one built by hand even if the hand built one has flaws. Or they might view a microwaved meal as worse than that created by a home chef.
People value the human intention and care that goes into creations. Without that it’s worse even if the output is fundamentally the same.
A drawing by my young niece may not have the same finesse as an AI generated one but I like it a whole lot more
>By many people’s criteria it automatically is worse, because part of what they value in art is thinking about the artist and their intentions behind their creation.
I think that's true enough for what it is but, as the other commenter also noted, a bit of a different topic here. The Monet example shows that people work backward from AI to direct conclusions about the quality of the work itself, which isn't the same as agreeing a work is by all appearances equivalent to Monet but lacking in underlying deliberation.
One can inform the other to be sure but that conversation exists in parallel with another conversation that's a straight one-shot assessment of quality.
> By many people’s criteria it automatically is worse, because part of what they value in art is thinking about the artist and their intentions behind their creation
That’s a bit separate to what I’m talking about, but I don’t think there are many of these people. I think this whole thing is about AI anxiety coupled with American social norms, and as soon as one of those things changes the artists are going to be left out in the cold again.
> I don’t think there are many of these people
I think there are lots of people who value art for the ideas of the artist. There are also lots of people who think that they value something like quality of brushstrokes, and these are the same people, mostly. I mean they don't know what they like it for, but the raw graphical data is what's in front of them, so they ascribe their preference to its (supposedly) measurable qualities.
Hence this thing about I can tell it's AI because its graphical quality is bad. In a way that's correct though! The artist's ideas are hinted at in the brushstrokes (or whatever other graphical aspects). In the gen AI picture you get hints of a phony mind. It becomes hollow when you know that, or when you think you know that. It's not delivering the cultural experience, if the hints you pick up on are false.
I think you’d be surprised by how many people feel that way but it’s hard to say for sure.
What did you think about my other examples? (The bookshelf and the microwaved meal)
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Yeah, but the issue is we are getting constantly exposed to a barrage of really low quality obvious AI generated content. Except a lot of people seem to not know that it's AI and interact with like it's real. The people posting it are being reward by monetization platforms.
Low quality baiting content was a problem before but the barrier to entry has been significantly reduced and the.amount of content is growing quickly.