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The internet was certain: the painting lacked \u201ccoherent composition,\u201d the colors were an \u201cincoherent muddle of inconsistently saturated greens.\u201d Commenters piled on with extraordinary confidence, picking apart what they believed was an obvious AI-generated knockoff of Claude Monet. One person even wrote an over 700-word breakdown of the supposed fake\u2019s shortcomings. There was just one problem: it was a real Monet.<\/p>\n
The experiment, which went viral on X last week, was set up by an anonymous conceptual artist who goes by the pseudonym @SHL0MS. He posted a cropped image of an authentic Monet\u00a0Water Lilies\u00a0painting\u2014created around 1915 and currently hanging in the Neue Pinakothek museum in Munich, Germany\u2014with the caption: \u201cI just generated an image in the style of a Monet painting using AI. Please describe, in as much detail as possible, what makes this inferior to a real Monet painting.\u201d He even affixed X\u2019s official \u201cMade with AI\u201d label to add to the deception.<\/p>\n
A catalog of confident wrongness<\/p>\n
The replies did not disappoint. Commenters ripped apart the depth and color choice, the lack of depth or contrast. One even declared the image \u201ccluttered slop\u201d that \u201cdoesn\u2019t look anywhere near like a Monet\u201d and achieves \u201clike 20% of it.\u201d That\u2019s since been deleted\u2014as have multiple comments once the reveal landed, but screenshots were preserved by other users before they disappeared.<\/p>\n
Not everyone was fooled. Oil painter Kendric Tonn pushed back in real time: \u201cDisagree with the people saying it lacks depth \u2014 there\u2019s a clear plane with the lily pads and an inverted space with the willow reflecting. Paint texture looks pretty believable as a physical object, though thinner than most Monets I\u2019ve seen \u2026 It\u2019s not a top-tier Monet, but it\u2019s a very credible Monet.\u201d <\/p>\n
Art historian A.V. Marraccini was more direct: \u201cWhat the f*ck dude this is a detail from an actual late Monet? You can tell because the brush strokes are super similar to the Agapanthus in MOMA. Late ones always have that kind of wild impasto.\u201d<\/p>\n
The results, embarrassing as they were for individual commenters, are consistent with what researchers have found about how context shapes artistic perception. A 2024 study published in\u00a0Nature\u00a0found that while participants generally preferred AI-generated artworks over human-made ones when they didn\u2019t know the source, they significantly downgraded the same works after being told AI produced them. \u201cParticipants were unable to consistently distinguish between human and AI-created images,\u201d wrote researchers Simone Grassini and Mika Koivisto, adding that people \u201cdisplayed a negative bias against AI-generated artworks when subjective perception of source attribution was considered.\u201d <\/p>\n
The 2004 Kruger \u201ceffort heuristic\u201d study similarly found that people value art more when they believe it required significant human effort to create.<\/p>\n
The great cultural critic Susan Sontag, writing in 1964, argued that \u201ccamp\u201d is defined by \u201clove of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.\u201d It\u2019s a sensibility, she argued, that prizes the knowing, self-conscious gesture over the genuine one. What happened to Monet\u2019s painting online was camp turned inside out: a crowd so trained to detect artifice that it could no longer recognize the genuine article when it appeared.<\/p>\n
In short: people weren\u2019t seeing the painting. They were seeing a label.<\/p>\n
LinkedIn commentator Fabio Ciucci drew a broad lesson: \u201cWhile too many believe fake AI images to be real, the contrary is also true: too many people believe a real image is an AI fake if told so.\u201d Most people\u2019s judgment about whether something is or isn\u2019t AI is wrong and biased by its source. <\/p>\n
It seems to confirm what AI researcher Vivienne Ming told Fortune recently: \u201cMost of our fears about AI are fears about other people.\u201d<\/p>\n
For this story,\u00a0Fortune\u00a0journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.<\/p>\n
#million #people #thought #ripping #AIgenerated #Monet #painting #real<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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