A recent bait-and-switch sparked a debate about AI art.
After a user on X posted a picture “in the style of Monet” and asked why it was inferior to a real Monet, hundreds of people replied saying “it lacks the texture” and “no clear focal point.” It was, in fact, a real 1915 Claude Monet waterlilies painting, posted as a social experiment.
“You need to get your head out of the sand,” an amateur painter told other artists: AI’s image-making abilities are good enough to fool almost anyone, and it has profound implications for the future of art. Ironically, one poster said, the troll was itself an artistic statement: “A urinal can become a sculpture” if an artist says it is; “true art challenges norms.”