Why people have a visceral reaction to AI art
If you're as AI-pilled as me and struggle with why people recoil at AI-generated images, a Nazi, a forged Vermeer, and a Dutch counterfeiter can help it make sense. They're not reacting to the pixels, they're reacting to the journey.
Why do people have a visceral reaction to AI generated "art"? If you're as AI pilled as me and struggle with this question, I think a German Nazi and a Dutch counterfeiter can help it make more sense.
In 1943 Hermann Göring, a Nazi so senior he was quite literally Hitler's named successor, acquired a Vermeer. Not just any Vermeer, a previously unknown one, "Christ with the Adulteress." He traded 137 paintings for it (looted, naturally).
Vermeers were among the most sought after paintings in the world because of their rarity. Only around 34 surviving works are definitively attributed to him, and he was one of, if not the, master of the Dutch Golden Age. For Göring, landing one was a triumph. By all accounts he loved that painting, the crown jewel of his collection.
After the war, the Dutch tracked the sale back to a painter and art dealer named Han van Meegeren and arrested him for collaboration. Selling a national treasure to the Nazis was, understandably, a very serious charge.
His defense: it wasn't a Vermeer. He painted it himself. Nobody believed him (the thing had fooled the leading Vermeer expert of the era), so he offered to prove it and painted another "Vermeer" while in custody, in front of witnesses.
When Göring was told at Nuremberg, the account is that he looked as if he'd discovered for the first time that there was evil in the world. Losing the war, the fall of Germany, his role in the atrocities of the Third Reich, none of it broke him. Finding out his beloved Vermeer wasn't actually a Vermeer did.
But why does it matter? The image didn't change. Same canvas, same brushstrokes, same aesthetics. If you loved it when you thought it was a Vermeer, you should love it just as much when it turns out to be a van Meegeren. And yet nobody does.
It's because when we appreciate art we're not just appreciating aesthetics. We're connecting with an image as much as with a story. When you buy a painting you're buying the image, but you're buying the link to the person behind it just as much (arguably more). Göring loved the image as much as the connection to a lost moment in time. To a master we can now only touch transitively.
For a lot of people, AI poisons that story. They associate it with copyright theft and shortcuts, so anything it touches is tainted the same way. I think that's the wrong way to think about it, but I understand the viscerality. They're not reacting to the pixels, they're reacting to the journey.
There's nuance that gets lost here. Yes, most AI generated images are slop. But it can be a vessel for creativity as much as any other medium. An AI generated image is as much art as a photograph is, which is to say most aren't, but that doesn't mean the medium is incapable of it. And if for some the story just fundamentally doesn't speak to them and they can't see it as art... that's ok too. The story was always part of the thing.