The AI Art Test, Results

Update: ongoing secondary revision Writing past discouragement

The AI Art Test, Results

I know some of you clicked through to the art experiment over at Astral Codex Ten, where you were asked to see if you could identify human vs AI art. I did the test, in a casual “clicking rapidly through it, not trying especially hard to get it right.” I found it interesting and also was genuinely surprised by some of the AI pieces. I should say that I fall solidly into the cliche “I don’t know anything about art, but I know what I like.”

Here are the results of the test, if you’d like to see how well or badly respondents did overall. Apparently there were 11,000 respondents, give or take, which is a pretty amazing sample size, honestly.

There’s a general discussion, including an interesting and detailed discussion about this image:

Which I liked a lot, but now like less after reading a long description of the many things that are wrong with it. Those things don’t bother me that much, but fine, I admit my opinion has been influenced nevertheless and as I say, now I like it less. I’m glad the giant ship was human and that nobody spent any time explaining what was wrong with it, because I really liked that too, and for a lot of the same reasons: I like monumental architecture (and, apparently, monumental ships) with lots of detail. You can click over to Astral Codex Ten and look at the ship; I’m not posting that image here because it is, after all, by a real person and therefore copyrighted.

A lot of people apparently shared my view that anything impressionistic was probably human, or ought to be human, and therefore had trouble with that category. One image that I liked a lot turned out to be AI generated and also was the single most-liked piece in the whole test. It was this one:

I still like it and I still find it hard to believe it’s AI generated. Some of you (Hi, Elaine’s Teen!) were much better at this than I was. If you see this post, then did you recognize this one as AI generated? And if so, how? There was another one, “Leafy Lane,” that to me seems similar to the one above and which I also liked and also thought was human-generated. Here it is:

Another favorite of mine was this one:

Which I felt was bright and cheerful and I just liked it. I still do.

Here’s one I thought was by a real person:

I don’t like it; to me, the figure of the woman looks like she’s been plonked down on top of a landscape painting without any attempt to make her look like she’s really there. BUT, I could swear I’ve seen plenty of paintings where the human figures looked unreal or misplaced to me in exactly the same way, so I guessed human. (Remember, I took about five seconds to guess one way or the other. But I really did have this exact reaction: she looks wrong, but in a human way. Nope, turns out she’s wrong in an AI way.)

Scott says he tried not to include any with hands that were obviously wrong. I think he missed one. The left hand of “Muscular Man” looks very strange to me.