#this doesnt mean we can stop critizising the ethical side of the AI vs human creators discussion btw

[tonitoewyn]

this is my lane and my knowledge here might be of interest: I'm a digital art history research assistant. We just did a survey on how well people can distinguish AI-made art from human-made originals, asking 900 people to choose the human-made painting out of two images, one being the original and the other being a midjourney generated piece (we asked it to make paintings "in the style of" artists, detailing the content of the paintings). The general outcome is that people choose the correct option roughly half the time - mostly because they couldn't actually distinguish them, and if you take a wild guess, a 50% success rate is likely. HOWEVER, there were clear differences between the paintings that were more easily distinguished and those that confused people. The pair of images where 78% of participants answered correctly:

First one is The Annunciation by Joseph Erns Tunner (1830), second is midjourney 2023. People recognized the AI fake by realism but done wrong: the midjourney architecture doesn't make sense, the surfaces are too smooth, the hands and proportions are weird. The task most people guessed wrong, at 14% success rate?

First one is Sam Francis 1965, the second is midjourney 2023. People presumably got this wrong because they expect human-made art to be what they have seen before, and AI-made art to be weird, unusual, "wrong". Of course, AI art is still in developement, but for what it is at the moment I can derive three points from this: 1) People at large think that AI art is weird and human-made art is what they expect. Do with that knowledge what you want. 2) AI art so far actually sucks at realism. There is a specific AI-art look that most people who have been confronted with this before can recognize, because it is too smooth while also making clear mistakes in the construction of architecture and anatomy which are easily recognized by the human eye (because your eyes already saw more images than any AI training model has by the time you were three years old). If you make realistic art, especially showing humans, AI cannot do what you do. 3) At the same time AI art isn't creative. It doesn't subvert expectations, it learned from what is already there and reproduces it as well as it can (like large language models, AI art generators also are stochastic parrots - babbling without real content understanding). If you make weird art - AI isn't going to be on par with you for even longer, because you can come up with actual new things, taking all your specific knowledge, background and experiences into account. (However, presuming that people don't update their expectations, at some point you might get an annoying amount of people mistaking you for AI, which is a whole new can of worms.) Honestly the only kind of art AI can do really well is soulless, faceless corporate images and the corporate designers who did that so far should be doing better anyway

Robots may already be replacing a lot of art jobs but that's all the more reason to make all of your art weirder. Realistic illustration is dying but if that's what you trained for you still have all kinds of skills applicable to stylistic work. Go ahead and just draw like a toddler who somehow spent 10 years on just color theory.