[HN Gopher] How did you do on the AI art Turing test?
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       How did you do on the AI art Turing test?
        
       Author : sieste
       Score  : 34 points
       Date   : 2024-11-22 19:30 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.astralcodexten.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.astralcodexten.com)
        
       | sieste wrote:
       | The only way I can explain people getting 98% accuracy on this is
       | being familiar with the handful of AI artists submitting their
       | work for this competition.
        
         | Izkata wrote:
         | It's a google form with no apparent time limit. It wouldn't
         | surprise me if some people could do this (think of it like how
         | older special effects in TV/movies look dated), but most likely
         | they did an image search on each one and got one wrong.
        
       | RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
       | I don't think that is AI art Turing test.
       | 
       | An AI art Turing Test would be interactive with me telling it
       | what to draw and what changes to make and see if what is
       | producing the art is human or AI.
        
         | egypturnash wrote:
         | This species of test would also need a multi-day turnaround
         | period on each image. And/or a video stream of the work being
         | drawn.
         | 
         | "Changes" are an interesting one, honestly as a professional
         | artist who has to pay her rent, there is certain complexity of
         | change beyond which I am likely to say "look, we're going to
         | need to renegotiate the budget on this if you want this much of
         | a change from the sketch you already approved", or even "no".
        
       | equestria wrote:
       | Eh, this is pretty unfair. That's a test of how good humans are
       | at deceiving other humans, not a of how hard it is to distinguish
       | run-of-the-mill AI art from run-of-the-mill human art in real
       | life.
       | 
       | First, by their own admission, the author deliberately searched
       | for generative images that don't exhibit any of the telltale
       | defects or art choices associated with this tech. For example,
       | they rejected the "cat on a throne" image, the baby portrait, and
       | so on. They basically did a pre-screen to toss out anything the
       | author recognized as AI, hugely biasing the results.
       | 
       | Then, they went through a similar elimination process for human
       | images to zero in on fairly ambiguous artwork that could be
       | confused with machine-generated. The "victorian megaship" one is
       | a particularly good example of such chicanery. When discussing
       | the "angel woman" image, they even express regret for not getting
       | rid of that pic because of a single detail that pointed to human
       | work.
       | 
       | Basically, the author did their best to design a quiz that humans
       | should fail... and humans still did better than chance.
        
         | bena wrote:
         | Also impressionism is probably one of the most favorable art
         | styles for AI. The lack of detail means there are fewer places
         | for AI to fuck up.
         | 
         | A street with cafe chairs and lights, that's like an entire
         | genre of impressionist paintings.
        
         | bongodongobob wrote:
         | I think it's fair. It's the same thing humans do with their own
         | art. You don't release the piece until you like it. You revise
         | until you think it's don't. If a human wants to make AI art,
         | they aren't just going to drop the first thing they generated.
         | They're going to iterate. I think it's just as unfair to
         | include the worst generations, because people are going to
         | release the highest quality they can come up with.
        
           | majormajor wrote:
           | > It's the same thing humans do with their own art.
           | 
           | How so? Humans distributed all those "I filtered them out
           | because they were too obvious" AI ones that _aren 't_ in the
           | test too. So they passed someone's "is this something that
           | should get released" test.
           | 
           | What we _aren 't_ seeing is human-generated art that nobody
           | would confuse with a famous work - which of course there is a
           | lot of out there - but IMO it generally looks "not famous" in
           | very _different_ ways. More  "total execution issues" vs
           | detail issues.
        
           | rurp wrote:
           | Based on what I've empirically seen out in the world most
           | people posting AI art are not using the same filtering as the
           | author of this test. Plus the human choices used probably
           | skew more towards what people think of as classic AI art than
           | all human art as a whole.
           | 
           | The test was interesting to read about, but it didn't really
           | change my mind about AI art in general. It's great for
           | generating stock images and other low engagement works, but
           | terrible as fine art that's meant to engage the user on any
           | non-superficial level.
        
           | equestria wrote:
           | > I think it's fair. It's the same thing humans do with their
           | own art.
           | 
           | No, hold on. The key part is that you have a quiz that
           | purports to test the ability of an average human to tell AI
           | artwork from human artwork.
           | 
           | So if you specifically select images for this quiz based on
           | the fact that _you, the author of the quiz_ can 't tell them
           | apart, then your quiz is no longer testing what it's promised
           | to. It's now a quiz of "are you incrementally better than the
           | author at telling apart AI and non-AI images". Which might be
           | fine, but is a lot less interesting, right?
        
       | cicdw wrote:
       | This article has an implicit premise that the ultimate judge of
       | art is "do I/people like it" but I think art is more about the
       | possibilities of interpretation - for example, the classics/"good
       | art" lend themselves to many reinterpretations, both by different
       | people and by the same person over time. When humans create art
       | "manually" all of their decisions - both conscious and
       | unconscious - feed into this process. Interpreting AI art is more
       | of a data exploration journey than an exploration of meaning.
        
         | ARandumGuy wrote:
         | That's one of my problems with AI art. AI art promises to bring
         | your ideas to life, no need to sweat the small stuff. But it's
         | the small details and decisions that often make art great!
         | Ideas are a dime a dozen in any artistic medium, it's the
         | specific way those ideas are implemented that make art truly
         | interesting.
        
           | cicdw wrote:
           | I couldn't agree more; I love what you said in your other
           | reply: "AI art punishes the viewer who looks closer"
        
           | jncfhnb wrote:
           | Eh. That's an artificial goalpost. Realistically, it's a tool
           | in the toolkit.
        
         | dpig_ wrote:
         | Agreed. AI art subtracts intentionality.
        
       | Izkata wrote:
       | 66% here. I was pretty much scrolling through and clicking on
       | first instinct instead of looking in any detail.
       | 
       | Interestingly I did a lot better in the second half than the
       | first half - without going through and counting them up again I
       | think somewhere around 40% in the first half and 90% in the
       | second half. Not sure if it's because of the selection/order of
       | images or if I started unconsciously seeing commonalities.
        
       | ARandumGuy wrote:
       | I feel like the comment made by the author's friend captures a
       | lot of my feelings on AI art. AI art is often extremely detailed,
       | but that detail is often just random noise. It's art that becomes
       | worse and makes less sense the more carefully you look at it.
       | 
       | Compared that to human art. When a person makes a highly detailed
       | artwork, that detail rewards looking closely. That detail forms a
       | cohesive, intentional vision, and incentivizes the viewer to
       | spend the time and effort to take it all in. A person could spend
       | hours looking at Bruegel's Tower of Babel paintings, or Bosch's
       | "The Garden of Earthly Delights".
       | 
       | Overall, I've never felt the need to spend the time looking
       | closely at AI art, even AI art that I couldn't tell was AI right
       | away. Instead of rewarding close inspection with more detail, AI
       | art punishes the viewer who looks closer by giving them
       | undecipherable mush.
        
         | morkalork wrote:
         | It's exactly what isn't captured in the training data. The AI
         | knows what the final texture of an oil painting looks like but
         | it doesn't, know if what it's creating isn't possible from the
         | point of view of physical technique. Or, likewise, it doesn't
         | see the translation from mental image to representation of that
         | image that a human has. It's always working off the final
         | product.
        
         | card_zero wrote:
         | That makes it sound like impressionism. But the phony details
         | have a more intense bullshitting quality, like the greebles on
         | a Star Wars spaceship.
        
           | doawoo wrote:
           | There's a lot of thought that goes into things like the
           | greebles on a spaceship, like the shape language, the values
           | and hues, etc.
           | 
           | Impressionism might seem "random" like what a model would
           | output, but the main difference is the human deciding how
           | that "randomness" should look.
           | 
           | The details on a model generated art piece are meaningless to
           | me, no one sat down and thought "the speckles here will have
           | to be this value to ensure they don't distract from the rest
           | of the piece."
           | 
           | That's more what I look at when I digest art, the small,
           | intentional design choices of the person making it.
        
           | lupire wrote:
           | Hmm? Impressionism is noted for extreme _lack_ of detail,
           | that still is suggestive of something specific, because the
           | artist knows what details your brain will fill in. (8bit
           | pixel art is impressionistic :-) )
        
         | majormajor wrote:
         | The gate picture has the same problem as as the cat one that he
         | didn't filter out. There's a lot going on, and the lighting
         | does seem to be one of the somewhat-inconsistent issues IMO,
         | but it's just generally weird about why there's cats of all
         | different sizes, why some of the smallest cats have the same
         | coloring as the biggest ones, but some don't, what's going on
         | with the arms of the two darker cats on the right, why aren't
         | the sides of the throne symmetric, etc.
         | 
         | Everything is consistent in terms of "the immediate pixels
         | surrounding it" but the picture as a whole is just "throw a LOT
         | at the wall."
         | 
         | It passes the "looks cool" test but fails the "how likely would
         | a human be to paint that particular composition" test.
        
       | QuadmasterXLII wrote:
       | so much of the value of art, which Scott has actually endowed on
       | these AI generated pieces, is the knowledge that other people are
       | looking at the same thing as you.
        
       | arjie wrote:
       | Generative AI is so cool. My wife (a creative director) used it
       | to help design our wedding outfits. We then had them embroidered
       | with those patterns. It would have been impossible otherwise for
       | us to have that kind of thing expressed directly. It's like
       | having an artist who can sketch really fast and who you can keep
       | correcting till your vision matches the expression. Love it!
       | 
       | I don't think there have been any transformative AI works yet,
       | but I look forward to the future.
       | 
       | It's unsurprising to me that AI art is often indistinguishable
       | from real artists' work but famous art is so for some reason
       | other than technical skill. Certainly there are numerous replica
       | painters who are able to make marvelous pieces.
       | 
       | Anyway, I'm excited to see what new things come.
        
       | Barrin92 wrote:
       | It would have been interesting to know how much time most people
       | spent per picture because if you look at the quoted comment from
       | the well scoring art interested person mentioned:
       | 
       |  _" The left column has a sort of door with a massive top-of-
       | doorway-thingy over it. Why? Who knows? The right column doesn't,
       | and you'd expect it to. Instead, the right column has 2.5 arches
       | embossed into it that just kind of halfheartedly trail off._"
       | 
       | You can find this in almost every AI generated picture. The
       | picture that people liked most, AI generated with the cafe and
       | canal, the legs on the chairs make little sense. Not as bad as in
       | non-curated AI art, but still no human would paint like this.
       | Same for the houses in the background. If you spend say a minute
       | per picture with AI art you almost always find these random
       | things, even if the image is stylized, unlike human art it has a
       | weird uncanniness to it.
        
       | 12_throw_away wrote:
       | Oh come on. I guess I missed the part in the "Turing test" where
       | a human filters out 99.999% of the machine's output prior to the
       | test.
        
         | hombre_fatal wrote:
         | On the other hand, if you think you can identify AI art, that
         | only means anything if you can do it on the hard cases, not the
         | easy ones.
         | 
         | It's also a reminder to not believe images/video that you see
         | online. It's not the low quality slop that's going to fool you.
        
       | beepbooptheory wrote:
       | Duchamp rolling in his grave about this post!
        
       | maldusiecle wrote:
       | Fine art is a matter of nuance, so in that sense I think it does
       | matter that a lot of the "human art" examples are aggressively
       | cropped (the Basquiat is outright cut in half) and reproduced at
       | very low quality. That Cecily Brown piece, for example, is 15
       | feet across in person. Seeing it as a tiny jpg is of course not
       | very impressive. The AI pieces, on the other hand, are native to
       | that format, there's no detail to lose.
       | 
       | But those details are part of what make the human art interesting
       | to contemplate. I wouldn't even think of buying an art book with
       | reproductions of such low quality--at that point you do lose
       | what's essential about the art work, what makes it possible to
       | enjoy.
        
       | egypturnash wrote:
       | It's interesting that the impressionist-styled pieces mostly
       | fooled people. I think this is because the style requires getting
       | rid of one of the hallmarks of AI imagery: lots and lots of
       | mostly-parallel swooshy lines, at a fairly high frequency.
       | Impressionism's schtick is kind of fundamentally "fuck high-
       | frequency detail, I'm just gonna make a bunch of little
       | individual paint blobs".
       | 
       | One of the other hallmarks of AI imagery was deliberately kept
       | out of this test. There's no _shitposts_. There 's _one_ , as an
       | example of "the dall-e house style". It's a queen on a throne
       | made of a giant cat, surrounded by giant cats, and it's got a lot
       | of that noodly high-frequency detail that _looks_ like something,
       | but it is also a fundamentally goofy idea. Nobody 's gonna pay
       | Michael Whelan to paint the hell out of this and yet _here it
       | is_.
        
       | d--b wrote:
       | I think what gave AI away the most was mixed styles. If one part
       | of the painting is blurred, and another part is very focused, you
       | can tell it's AI. People don't do that.
       | 
       | I got all of Jack Galler's pictures wrong though. The man knows
       | how to do it.
        
       | throwawayk7h wrote:
       | You can't really draw many conclusions from this test, since the
       | AI art has already been filtered by Scott to be ones that Scott
       | himself found confusing. So What do any of the numbers at the end
       | of this really mean? "Am I better than Scott at discerning AI art
       | from human" is about the only thing this test says.
       | 
       | If you didn't filter the AI art first, people would do much
       | better.
        
       | jncfhnb wrote:
       | AI Art can be hard to identify in the wild. But it still largely
       | sucks at helping you achieve specific deliverables. You can get
       | an image. But it's pretty hard to actually make specific images
       | in specific styles. Yes we have Loras. Yes we have control nets
       | (to varying degrees) and ipadapter (to lesser degrees) and face
       | adapters and what not. But it's still frustrating to get
       | something consistent across multiple images. Especially in
       | illustrated styles.
       | 
       | AI Art is good if you need something in a general ballpark and
       | don't care about the specifics
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2024-11-22 23:00 UTC)