As AI continues to encroach on every aspect of our lives, there is a persistent fear or hope, depending on your angle: AI will someday take over art. The internet is full of quizzes showing that most lay people cannot tell the difference between AI-generated art (digital pictures of paintings, prose) and the real thing. Multiple studies have shown that when people are shown AI-generated art and human-made art, but are not told which is which, they tend to prefer the AI-generated art, whether it be images, poetry, or prose.
Yet what’s striking is that despite this disparity, people still consistently say that human-made art is what they want.
In one study published in 2023, participants were shown a series of images, each randomly labeled “AI-made” or “human-made.” Participants rated the images they thought were machine made as worse than the images they thought had been created by a human artist — even when those were actually human-made.
One conclusion you might draw here is that the widespread disdain for AI-generated art is empty snobbery. If human-made art were so much better, the argument goes, then people would be able to see a real difference.
This line of thinking relies on the belief that “good” art is something that many people find appealing, at least in a vacuum. At this point, AI has automated that generation fairly successfully. At some point, it may get even better at it.
But I don’t think those study participants were lying when they said they wanted human-made art, even if they couldn’t tell the difference. Even if we get to a future in which AI’s persistent glitches are ironed out, so that there are no more missing fingers and garbled sentences, and AI-generated images and music and poetry and prose and film are completely indistinguishable from the best a human can produce, even to highly trained experts — even then, I think people would still keep saying they would rather experience art made by humans. And even in such a world, I don’t think they would be lying.
The pleasure of art is specifically related to the human mind on the other side of the product. When we’re told that the mind on the other side is a machine, many of us don’t want to engage anymore.
That loss of interest matters. It is consistent. It has happened before in the history of art.
Two hundred years ago, another new technology emerged that was capable of automating the technical skills many people at the time would have considered one of art’s fundamental functions: the camera. It could capture a likeness perfectly and very quickly, in a moment when almost all of visual arts were organized around capturing a likeness.
The camera changed the way paintings were produced and ultimately valued, but it did not replace the medium entirely — and the reasons why can help explain why AI-generated art won’t replace human-made art, either.
You can read Constance’s full story on the Vox site here.
