A screen flashes up another image. The man in the examination chair stares intently at. A minute goes by, then two. Finally he reaches a tentative hand towards one of two buttons in front of him, the one labelled, "Not AI." A moments hesitation, and then he presses down. The room explodes with simulated confetti and the noise of horns blowing. A large badge appears on the screen, reading, "You have scored 58% accuracy in Art Appreciation! Congratulations, you are now a certified Art Critic!"

This is how humans now look at art. They look at a piece that catches their eye, and 100% of their attention is focused on the question, "is it real?" Questions of beauty or affect hardly enter their calculations. Their focus is on subtle shifts in perspective or scale, in the minute details of hands or feet.

God knows what they would make of a Rubin.

You might think the worst part is when they mistakenly dismiss a real artist's work, the labor of hours and culmination of frenzied dreams, after a single glance at it on the most spurious grounds. Or you might think it's the downstream effect of all these false positives, as artists intentionally avoid anything that might be interpreted as AI generated and thereby put themselves in a box inimical to creativity and free expression. While those things are bad, they aren't the worse part.

No, the worse part is when the viewer is done with their judgment, when they have decided that the piece is "real art." Because that is when they turn away, their job done, their curiosity satisfied. They have passed the test, they have solved the puzzle. Now they can return their attention to more interesting tasks, such as scrolling through an endless river of content. On to the next image. Oh wait—is that one AI? Engaged in an endless loop of simple binary discernment, there is no need to sit with the art, to let it works its subtle magic on our emotional affect, to question how we feel and why. Such things are simply not needed for the all-important business of classifying.

We can no longer see art.

We can no longer engage with it in any meaningful way.

50,000 years of humans expressing themselves through art is now over.

AI art, as worthlessness as it is, has somehow won the day; and worse, has somehow managed to drag all art into the gutter with in. The mere possibility that art might be AI generated is always there, the AI or Not classification process that we've trained our brains to perform is always running in the background, always that little voice of doubt in the back of our minds, always pulling us away slightly from what's in front of us.

Even you, reading this now, are wondering, "did ChatGPT write this? It's kind of a generic anti-AI screed, but the style is kinda different... Ah look! There's an em dash! Got-'em! Or maybe he's just one of those typography nerds..." But you'll never know for sure, and by the time you've made up your mind you'll have already forgotten the message. Oh well. On to the next post.