On Tech Source PetaPixel.com May 2026
Someone Shared a Real Monet Painting as AI and Asked for Critiques
A fascinating art social experiment unfolded on social media this week after someone shared an actual Monet painting as an AI-generated artwork and asked people to explain what makes the “AI image” inferior to a genuine Monet piece. There was no shortage of “sharp-eyed” critics eager to chime in.
It all started after X user @SHL0MS posted the painting and wrote: “I just generated an image in the style of a Monet painting using AI. Please describe, in as much detail as possible, what makes this inferior to a real Monet painting.”
The fellow who started everything on Twitter admittedly lied about the art’s provenance, but he demonstrated something I’ve been sensing for some time. People, generally speaking, are biased against AI art. I felt this same bias when I was learning CGI art in Blender. People would look at an image and say it was beautiful, but when they found out it was CGI, they would immediately find something to critique—and often the thing they critiqued didn’t make any sense. I remember a similar thing when digital photography was starting to take off.
However, I can say the distaste for AI art is some of the most viscerally felt. I think there are a few reasons for this. First, AI art is putting people out of work at a much faster rate than the previous technologies I mentioned ever did. Second, AI art stepped forth into the sun, blinking, long before it was ready. Early AI art was simply awful. I’ll leave it at that to avoid pulling my punches (I thought about giving you eight reasons and counting them on one hand). Digital photography and CGI were immature when they were first used, but not like AI art was. Third, many people making AI art seem to fancy themselves proper artists on that account. But AI art is less work than most forms of art, and so artists in more traditional forms feel that their hard work is being undervalued (and it often is).
Another interesting thing I’ve noticed is that people’s aversion to AI art extends to anything that looks like it might be even remotely AI art. That is to say, if the major AI models focus on and lean into a given style, that style becomes toxic and even traditional art in that style is often given the ol’ side-eye. Right now, we’re in a phase where seemingly only smartphone photography (with no depth of field, compressed dynamic range, and a particular kind of denoised cleanness) is considered ‘realistic,’ with digital photos shot on mirrorless and DSLRs being thought of as fake and AI or AI-adjacent.
But at the root of all the nonsense in the X replies is the simple fact that experienced artists and designers see differently from the uninitiated. They don’t just look at bad art and say that it is bad; they can tell you how it is bad. They can do this because they put in years of blood, sweat, and tears making things that were bad and learning how to make them better. They know what’s wrong because they’ve made the mistake before (or one like it) and we can see it.
To be clear, what’s embarrassing is that these people are confidently critiquing one of the greatest painters in human history, while at the same time demonstrating to no uncertain degree, why they are precisely the kinds of ignoramuses of which the Internet seems to be a factory. A big part of why AI art is bad is that the people using it can’t see what’s bad about it. That’s evidently also at least partially true of the people who hate it.
I’ll be taking this as a reminder to value and honor the ninth commandment by not speaking confidently to matters about which we know nothing, and I suggest you do the same. Bring receipts everywhere, even if only because it can be embarrassing to be caught without them.