Fellow Artists, I’m Begging You to Pull Your Heads Out of the Sand About AI
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Fellow Artists, I’m Begging You to Pull Your Heads Out of the Sand About AI<br>I'm sorry, but it's not going away
funplings<br>May 14, 2026
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Monet, Claude. Water Lilies. 1915, Oil on canvas.<br>Earlier this week, a Twitter user (@SHL0MS1) posted the following:
𒐪@SHL0MS
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
7:20 PM · May 12, 2026 · 1.05M Views
616 Replies · 176 Reposts · 2.46K Likes
Some sample responses from the comments:<br>the reflection in AI art is just noise splattered right. monet actually understood how light behaves on water
no frame, no sense of the threshold between subject and object, just colors
Depth, contrast, and cohesion are the most obvious. There’s also no clear focal point.
Sure. It feels less lively. It lacks the texture, the rugged edges, the folds, the crevices and creases and bevels and topology of plastic arts. The fine, calculated highlights. The AI version is granulated pixelation, and it looks that way, it lacks the mess of humanity.
The punchline: it’s not AI generated. It’s a real Monet! (Specifically from his Water Lilies series; this particular one was painted in 1915 and is currently in Neue Pinakothek, Munich).<br>Of course, many commenters deleted their replies in embarrassment. Some insisted that the crop, digitization, lack of context, etc. made it tangibly different from the original, physical painting, so their critiques were still valid. A few even went as far as to say that even if it was a real Monet, it was an “inferior” Monet, anyways.<br>I’m no Monet expert. I didn’t comment at the time so you’ll just have to take my word for it, but my immediate gut reaction upon seeing the post was: wow, AI art’s really gotten good, I can’t really tell the difference between this and a real Monet at all. And clearly, that was the case for many, many other people as well.<br>Look, I’m an artist. Not professionally; it’s not my livelihood, which is probably why I’m able to comment on this from more of a distance than the working artists I see online and that I know in real life. But I’ve been drawing and painting since I was a child, and it’s one of my great joys in life, so I’m definitely emotionally invested in Art. And as an artist, I have to say… guys, you need to get your heads out of the sand .<br>AI art is Good now. Good in the technical sense, in the sense that a well-generated image will be able to fool 99% of people who see it—even discerning artists. Attempting to identify the “tells” of AI art has been a rapidly accelerating arms race: first it was hands (which, I’ll note, is something human artists infamously struggle with as well!). Then it was text. Then it was the piss-yellow filter. Like whack-a-mole, when one obvious flaw was fixed, another one would make itself known. But it looks like we’re finally running out of moles.
AI artists… you gotta hand it to them.
Another (actual) piece of AI art was making the rounds the other day. It was an AI-generated animated short created with a tool by Runway:<br>@runwayml in a few hours and a handful of gens. ","username":"Markoslavnic","name":"Marko Slavnic","profile_image_url":"https://pbs.substack.com/profile_images/2053726526818910208/wIA2Y3NQ_normal.jpg","date":"2026-05-08T17:07:27.000Z","photos":[{"img_url":"https://substackcdn.com/image/upload/w_1028,c_limit,q_auto:best/l_twitter_play_button_rvaygk,w_88/dytlo4u1sxqr2v2imoaa","link_url":"https://t.co/ksrfXtTQnq"}],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":845,"retweet_count":1196,"like_count":14752,"impression_count":6614312,"expanded_url":null,"video_url":"https://video.twimg.com/amplify_video/2052796427307266053/vid/avc1/1280x720/zgsX-5Dx0VbsYH5V.mp4","belowTheFold":true}" class="pencraft pc-display-flex pc-flexDirection-column pc-gap-12 pc-padding-16 pc-reset bg-primary-zk6FDl outline-detail-vcQLyr pc-borderRadius-md sizing-border-box-DggLA4 pressable-lg-kV7yq8 font-text-qe4AeH tweet-fWkQfo twitter-embed">
Marko Slavnic@Markoslavnic
The quality of animation you can create on your own is truly amazing. We really are just limited by our imaginations at this point. Go tell your story!
Made in @runwayml in a few hours and a handful of gens.
5:07 PM · May 8, 2026 · 6.61M Views
845 Replies · 1.2K Reposts · 14.8K Likes
My personal opinion of the short: it’s fine. The visuals are on the level of a low-tier Dreamworks or Illumination film. The story/writing is aggressively mediocre. The voices still clearly carry that uncanny valley, flattened AI affect.<br>But nonetheless: holy crap. Remember when AI video used to look like this?
You think I care about Lunch #2?<br>Gone are those days. Yet in the comments and quote tweets, this is what I see:<br>These suckers still think “typing words into ai to generate is them “making” anything
Looks like shit...