The AI Art Turing Test

One of these two pretty hillsides is by one of history’s greatest artists. The other is soulless AI slop. Can you tell which is which?

Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten:

Last month, I challenged 11,000 people to classify fifty pictures as either human art or AI-generated images.

I originally planned five human and five AI pictures in each of four styles: Renaissance, 19th Century, Abstract/Modern, and Digital, for a total of forty. After receiving many exceptionally good submissions from local AI artists, I fudged a little and made it fifty. The final set included paintings by Domenichino, Gauguin, Basquiat, and others, plus a host of digital artists and AI hobbyists.

1: Most People Had A Hard Time Identifying AI Art

Since there were two choices (human or AI), blind chance would produce a score of 50%, and perfect skill a score of 100%.

The median score on the test was 60%, only a little above chance. The mean was 60.6%. Participants said the task was harder than expected (median difficulty 4 on a 1-5 scale).

How meaningful is this? I tried to make the test as fair as possible by including only the best works from each category; on the human side, that meant taking prestigious works that had survived the test of time; on the AI side, it meant tossing the many submissions that had garbled text, misshapen hands, or some similar deformity. But this makes it unrepresentative of a world where many AI images will have these errors.

More here.

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