By Will Bennett
Publication Date: 2026-05-24 03:30:00
Last week an image was posted on social media with the caption: “I just created an image in the style of a Monet painting using AI. Please describe in as much detail as possible what makes this image inferior to a real Monet painting.”
Hundreds of people crowded together. “The depth and color choices are off,” wrote one. “It’s high school level art,” said another. “The mess of humanity is missing.” “It doesn’t look like a Monet.”
Of course, the painting was a real Monet – one of his most famous Water lilies.
The experiment — posted by an anonymous conceptual artist who uses the pseudonym @SHL0MS — reveals something more interesting than human gullibility: It shows how confused we have become about what art is and why it matters.
Studies consistently conclude that humans cannot distinguish AI-generated images from human images…
