Allen but one of the bad ones, woooo on Nostr: That AI picture that won the art competition and whose prompter is now moaning about ...

That AI picture that won the art competition and whose prompter is now moaning about how he gets no copyright protections:

That odd thing with the dramatic lighting, and there's some architecture in the background but the Moon is embedded in it for some reason?

It's a classic example of how, while art rewards you the more you engage with it and gives more back the longer you look at it, AI pictures are the opposite. The more you look at this thing, the more you study the details, the more it falls apart.

First impression is "Woah, impact, much contrast, very colour, some sort of sci-fi hall with people in dramatic poses" but as you look longer... nothing. The people are just blobs. The architecture is... like upside down or something? It's got none of the usual tells, like too many hands or mystery non-writing, but nevertheless it's just... blobs of imagery that briefly fool the brain into thinking it's seeing something profound.

Here's another way to describe what's going on: You know how with music, certain chords and keys are associated with certain emotional responses? Like major keys make for great anthems, victory parades, happy positive assertive stuff, while minor chords are a bit more melancholic, a bit more conflicted, great for love songs or complex emotional situations. If you're not familiar with this, watch literally any one of Bill Bailey's standup routines, explaining this is a standard part of his act.

A skilled composer can build a piece of music using purely those emotional building blocks to create a powerful cinematic soundtrack for a movie trailer or fight scene or something. But if you take that music out of context and just try to listen to it *as music*, it's often kinda flat and boring because there's nothing actually there, it's just a sequence of emotional triggers that don't add up to anything.

I think the AI pictures are doing something similar with pictures. It's learned to blend visual blobs in a way that triggers an initial emotional response in humans, without actually being anything. And that's why they so often give a great first impression, where people are astounded by what the soulless machine produced, but it turns out you can't sell the stuff (except maybe to idiot Art Investor types trying to Diversify Their Portfolio. These people are perfect because they don't look at art, they store it securely in a safe somewhere) because the illusion never lasts more than about 60 seconds when your brain starts to actually process what it's looking at.