AI-generated art – Even as studies show people often can’t reliably tell AI-made work from human-made, research and real-world examples suggest the bigger issue isn’t whether AI can produce convincing images and prose. It’s whether readers and viewers feel the presence of anothe
A story prize winner was supposed to be a test of taste and craft. Instead, it turned into a spotlight on a problem that won’t go away: whether the public can tell the difference between machine-made art and human work—and, more importantly, what they feel when they can’t.
Last month. the Commonwealth Foundation awarded its short story prize to “The Serpent in the Grove. ” a piece described as bearing “some of the hallmarks of AI-generated prose.” In a statement to New York magazine. the Commonwealth Foundation said the prize committee does not use AI checkers. but also that “all shortlisted writers have personally stated that no AI was used.”.
What makes the case feel almost tailor-made for the debate is how quickly the story’s surface can charm—and then betray. “The Serpent in the Grove” is described as riddled with metaphors that are rhythmic and evocative at first glance but fall apart when you try to figure out what they mean: “The girl smiled like sunrise over a sink”; “She had the kind of walking that made benches become men.” The point isn’t that the writing is dismissed out of hand. It’s that. in the reading experience laid out here. the mind behind the sentences becomes hard to locate—raising a question about whether art succeeds when the reader can’t clearly sense a human effort trying to communicate.
That instinct sits beside a different set of findings. The piece recounts that. as AI expands through daily life. there’s a recurring fear—or hope—that machines will take over art. The internet is full of quizzes where most lay people struggle to separate AI-generated art from the real thing: digital pictures of paintings. prose. and more. And multiple studies are described as finding that when people are shown AI-generated art and human-made art without being told which is which. they tend to prefer the AI-generated pieces—whether the work is images. poetry. or prose.
But one 2023 study adds tension to that picture. Participants were shown a series of images. each randomly labeled “AI-made” or “human-made.” In that setup. participants rated the images they believed were machine made as worse than the images they believed were created by a human artist—even when the images they thought were human-made were actually human-made.
From there. the argument in the piece shifts from “can people tell?” to “do they still want it?” It suggests that the results don’t necessarily reflect snobbery about human effort. Even if future systems became flawlessly indistinguishable from the best human work—fixing “persistent glitches” like missing fingers and garbled sentences. producing images. music. poetry. prose. and film with expert-level fidelity—the text argues people would still keep saying they prefer art made by humans.
The reasoning is rooted in how the pleasure of art is described as working. Art. the piece says. is tied to “the human mind on the other side of the product.” When people are told that the other mind is a machine. they may not want to engage in the same way. And that pattern isn’t new. It happened during earlier technological shifts that changed art’s relationship to reproduction.
Two hundred years ago. the camera arrived as a tool that could automate the technical skills many people treated as central to art’s function. The piece points to the way early visual arts were organized around capturing likeness—then contrasts that with what a camera could do: capture a likeness “perfectly and very quickly.” A major change followed. but the piece emphasizes that the camera did not replace the medium entirely.
It looks back to 19th-century Europe. where people often judged paintings by asking. “How closely does this match what I can see with my eyes?” Photorealism mattered. Richard Meyer—identified as a professor of art history and director of American studies at Stanford University—describes what viewers wanted from painters in that era as similar to what audiences expect from a good Hollywood movie: “You suspend your disbelief that you’re looking at a flat surface with pigment built up on it. and you fall into the fiction of. here are these beautiful bodies before you. or here is this landscape. or here’s this bowl of fruit.”.
Anju Lukose-Scott, a curator and master’s student at the University of Chicago, is described as explaining that artists could make a living painting affordable portraits, allowing people who weren’t aristocrats or nobility to commission a permanent record of their appearance.
When early versions of photography developed in the middle of the 19th century. the camera began to look like a replacement for skilled painters. The piece attributes a dark appraisal to French poet Charles Baudelaire in 1859. calling the new technology “art’s most mortal enemy.” It also points to philosopher Walter Benjamin’s fear by the 20th century that reproducing an old masterpiece on a postcard had eroded the work’s “unique aura.”.
The effects were harsh for craftspeople tied to portraiture. Lukose-Scott says, “Portraiture was a huge commercial business,” and that the camera made such work “nearly obsolete.” Some artists went out of business; others pivoted to making daguerreotypes for clients instead of paintings.
Yet the piece argues the impact on painting as fine art was different. Meyer is described as saying painters leaned into what cameras couldn’t do. Instead of trying to capture reality, they began to use colors and textures to convey emotions. The impressionist movement is described as deliberately showing brushstrokes—turning texture and paint into part of the artistic effect. Because photography was black-and-white, impressionists made vivid color more central, moving away from duplicating camera-recordable shapes and lines. The modern viewer. the piece says. finds value in the discrepancies between painting and reality—because they show a way of perceiving the world that photography cannot.
The piece also uses specific artwork to anchor those claims, including Claude Monet’s 1872 painting “Impressionism, Sunrise,” described as featuring expressive brushstrokes and “impossible physics,” which is said to have given the impressionists their name.
As painting changed, photography filled the trade portrait market and was considered a craft rather than art. Meyer says photography became taken seriously as its own medium not because of its ability to capture likeness—something that could be taken for granted—but because of what human choice created through the camera: what to shoot. how to frame. how to light it. and how to edit it.
That idea loops back to today, where almost everyone carries a camera in a smartphone. The piece argues that most people wouldn’t call quick, functional smartphone photos art, even if some can be. Creating art requires “intention and craft behind the machine.” And it adds a caution that AI could devalue smooth. readable text and pleasant visual compositions—threatening industries including journalism—without ending people’s concern about whether “a human being made a piece of art.”.
The most direct hinge in the piece comes from Meyer’s account of what portraiture was “about” when people paid for it. For those 19th-century portraits. Meyer says. “you’re going not so much for the individual expressive perspective of the artist but for a likeness. It’s really about oneself. the person portrayed. rather than the person portraying.” Fine art. he argues. is different: it’s about the artist and the way the artist sees the world.
That distinction underpins how the piece treats AI prompting and its appeal. It describes a familiar claim about the pleasure of prompting—watching “a stray thought become concrete” as a way of making a piece external. In that framing. AI prompts can look like the work is about the person prompting. like an “average hired portrait” that reflects the subject rather than an artist’s distinct view.
But the text draws a line when the work is about something else. If an image or text reflects you. the piece suggests you might not mind using soulless technology—it’s already interesting because it’s about you and for you. Yet when it’s about someone else, it feels different. The piece says people want “to connect with another person, not something mechanical.”.
For Lukose-Scott, that connection is unlikely with today’s large language models. She is quoted as saying that LLMs are trained on a corpus of existing art. and that “what’s retained in the invention of photography is a kind of artistic identity.” She argues that people use the technology through their own artistic voice. which “from my perspective is lacking in AI.” She further describes her “perception of AI art” as “just a self-gratifying loop. ” because it “is taking from what we already know. and it’s putting it back in the world.”.
The piece also raises the provenance issue around specific creative inspiration. describing a hypothetical act of using ChatGPT to generate a “Studio Gibliflied replication of their family snapshots.” It argues that such a use wouldn’t show a new kind of subjectivity; it would mimic subjectivity associated with Hayao Miyazaki without bringing Miyazaki’s intention or skill into the finished product. It also states that the model was trained on Miyazaki’s work “without his permission.” The piece adds a claim that unlike the camera. AI is built on a foundation of what it calls “intellectual theft.”.
Still, it doesn’t close the door entirely. The piece says it’s not impossible for an artist to use AI as a tool to produce new artistic ideas. in the same way an artist can use an iPhone camera as a tool to make art. It draws a difference between using a tool and relying on a system that can produce outputs that are “about and for you. ” arguing that context matters—especially when the goal is sharing an “embodied experience with the world.”.
It ends where it began, circling back to the core question it wants readers to feel: whether art made by machines leaves room for an actual encounter—another mind reaching back.
AI art human-made art Commonwealth Foundation The Serpent in the Grove Richard Meyer Anju Lukose-Scott camera and art history Walter Benjamin Charles Baudelaire Hayao Miyazaki ChatGPT