{"id":449016,"date":"2026-05-19T07:32:10","date_gmt":"2026-05-19T07:32:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/449016\/"},"modified":"2026-05-19T07:32:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-19T07:32:10","slug":"6-7-million-people-thought-they-were-ripping-apart-an-ai-generated-monet-painting-but-it-was-real","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/449016\/","title":{"rendered":"6.7 million people thought they were ripping apart an AI-generated Monet painting. But it was real"},"content":{"rendered":"

The internet was certain: the painting lacked \u201ccoherent composition,\u201d the colors were an \u201cincoherent muddle of inconsistently saturated greens.\u201d Commenters piled on<\/a> with extraordinary confidence, picking apart what they believed was an obvious AI-generated knockoff of Claude Monet. One person even wrote an over 700-word breakdown<\/a> of the supposed fake\u2019s shortcomings. There was just one problem: it was a real Monet.<\/p>\n

The experiment, which went viral on X last week<\/a>, was set up by an anonymous conceptual artist who goes by the pseudonym @SHL0MS. He posted a cropped image of an authentic Monet\u00a0Water Lilies\u00a0painting\u2014created around 1915 and currently hanging in the Neue Pinakothek<\/a> museum in Munich, Germany\u2014with the caption: \u201cI 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.\u201d He even affixed X\u2019s official \u201cMade with AI\u201d label to add to the deception.<\/p>\n

A catalog of confident wrongness<\/p>\n

The replies did not disappoint. Commenters ripped apart the depth and color choice, the lack of depth or contrast. One even declared the image \u201ccluttered slop<\/a>\u201d that \u201cdoesn\u2019t look anywhere near like a Monet\u201d and achieves \u201clike 20% of it.\u201d That\u2019s since been deleted\u2014as have multiple comments once the reveal landed, but screenshots were preserved by other users before they disappeared.<\/p>\n

Not everyone was fooled<\/a>. Oil painter Kendric Tonn pushed back<\/a> in real time: \u201cDisagree with the people saying it lacks depth \u2014 there\u2019s a clear plane with the lily pads and an inverted space with the willow reflecting. Paint texture looks pretty believable as a physical object, though thinner than most Monets I\u2019ve seen \u2026 It\u2019s not a top-tier Monet, but it\u2019s a very credible Monet.\u201d <\/p>\n

Art historian A.V. Marraccini was more direct<\/a>: \u201cWhat the f*ck dude this is a detail from an actual late Monet? You can tell because the brush strokes are super similar to the Agapanthus in MOMA. Late ones always have that kind of wild impasto.\u201d<\/p>\n

The results, embarrassing as they were for individual commenters, are consistent with what researchers have found about how context shapes artistic perception. A 2024 study published in\u00a0Nature<\/a>\u00a0found that while participants generally preferred AI-generated artworks over human-made ones when they didn\u2019t know the source, they significantly downgraded the same works after being told AI produced them. \u201cParticipants were unable to consistently distinguish between human and AI-created images,\u201d wrote researchers Simone Grassini and Mika Koivisto, adding that people \u201cdisplayed a negative bias against AI-generated artworks when subjective perception of source attribution was considered.\u201d <\/p>\n

The 2004 Kruger \u201ceffort heuristic<\/a>\u201d study similarly found that people value art more when they believe it required significant human effort to create.<\/p>\n

The great cultural critic Susan Sontag, writing in 1964, argued that \u201ccamp\u201d is defined by \u201clove of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.\u201d It\u2019s a sensibility, she argued, that prizes the knowing, self-conscious gesture over the genuine one. What happened to Monet\u2019s painting online was camp turned inside out: a crowd so trained to detect artifice that it could no longer recognize the genuine article when it appeared.<\/p>\n

In short: people weren\u2019t seeing the painting. They were seeing a label.<\/p>\n

LinkedIn<\/a> commentator Fabio Ciucci drew a broad lesson: \u201cWhile too many believe fake AI images to be real, the contrary is also true: too many people believe a real image is an AI fake if told so.\u201d Most people\u2019s judgment about whether something is or isn\u2019t AI is wrong and biased by its source. <\/p>\n

It seems to confirm what AI researcher Vivienne Ming told Fortune recently<\/a>: \u201cMost of our fears about AI are fears about other people.\u201d<\/p>\n

For this story,\u00a0Fortune\u00a0journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.<\/p>\n