Hot take: Is AI art actually getting better or are we just getting used to it?

I remember looking at AI art from DALL-E 2 in 2022 and thinking the hands were a total mess. Now with Midjourney v6 and newer models, the details are way sharper but something still feels off to me. Is it legitimately improving or are our brains just learning to ignore the weird stuff? Curious if anyone else sees a real jump in quality or if it's all just polish.

2 comments

2 Comments

robinson.matthew1mo ago

Its all just polish" pretty much hits the nail on the head for me. I remember the DALL-E 2 hands too, yeah they were bad, but at least the stuff had this raw, weird charm to it. Now everything looks like a photorealistic rendering of something that doesn't actually exist - it's harder to put your finger on why it's wrong because the surface level is so clean. We're getting fooled by the lack of obvious mistakes, not by actual understanding of form or anatomy. It's like how a bad CGI monster in a movie from 2004 looked fake but you could tell what it was trying to be, while now you get these hyperreal AI images that just don't hold together if you look at them for more than a second. So yeah, I think we're just getting numb to the weirdness, not seeing real improvement.

craig.nathan1mo ago

Raw weird charm" is exactly what we lost. Back then you could laugh at the six fingered hands, now it's so close to real that the eyes just feel dead. Better polish doesn't mean better art, it just means harder to spot the cracks.