The Soulless Masterpiece
Claude Monet spent the better part of a decade wading into a lily pond in Normandy, squinting at light, and producing what would become some of the most recognizable paintings in human history. He was nearly blind by the end. His cataracts had turned the world amber and grey, and yet he kept painting, adjusting his palette from memory and fury.
None of that, it turns out, matters particularly if you tell people the painting was made by a computer.
An artist going by SHLOMS recently posted a cropped Monet water lily painting on X with a simple label: “Made with AI.” Then he sat back and watched. The internet, which rarely passes up an opportunity to be confident about something it doesn’t fully understand, obliged magnificently. Commenters called it soulless. They noted its lack of depth. Several wrote lengthy analytical takedowns before discovering, to their quiet horror, that they had just spent considerable intellectual effort criticising a 150-year-old masterpiece. Most deleted their replies. A few, presumably, stared at the ceiling.
There is research supporting exactly this reaction. People demonstrably devalue art when told a machine made it. The label does the work before the eyes even focus.
Monet, who once described his garden at Giverny as his greatest work of art, would probably have found this very funny. Or possibly infuriating. He was not, by most accounts, a patient man.