It’s easy to be smug about AI “art” because, hey, doesn’t that stuff look like garbage? But the reality isn’t so simple. To the untrained eye, it seems that AI-generated images are more than just passable; in some cases, they seem to match up to the old masters themselves. That at least appears to be the findings of a recent blind test conducted by the blog Astral Star Codex, which found that the readers who took part incorrectly distinguished between AI images and human art 40 percent of the time. But perhaps the most striking takeaway was that overall, the participants slightly preferred the AI creations to human ones, with six of the top ten most-liked images being AI-generated, and the top two slots going to the AI paintings. This preference was even the case among participants who identified as having a profound distaste for AI illustrations — perhaps demonstrating the unnerving capabilities of the technology. For the record, this was not a scientifically conducted test. But with 11,000 participants, it’s big enough to be interesting. Via an online survey, respondents were asked to look through fifty curated images that had no accompanying details, and on each, opine whether they were human or AI. The ending included additional questions asking to explain certain decisions, expand on participants’ familiarity with art, and other relevant inquiries. The blog’s selection of images, meanwhile, was wide-ranging, including numerous classicist and impressionist paintings, a host of contemporary digital art, and AI facsimiles of all of…Even People Who Hate AI Art Appear to Actually Prefer AI Art in a Blind Test