They said they wondered "why such a poor quality AI piece was hanging there without being labelled as AI"
Lol
this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2025
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What makes it low quality? I've seen some shittier hand painted art.
I get the objection to it being AI generated, but I can't place exactly what stood out as low quality...
Edit: the framing and creases in the print, not the image itself...
I think there's more low quality than just the basic print with all the wrinkles and creases in it. For once the head is "painted" realistically, the shirt is a slightly different style and then the hands and legs are yet another style. There's some obvious AI artifacts and it didn't fool people, seems they were able to tell.
And then with real art there's some layers to it. It'd have a deeper meaning, tell us something about the people depicted, or society at times or how they'd like to portray it. Or there's an entire interesting story about the artist, what kind of struggles they had... At least it'd invoke some astonishment in somebody. And I don't think there's any of that with this picture. That's just the "empty plate" in-your-face meaning. Some children don't have food. But doesn't seem to me, the picture in itself tells more to the audience, or makes them think about what the statement might be, wonder what it's trying to express, or make them question anything. And that'd be what turns art into art.
At least that's my take on the definition of quality in art. I mean people put a bathtub out there along with some butter and it's art. Or paint a canvas black and be done with it. On the other hand I can take a visually appealing photo of me with my smartphone and it wouldn't be art. So in this case I don't think quality is concerned with the visual aspect of it in the first place.
I hate the debate over "what is art". Honestly I think the best answer I could give to the question is "something that was ruined by a bunch of idiots asking 'what is art'".
That said, and not wanting to go into that discussion, calling this guy an "artist" seems like a mockery. He's not an artist, he's just some idiot with double sided tape.
I agree with the first part, disagree with the second.
Jackson Pollock was just some idiot with a paintbrush. John Cage was just some idiot with a piano when he wrote 4'33". "I could have done that." Sure, but they did. Having the concept and then executing it is as much of the art as the finished product.
Sure, but they did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disumbrationism
Disumbrationism was a hoax masquerading as an art movement that was launched in 1924 by Paul Jordan-Smith, a novelist, Latin scholar, and authority on Robert Burton from Los Angeles, California.
Annoyed at the cold reception his wife Sarah Bixby Smith's realistic still lifes had received from an art exhibition jury, Jordan-Smith sought revenge by styling himself as "Pavel Jerdanowitch" (Cyrillic: Па́вел Жердaнович), a variation on his own name. Never having picked up a paint brush in his life, he then painted Yes, we have no bananas, a blurry, badly painted picture of a Pacific islander woman holding a banana over her head, having just killed a man and putting his skull on a stick. In 1925, Smith entered the banana picture under a new title of Exaltation in New York's "Exhibition" of the Independents at the Waldorf-Astoria. He made a suitably dark and brooding photograph of himself as Jerdanowitch, and submitted the work to the same group of critics as representative of the new school "Disumbrationism". He explained Exaltation as a symbol of "breaking the shackles of womanhood".[1] To his amusement, if not to his surprise, the Disumbrationist daub won praise from the critics who had belittled his wife's realistic painting.
More Disumbrationist paintings followed: a composition of zig-zag lines and eyeballs he called Illumination; a garish picture of a black woman doing laundry that he called Aspiration, and which a critic praised as "a delightful jumble of Gauguin, Pop Hart and Negro minstrelsy, with a lot of Jerdanowitch individuality";[2]: 111 Gination, an ugly, lopsided portrait; and a painting named Adoration, of a woman worshipping an immense phallic idol, which was exhibited in 1927.
https://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/the_disumbrationist_school_of_art/
Jordan-Smith did too, though, and his work doesn't qualify. I think that one has to both do and maintain a straight face for the rest of one's life.
Those artists at least had a recognizable and identifiable style. It was easy to mimic yes, but they became icons for the identifiable style. If Altman snuck this in to the museum I'd give him some credit for it I suppose, but the style already exists and isn't novel or identiable to a particular artist. Other people have snuck crap into museums too. There's no novelty or creativity or unique iconic style here. It's just sludge.
And here we are talking about it.
If I take my pants off and walk down the street people will talk about me. Seems like a low bar.
If.
Yeah, it's called performance art. You're not wrong in disliking it as slop, but the barrier for what is art is empirically low.
Last time I did it the cops didn't take that excuse. You'd think doing it near a school would make it obvious it was an artistic performance too.
Artists have often gotten caught in trouble with the law, many justifiably so for having done generally bad things, still artists though
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Except this is missing the executing part. Prompting isn't work.
You're missing it. It got sneaked into a museum and hung on the wall. That's an extremely important part of it.
Indeed, the art is the reverse heist.
Jokes on you, putting up bullshit in an art gallery is a classic art move.
Elias Marrow
Prompt jockey not artist.
Is it performative art now. art is so confusing
Yeah it’s the framing it and putting it up that’s the “art”, in this context, I reckon. Which is why he wanted to reframe “vandalism” as “participation”.
"art" in general is just as dumb as AI. People don't want to hear this, but a painting isn't worth 120 million dollars. I was once at an art show that had some amazing looking pieces. But at the same time there was a guy on stage who had. A bowl of spaghetti on a chair and he flipped the chair over and yelled: "hazzaa" and people clapped and talked about how provocative and great it was. One of my favourite museums has this huge painting that is just blue. Even when i was a child, i asked the museum guy what the point was, because everyone could do that. He was pretty defensive and explained that first of all, you can't just buy a canvas that big. Okay... Got it. Then he kept going: see, the artist didn't just paint it blue, he painted it many shades of blue until it was perfect. Okay... Got that too, but it wasn't even "perfect" it was kinda shitty. Of course that was the point, it had to look exactly like that. Ah got it, that makes it worth millions of dollars i guess.
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The one time AI generated material can count as actual art. But not for the reasons the person putting it up in the museum thinks.
Unsurprisingly, it's crap.
wow, it seems like it's printed on printer quality paper. really amplifies how those who use AI for "art" don't give a flying fuck about art
Would have been far more interesting as an experiment if he had done a better job on better media. Doesn't usually look so hot, but printing on canvas isn't some rare thing.
How long would it have stayed up? How would people react?
never mind a canvas, if the guy cared in the slightest about the "art" AI made he'd at least print it on poster paper
this experiment shows how even the "artists" just do not care about those images, and why would they? why would any of us care?
this shows exactly the core of the issue - every piece of art made by a human, no matter how good or bad (whatever that means), is a reflection of the artist. Sometimes they pour their entire soul into a piece, sometimes just a small part of them, but it's always a reflection of them. So the artist will care about what they've made because it's their own self, in a way. And others will care about it too, because we crave to get to know others, understand them, see the world how they see it - and art allows us to glimpse just that.
AI slop elicits none of those emotions, there is no artist to care about, no reflection of the self, no worldview to glimpse, no way of caring about it, nothing – even if it was you who wrote the prompt, you just can't bring yourself to give a shit
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Or quality.
Marrow was interested in "how public institutions decide what's worth showing, and what happens when something outside that system appears within it".
Wanky pretentious edgelord crap. It's obvious what happens when you put up a shit AI-generated poster in a museum without permission. Someone asks the staff why there's a shit AI-generated poster on the wall and they take it down. Other artists have done the "sneaking something into a gallery" thing way better than this many times before.
Sure, Art is supposed to make you think and react. But art that makes you think "wow that guy completely failed at every aspect of this" is of no value. The true scandal isn't that he did it, it's that some dumbfuck at the BBC thought it was worth reporting on.
And, tbh, it doesn't even matter in this case that this was AI generated. If anyone snuck any worthless piece of crap painting into a into a museum without permission it would be removed. AI only contributed to this by making it even more low-effort.
Comments are wild. Amazes me how much of the tech world is completely oblivious to the fact that art is interesting precisely because of the context and people involved.
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Marrow was interested in “how public institutions decide what’s worth showing, and what happens when something outside that system appears within it”.
He said using artificial intelligence to create it was “part of the natural evolution of artistic tools”, adding he sketched the image before he used AI.
“AI is here to stay, to gatekeep its capability would be against the beliefs I hold dear about art,” he said.
[…]
The artist, who said similar stunts he had carried out at Bristol Museum and Tate Modern were not “approved, sanctioned, or acknowledged”, denied it was vandalism.
“The work isn’t about disruption. It’s about participation without permission,” he said.
“I’m not asking permission, but I’m not causing harm either.”
It’s like the same “logic” AI companies use when they take copyrighted content without permission: claim you’re not causing harm so you don’t need permission. They don’t see the harm, so from their perspective it’s fine, even if the creator doesn’t want them taking their work.
Railing at the institution as being gatekeepers might reveal the flaw in their logic. People or institutions are entitled to decide what belongs in their collection and what does not. Random outsiders are not entitled to be a part of that collection. They can be invited in if the curators are interested in their work, but the curators are generally not required to add them just because they’ve made something. The artist can create their own collection and invite others to be a part of it, but they’re not entitled to be in anyone’s collection. They also can’t just go and take something from someone else’s collection without permission, and even taking a photo of someone else’s work and placing it in their collection would at the very least be bad form. The other artist is just as entitled to decide where they do or don’t want their work displayed.
With encryption and encryption backdoors I often use the illustration that I put a lock on the door of my house, not because I have something to hide, but because I have things valuable to me that I want to protect. Just because I have nothing to hide, it doesn’t mean I give the police a key to my house or let them add their own lock to my door. I wouldn’t want to come home one day and discover a random policeman had let himself in and was making copies of all my documents and photos just to make sure I wasn’t doing something bad. I’d be even more upset if I came home and discovered a policeman from another country had let himself in because he’d gotten a copy of the same key, or a thief was doing the same because he’d gotten a copy of the key.
Building off that illustration, I might have a collection of art in my house. This guy is not entitled to come into my house and look at my art, nor is he entitled to come into my house and put a picture on an empty space on my wall just because he thinks it should be there. Railing against gatekeepers keeping his slop out to me seems as ridiculous as him being mad that I won’t open my door and let him put a picture on my wall. He might not be damaging my walls, but just forcing his way in against my wishes is something I would view as harmful.
Headline should be: Person sneaks example of vagrant copyright infringement on a scale not previously seen into National Museum Cardiff gallery.
Lol, that print has more creases on it than a homework assignment that's spent all day in my backpack
An artist sneaked an AI-generated print on to a gallery wall (...)
Isn't it "snuck", and not "sneaked"?
Anyhow, I'd agree with both parties: AI generated art can be considered a form of art, but not in the same league. Just like you have people who perform sports with "artificial enhancers" are separated from the naturals.
Sneaked is the traditional form as the past tense of a regular verb, dating back to at least the 1500s, whereas snuck only appeared as an irregular form in the 1800s and it’s not clear why. It’s very unusual for a regular verb to become irregular. Snuck is more common in US English than British English, although sneaked and snuck appear in both variants. Sneaked would seem more correct especially for British English.
It feels like “snaked” to “snook” but you haven’t book a cake. I say that but now I’m imagining it arriving right on time
Snucked
Snook
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Maybe i got trained through time, but the image says AI everywhere to me.
The book title and the school insignia give it away, (also one ear is bigger than then other, but that could have been an artistic choice).
Apart from there I can't tell. A bit of digital touch up and I would be absolutely unable to tell.
I feel that other ppl are better at spotting AI than I.
Could be performance art. But people did that before. Sneak into a museum and put something up. So it's not an original idea.
"The work isn't about disruption. It's about participation without permission," he said.
And I think the "without permission" holds true on several levels. I mean on the one hand they just put it up. And doing it with AI adds another level on top. I mean the AI companies are known for not asking for permission when they train their generative AI models. But I don't see this being discussed in the article. It'd probably be the only thing turning this into some form of art. An AI picture in itself certainly isn't art. Also like how the paper is wrinkled and it doesn't look good at all and "empty plate" is just a shallow in your face meaning and even I can tell how there isn't any art or deeper meaning to it. And most people I know who are close to art, and they're musicians or properly draw stuff as a hobby aren't really pro AI, I don't think I've ever seen them use AI or mix it into their works.
Tom Greene did it much better on his show.
Just put a weapon on the plate and it could almost be a Banksy.
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