AI is ruining reference images.
Am I surprised?
No.
Am I annoyed.
Yep.
I'm leaning back into my impressionist style for my current series of paintings so I wanted to go back and look over the works of the old masters. Specifically, I wanted to find some seascapes, preferably one with a lighthouse. The impressionists were quite the busy bunch. Surely a few of them must have painted one. Ideally I had hoped to find some from a few different painters that I could analyze and compare.
So I type in my search query, and get back pages and pages of slop, including one image claiming to be a Monet painting- not "in the style of"- claiming to actually be Monet's-- painting of a lighthouse in Ireland.
And to be fair it did look sort of look like something Monet may have painted, if you squinted your eyes a little and Monet had painted with magic markers. The color palette was completely wrong, made up entirely of jarring primary hues instead of the gentle pastels Monet was known for
Then, of course, there were all the folks who thought they were clever for slopping a lighthouse into weak imitations of "Starry Night', each more absurd looking than the last.
And the rest were just bad, the lighting was off, the paint strokes didn't make sense, the compositions were odd.
Granted, my compositions are also weird, but at least mine are weird for a reason. These were just sort of a jumbled junkyard of...stuff
Most of them weren't even in the right style to be considered impressionism. They were just sort of blurry.
Later I did another search from my laptop in a different browser, and the results were better, but not by much. I got lots of ads for sort of close digital art that online sales platforms helpfully told me were available in between the buckets of slop, but still no old masters.
Then just as I was about to give up I discovered something wonderful.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir has a great grandson named Alexandre Renoir who is alive and well and making art in our modern times.
And darned if that doesn't make me think that we just might be a little more ok than we'd be otherwise.
Since Alexandre Renoir is a living working artist his work is currently protected by copyright- as it should be-- so I can't share it here, however, his great-grandfather's is now in the public domain so I here is one of his instead.
Image Credit
Fort Carre et Phare d'Antibes Pierre-Auguste Renoir oil on canvas 1916 courtesy of wikimedia commons public domain