From 28 September 2023 until 7 January 2024 you can go to the Van Gogh museum to look at the new “Pokémon in het Van Gogh Museum” collection. These are paintings that are inspired by the old famous van Gogh paintings, but they placed Pokémon in the famous paintings. When I saw this it reminded me of the examples of generative AI that were shown during the lectures of Information Strategy where images were created by a simple prompt. I instantly asked myself: “Could these be AI generated?”. The prompt seemed pretty obvious to me e.g. “Pickachu from Pokémon in a painting in van Gogh style” . Under this textbox one of the paintings that is currently to see in the museum is compared to van Gogh’s “Zelfportet met grijze vilthoed”.
I understand that a museum would not show Ai generated images in their museum, but why would they not if nobody would notice. This got me thinking and made me curious to try out some prompts myself. Therefore, I picked out some paintings that I AI generated using Canva in 5 to 10 minutes. Let’s see if you can guess which two are real and which two are fake.
I assume that you at least got one correct since I generated these in 5 to 10 minutes, but I’m curious to see if you noticed that three of these pictures are AI generated or that you believed me that two of these are actually real. I think it is safe to say that you noticed that B was real, but let me know down in the comments if you believed that D or maybe A and C were real!
Canva is a free service which was fine for this blog post, but imagine if you used a payed version of generative AI that makes images or maybe even the best generative AI for images out there. I’m really curious if that generative AI would make exact replicas or kinda sketchy looking ones like the ones that I made.
I am really curious what you think of generative AI that makes pictures and if you think that in the future maybe generative AI will do it even better than real artists. Let me know in the comments and be honest if you thought that two out of the four example pictures were made by generative AI 😉
References
Pokémon in het Van Gogh Museum. (n.d.). Van Gogh Museum. https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/nl/van-gogh-museum-x-pokemon
Thanks for this very intriguing post. When I first saw this one-of-a-kind collection by Van Gogh via the news, it really attracted me already. I had the same kind of thought when hearing about it: ‘Did they maybe generate this with a bit of help from AI?’. When looking at the pictures you created, I really thought that only A would be the ‘fake’ one, the others look so good and similar to the Van Gogh style. It fascinates me to see what can be done in under 10 minutes, just by using AI and (free!!) Canva. There is so much more hidden potential that we will see coming up the next years. Really exciting 🙂
Very creative post! With the current hype around the Pokémon cards that are handed out by the Van Gogh Museum, this puts an interesting perspective on it. Perhaps because I already saw the displayed artworks, I could immediately tell which one was real or fake. While I can see that the AI generator tried to emulate Van Gogh’s art style, picture D is a bit less convincing than the other ones. This might be as you said because of the free AI generator on Canvas. Overall, really an enjoyable post to read!