The internet was certain: the painting lacked “coherent composition,” the colors were an “incoherent muddle of inconsistently saturated greens.” Commenters piled on with extraordinary confidence, picking apart what they believed was an obvious AI-generated knockoff of Claude Monet. One person even wrote an over 700-word breakdown of the supposed fake’s shortcomings. There was just one problem: it was a real Monet.
The experiment, which went viral on X last week, was set up by an anonymous conceptual artist who goes by the pseudonym @SHL0MS. He posted a cropped image of an authentic Monet Water Lilies painting—created around 1915 and currently hanging in the Neue Pinakothek museum in Munich, Germany—with the caption: “I just generated an image in the style of a Monet painting using AI. Please describe, in as much detail as possible, what makes this inferior to a real Monet painting.” He even affixed X’s official “Made with AI” label to add to the deception.
