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.
A catalog of confident wrongness
The replies did not disappoint. Commenters ripped apart the depth and color choice, the lack of depth or contrast. One even declared the image “cluttered slop” that “doesn’t look anywhere near like a Monet” and achieves “like 20% of it.” That’s since been deleted—as have multiple comments once the reveal landed, but screenshots were preserved by other users before they disappeared.
