What Really Moves Us
A pencil drawing of a bolt that looks like a photo only amazes you once you know it was drawn by hand. With AI, a result can no longer prove the process behind it.
This article was originally written in my native language, Japanese, and has been translated into English by AI. You can read the original Japanese version here.
There is a pencil drawing of a bolt and a nut. However you look at it, it looks like a photograph. It was drawn by the Japanese pencil artist Kohei Ohmori, and it reportedly took him about 280 hours.
If you look at it thinking it’s a photo, nothing happens. It’s just a photo of a bolt. The moment you learn it was drawn in pencil, you’re amazed.
What reaches your eyes is the same either way. So what is it that actually moves us?
Being Moved Has Two Sides
I think being moved has two sides: result and process, or value and cost.
The finished thing is beautiful, useful, or new. That is being moved by the value of the result. But we are also moved by the process and the cost, by how much time and skill went into it.
Usually we don’t separate the two. We’re moved by both at once, mixed together. The amazement at the pencil drawing is made up almost entirely of the second kind.
Mistaking Cost for Value
People have a habit here. It’s the fallacy of treating cost as value. We feel that the more expensive thing must be the better one.
In 2008, Hilke Plassmann and her colleagues at Caltech ran an experiment in which people tasted the same wine under different price tags. The higher the price tag they saw, the better they said it tasted. It wasn’t just what they said. Activity in a brain region linked to pleasantness went up too.
Time works the same way. In a 2004 study of the “effort heuristic” by Justin Kruger and his colleagues, people who were told a poem took 18 hours to write rated it higher than people who were told it took 4 hours. In another experiment, using pictures of medieval armor, the effect grew stronger when the pictures were blurry and the quality was hard to judge. The harder it is to see quality, the more people measure value by the effort that went in.
Cost can be a clue to value. But it isn’t value itself.
Still, Before AI, It Was Mostly Right
For a long time, though, this fallacy did little harm.
To draw a detailed picture, you needed years of practice and long hours of work. Behind an impressive result, there was effort and skill. How impressive the result was and how impressive its maker was almost always overlapped.
So when you looked at a result and were moved by the process, you were usually not wrong. It was a fallacy, but as a clue it was usually right.
Results No Longer Prove the Process
AI has pulled that overlap apart.
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In 2022, the picture that won first place in the digital art category for emerging artists at the Colorado State Fair was based on an image made with the image-generating AI Midjourney. The judges said they hadn’t known AI was used. Even experts whose job is to look at art couldn’t see the process in the result. The judges also said they would have given it first place even if they had known. Being moved by the result stood on the result alone.
The opposite happens too. In a study published in 2023, Lucas Bellaiche and his colleagues took paintings that were all made by AI, randomly labeled them “human-made” or “AI-made,” and asked people to rate them. People preferred the ones labeled human-made, and how much effort they perceived played a part. We think we’re looking at the result, but we’re looking at the process we imagine behind it.
I once wrote that no one but the author can verify whether AI was used.
If it can’t be verified, then a result is no longer evidence of its process.
“Judge It Without Seeing It” Doesn’t Work
That makes things simple. If you want your process to be valued, you have to show the process too.
Hand drawings that look exactly like photos have had this problem for a long time. A drawing that looks just like a photo can’t be told apart from a photo by the result alone. Saying “I drew this in pencil” doesn’t guarantee that people will believe you. Ohmori shares his drawing process on YouTube. Only when you watch his hand at work do the 280 hours start to carry their weight.
This used to be true only in a few fields. AI has spread it to every field.
“Judge it without seeing it” doesn’t work. You can no longer show only the result and say, “This isn’t AI, so give me credit for it.” A process you haven’t shown is, for the viewer, the same as a process that doesn’t exist.
When Result and Process Can’t Be Separated
Some things, on the other hand, don’t need their process shown. These are things where the process itself is the result.
Sports are one. Cars are far faster than people, yet the 100-meter dash hasn’t disappeared. It means something because a person runs it on their own legs. However far AI and robots advance, and however much stronger than humans they become, people can’t enjoy watching them do it.
Shogi, often called Japanese chess, is another. In the 2017 Denou-sen, a match series between professional players and computer programs, the shogi program Ponanza beat Amahiko Sato, then holder of the Meijin title, twice in a row. Years later, shogi is still a human competition, and being a professional shogi player is still a profession.
In sports and shogi, both the result and the process mean something, and the two can’t be separated. No one can take an interest in a win or a loss stripped of who won and how. That’s why this part won’t be shaken, however strong AI becomes.
In Closing
Back to the pencil drawing of the bolt.
Being indistinguishable from a photograph is what this drawing achieves. At the same time, it’s the reason the result alone can’t convey that achievement. Only those who have watched it being drawn can be moved by the 280 hours.
We are moved by results, and we are moved by process. Being moved by a result reaches people no matter who made the thing or how. Being moved by a process reaches people only when the process is shown. Before AI, showing the result delivered the process along with it. I think that era is over.
