AI-Expanded Mona Lisa

About

AI-Expanded Mona Lisa refers to a post that shows a landscape generated by artificial intelligence added to the background of the Mona Lisa by Leonardo DaVinci. Some meme makers online mocked the AI-generated expansion of the Mona Lisa and argued the reaction of artificial intelligence boosters represented many of the worst excesses of AI and its boosters.

Origin

Kody Young, an AI booster claiming to offer "thoughtful TL;DR takes on what's actually important in artificial intelligence today" on Twitter, posted the AI-expanded Mona Lisa on May 26th, 2023, earning almost 6,000 likes and 7,000 quote-tweets over the course of two days.^[1] He claimed to have used Adobe Firefly's artificial intelligence tools to expand the Mona Lisa and performed a similar series of transformations on other famous paintings by Van Gogh and others.

Spread

The original post by Kody Young on May 26th, 2023, received over 7,000 quote tweets in 48 hours, largely consisting of people reposting the original picture in order to criticize it. For example, on May 30th, Twitter user @GoranGligovic posted a take criticizing the overall philosophy of AI backers, earning over 25,000 likes in less than a day (seen below).^[2]

Others took a different route, replacing the AI-generated background with another, different background. For example, on May 30th, Twitter user @AlexBlechmann posted a different context for the famously mysterious Mona Lisa, garnering over 1,200 likes in a day (seen below, left).^[3] Also that day, another route was taken by user @RadishHarmers and others on Twitter, who altered the way the picture itself looked and "expanded" it (seen below, right), receiving over 1,300 likes in a similar timeframe.^[4]

The growing trend attracted increasing media attention through the end of May 2023, with media outlets such as Mashable^[5] reporting on it.

Various Examples

External References