It turns out AI is bad at creating plain white paintings

AI has come a long way and it’s all getting a little frightening now that it’s mostly conquered those pesky hands. You’d be excused to feel a little existential on the matter, but fear not – there’s one thing AI has yet to master. It turns out AI’s latest hurdle is generating a simple white painting.

With advances such as Sora AI and Nvidia’s Blackwell AI superchip it sounds ludicrous to think that an AI art generator would struggle to create what is essentially, nothing. However, research shows that AI struggles with simplicity, generating a selection of overly creative images despite the most basic of prompts. 

The research was conducted by data scientist Cody Nash, who presented the humble question “Can AI create a white painting?” In the study, Cody shows various human examples of all-white minimalist art including Malevich Kazimir’s White on White and Robert Ryman’s Untitled to demonstrate his vision. As AI is trained on details, naturally it struggled to get back to basics. 

Cody began by experimenting with DALLE 3, inputting simple prompts such as “A blank white space”, “A white background” and even “#FFFFFF” to no avail. He applied a similar technique with Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL), which garnered similarly disappointing results. The most effective image occurred when asking for a “Smooth even all white background”, but for Cody, this lacked the meaning and emotional nuance of the human-made minimalist art pieces. 

As Cody concludes, there is certainly “room for improvement”. It’s clear that when given an effective prompt, AI can produce an all-white image, but for Cody, it can’t truly qualify as a painting unless it’s “the result of some inspiration, idea, or concept.” You can check out the full study here.

Without getting too philosophical, it seems AI can’t yet replicate the nuance of human art, and for that, we can all breathe a collective sigh of relief. As long as your plain white canvas has meaning, you’re still triumphing over soulless generative art. For more inspiration, check out the hilarious human art generator that runs on pure manmade creativity.