While talking with a friend about the weird bits of uncanniness that slip into neural network art and upscales/remasters, I suddenly remembered the Objectivity Room from C.S. Lewis' That Hideous Strength. In the story, it appears as part of a character's initiation into a British government agency, and somehow a lot of it comes strangely close to the experience of looking at AI art which hasn't been properly touched up.
A couple selections from the passage:
>A man of trained sensibility would have seen at once that the room was ill-proportioned, not grotesquely so, but sufficiently to produce dislike. It was too high and too narrow. Mark felt the effect without analysing the cause and the effect grew on him as time passed. Sitting staring about him he next noticed the door — and thought at first that he was the victim of some optical illusion. It took him quite a long time to prove to himself that he was not.The point of the arch was not in the centre: the whole thing was lopsided. Once again, the error was not gross. The thing was near enough to the true to deceive you for a moment and to go on teasing the mind even after the deception had been unmasked. Involuntarily one kept shifting the head to find positions from which it would look right after all.
>At first, most of them seemed rather ordinary, though Mark was a little surprised at the predominance of scriptural themes. It was only it the second or third glance that one discovered certain unaccountable details — something odd about the positions of the figures’ feet or the arrangement of their fingers or the grouping.
>What was the curious trick of lighting that made each picture look like something seen in delirium?
>When once these questions had been raised the apparent ordinariness of the pictures became their supreme menace — like the ominous surface innocence at the beginning of certain dreams.
>Compared with these the other, surrealistic, pictures were mere foolery. Long ago Mark had read somewhere of “things of that extreme evil which seem innocent to the unintitiate,” and had wondered what sort of things they might be. Now he felt he knew.