Comment by dpark
17 hours ago
I hear what you’re saying and at the same time I don’t agree with some of your criticisms. The gradient, yep, it slipped one in. The imperfect stars? I have seen artists do this forever, presumably intentional flair. The few real “glitches” would be trivial to fix in Photoshop.
But they are very different certainly. ChatGPT generated a poster with a very sleek, “produced” style that apes corporate posters whereas you went with a much more personal touch. You are correct that yours does not look like typical AI.
My point is certainly not that the AI poster is better, only that it’s capable of producing surprising results. With minimal guidance it can also generate different styles: https://imgur.com/a/zXfOZaf
I think the trend to intentionally make stuff look “non-AI” is doomed to fail as AI gets better and better. A year or two ago the poster would have been full of nonsense letters.
> And finally, the QR code has obvious AI artifacts in them.
I wonder if this is intentional, to prevent AI from regurgitating someone’s real QR codes.
ETA: Actually, I wonder how much of the “flair” on human-drawn stars is to avoid looking like they are drag-and-drop from a program like Word. Ironic if we’ve circled back around to stars that look perfect to avoid looking like a different computer generated star.
> I think the trend to intentionally make stuff look “non-AI” is doomed to fail as AI gets better and better.
What’s the mechanism that makes an AI ‘better’ at looking non-AI? Training on non-ai trend images? It’s not following prompts more closely. Even if that image had no gradients or pointier shapes, it still doesn’t look like it was made by an individual.
To your counterpoints, notice that you are apologizing for the AI by finding humans that may have done something, sometime, that the AI just did. Of course! It’s trained on their art. To be non-AI, art needs to counter all averages and trends that the models are trained on.
> What’s the mechanism that makes an AI ‘better’ at looking non-AI?
I don’t know. Better training data? More training data? The difference over the past year or two is stark so something is improving it.
> Even if that image had no gradients or pointier shapes, it still doesn’t look like it was made by an individual.
The fact that humans are actively trying to make art that does not look like AI makes it clear that AI is not so obvious as many would like to pretend. If it were obvious, no one would need to try to avoid their art looking like AI.
> To your counterpoints, notice that you are apologizing for the AI by finding humans that may have done something, sometime, that the AI just did. Of course! It’s trained on their art.
Obviously.
> To be non-AI, art needs to counter all averages and trends that the models are trained on.
So in order to not look like AI, art just has to be so unique that it’s unlike any training data. That’s a high bar. Tough time to be an artist.
My point is not that the AI version looks bad (although it does) it is that I hate AI, and so do many people around me. And I hate AI so much, and I know so many people around me hate AI as much, that I am consciously altering my designs such to be as far away from AI as I can. This is the moving from Seattle to Florida after a divorce of creative design.
About the stars. I know designers paint unperfect stars. I even did that in my design. In particular I stretched it and rotated slightly. A more ambitious designer might go further and drag a couple of vertices around to exaggerate them relative to the others. But usually there is some balance in their decisions. AI however just puts the vertices wherever, and it is ugly and unbalanced. A regular geometric shape with a couple of oddities is a normal design choice, but a geometric shape which is all oddities is a lot of work for an ugly design. Humans tend not do to that.
> I am consciously altering my designs such to be as far away from AI as I can
I don’t think this is a productive choice, but it’s certainly yours to make.
> but a geometric shape which is all oddities is a lot of work for an ugly design. Humans tend not do to that
I find this such an odd thing to say. It’s way easier to draw a wonky star than a symmetrical one. Unless “drawing” here means using a mouse to drag and drop a star that a program draws for you.
Vintage illustrations are full of nonsymmetrical shapes. The classic Batman “POW” and similar were hand drawn and rarely close to symmetrical.
I draw mine in Inkscape (because I like open source more then my sanity) and inkscape has special tools to draw regular geometric shapes. You don‘t need to use those tools, you can use the free draw pen, or the bezier curve tool, or even hand code the <path d="M43,32l5.34-2.43l3.54-0.53" />, etc. But using these other tools is suboptimal compared to the regular geometric tool.
Apart from me, my partner also does graphic design, and unlike me she values her sanity more then open source so she uses illustrator for her designs. In adobe’s walled garden world of proprietary software it is still the same story, you generally use the specific tools to get regular shapes (or patterns) and then alter them after the they are drawn. You don‘t draw them from scratch. If you are familiar with modular analog synthesizers, this is starting with a square wave, and then subtracting to modulate the signal into a more natural sounding form.