Comment by dev0p

13 hours ago

The loss of personality is real. The most heartbreaking ones I've seen are in schools, or anywhere that children are involved.

For example, at my local preschool there was a wall flyer with information about what to bring the swimming pool. It had the most crudely drawn fishes and crabs and seahorses that I had ever seen. It was clear that whoever drew that had no prior experience with anything even remotely resembling a pencil, and by no metric one would define those drawings as "good". Maybe it was drawn by a janitor, or a teacher with too little time to waste on a drawing? Regardless, and I cannot emphasize it enough, I VASTLY preferred it to the new AI generated one they put up, with its generic AI generated marine life that one would get if they just typed "sea life" in the prompt. I can't tell you why myself, if you were to look at both versions side by side, the AI one is undoubtably miles better. But... it just feels wrong. Off. Out of place. I know I sound like a luddite, but it just doesn't look right. It's uncanny, and I really can't explain the reason. It's like seeing a perfectly drawn, realistic, anatomically accurate human being in an otherwise cute and cuddly children's cartoon. It just doesn't fit in with everything else. It's a preschool, it's supposed to be filled with "bad" drawings, you know?

And don't get me started with the time they put up AI filtered group photos. I almost had a meltdown, and I'm (mostly) pro AI.

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dev0p

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dspillett  4 hours ago

> The most heartbreaking ones I've seen are in schools, or anywhere that children are involved.

Not heartbreaking, but the ones that get my goat up most are flyers from craft fairs and worse places promising to teach crafts/arts. How is that not a sign to walk very quickly in the other direction? Or maybe it is intentional, like some bad spam text apparently being intentional to weed out the people who are less likely to fall from the scam anyway…

mablopoule  13 hours ago

Because the AI one are soul-less, and the badly drawn ones are not, simple as that.

  • dev0p  12 hours ago

    I'm aware of that, and it becomes extremely obvious in an inherently soulful context such as a preschool.

    Still, while "it's AI generated crap" and variations thereof are all perfectly valid reasons by themselves, they are way, WAY too shallow for the average guy who looks at both versions and prefers the AI one because it looks "better". I would probably sound crazy and/or pretentious trying to explain to him why I prefer the badly drawn one to the perfect AI generated one, I do not know exactly why myself.

mathw  13 hours ago

Also why do they have sea life in it at all, surely that's not something that's meant to be in the pool.

  • sillyfluke  7 hours ago

    This helped my nostalgic craving for those pedantic old school HN comments which I seem to see less of nowadays...But frankly as a kid playing in the pool often revolved around pretending to be some kind of sea creature.

  • pessimizer  3 hours ago

    The obvious answer is because the old, crudely drawn sign did (and to go deeper, you'd have to ask the janitor who drew it.) Now it's become completely detached from its origin and pointless.

    The only reason this question is answerable is because the poster saw the old sign. When everybody is gone who saw the old sign, they'll just continue doing it for no reason. When somebody asks about it, some creep will babble about Chesterton's Fence.

akomtu  8 hours ago

I think AI pictures have this soulless vibe because they are creations of Frankenstein: many pieces of other pictures stitched together in a sloppy manner. A human-made picture, even a bad one, is made by outlining an idea and the presence if this idea behind a picture is what gives it a soul, figuratively speaking.

codemog  4 hours ago

People have posted prolific artists, called it AI, and had everyone hating them until the big reveal. So to be frank, it probably is in your head.