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Comment by a2ff6eeb0

3 days ago

These look exactly like all of the low budget bodega signs near me. They also look like a bunch of cheap ads for parties that I keep seeing. The sameness of style is uncanny.

(I don't have the Bodega signs, but I'm thinking of shit like this, from a quick google: https://linkstub.com/en/wet-wild-foam-party)

4 comments

a2ff6eeb0

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Barbing  3 days ago

Sigh. You might be interested in this piece that came to mind from Doctorow:

  “Let me explain: on average, illustrators don't make any money. They are already one of the most immiserated, precarized groups of workers out there. They suffer from a pathology called "vocational awe." That's a term coined by the librarian Fobazi Ettarh, and it refers to workers who are vulnerable to workplace exploitation because they actually care about their jobs – nurses, librarians, teachers, and artists.

  If AI image generators put every illustrator working today out of a job, the resulting wage-bill savings would be undetectable as a proportion of all the costs associated with training and operating image-generators. The total wage bill for commercial illustrators is less than the kombucha bill for the company cafeteria at just one of Open AI's campuses.

  The purpose of AI art – and the story of AI art as a death-knell for artists – is to convince the broad public that AI is amazing and will do amazing things. It's to create buzz. Which is not to say that it's not disgusting that former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati told a conference audience that "some creative jobs shouldn't have been there in the first place," and that it's not especially disgusting that she and her colleagues boast about using the work of artists to ruin those artists' livelihoods.”

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/

OK so after all that, THIS (bad foam party posters) is what we get!

  • paulluuk  3 days ago

    I like this concept of "vocational awe", and I do think it's why, for example, there is so much sexual and financial abuse in the movie, music and game industry: those people are willing to be treated poorly so they can work their craft - do the thing they love. Basically they are trading away good working conditions in exchange for actually doing work you like or find meaningful, the opposite of someone who does something they hate or find meaningless but pays a high salary and where you are treated really well.

    I don't know how well this actually translates to AI, though. We all understand that AI art has a pretty low quality, but sometimes low quality is enough. If I want an image for my D&D character that only I and my DM will likely ever see, I am fine with a 7 cent AI-generated image, but I'm not willing to pay 150$ for an artist to do it - not that I don't value their time, I just don't value the image that much. Before AI this was the same, I'd just have used an image from Pinterest and thought "Well, this isn't exactly a good match, but I can't find anything better".

    But I assume real illustrators do things like illustrations for children's books? I'd like to believe that those are still done by actual people, not AI.

paganel  3 days ago

All AI "art" is proving out to be basically crap, and the good thing is that it has started to become a very good filter, as in whoever uses AI art most definitely is doing a shitty job with the rest of his/her business so it's better not to bother with said business.

The thing is though that most of the nerds here are oblivious to all that, so it will take a while for them to fully acknowledge what's happening. In a positive note, I'm here on a AI thread discussing AI-image generation and I haven't yet seen any link to the dreaded pelican on a bicycle thing, so hopefully we're getting into the right direction.