Comment by ajjenkins
1 day ago
A lot of people in the comments say that the supposedly better examples in the article are still “horrible” because they can tell they’re AI and point to things that the AI did “wrong” and a human artist would do better.
That may be true if you’re working with a top of the line artist, but in my experience the average freelance designer online is significantly worse than AI. I’ve worked with dozens of budget friendly designers on Fiverr and consistently get way worse results than I’ve gotten from AI models. Will a great human designer produce better output than an AI? Maybe, but a small local event or business probably won’t have the budget to hire them or know where to find them. It’s cheaper, faster and easier to use AI to generate something that’s good enough for their purposes.
People also point out all the little flaws in the “good” examples and cite them as obvious tells that they were AI generated. I think it would be interesting to see if people could reliably distinguish between AI generated flyers and human made flyers. Sure, sometimes it’s obvious like when the AI adds those weird, cartoony people. But if the model is told not to create designs like that and stick to the styles used in the second half of the article, I expect people would have a much harder time distinguishing the human designs from the AI designs.
The biggest problem that I have with most AI posters is that they are too busy, you have to look for information instead of seeing it popping right away.
Amateurs posters of before AI didn't have this problem. White background, the important info in big letters, maybe one clipart or to. So I'm not talking about how pro artists could make a better job, but even the small local non-profit used to produce better posters. Not in the sense of "better looking", but in the sense that they were more readable.
At least the examples of this blog are more readable than what we usually see.
This is very true and after rendering 100 prompts twice for https://john.hartnup.uk/poster-prompts/ I realised that the prompts could be improved by asking for much less clutter. The best examples on there pick out one main visual subject, but many of them are too fussy.
I may do a V2 one of these days.
Clutter comes with the territory to some extent though. I was recently asked to do a real world PTA fayre poster, and the client (my wife) very firmly wanted 12+ attractions mentioned on the poster. Tombola, hook a duck, bar, BBQ, blah, blah, blah as well as date, location, sponsor, ...
To get a really clean design, you need to edit it down to the essentials. I don't know what pro designers do - convince the client to say less?
Unless the prompt says otherwise, AI will try to get a visual element in for every single word too.
Pro designers are generally paid because they’re extremely good editors. And they’re an intermediary between clients and their consumers.
So when you put the capability in the hands of the client without the editing (or taste) and no way to evaluate the result, you get the passable, homogenous thing.
It mostly doesn’t matter because there’s no economic incentive for it to matter, which is why much of our aesthetic world is the way it is.
14 replies →
As one of the AI-wielding amateurs, I got positive feedback from an audience member on this Ai-gen poster for a talk I gave earlier this summer https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MaawQcupC5XHqWBiTujSpKOKohx...
The clutter is there yes - it's not a sparse 1970s kitsch cultural event promo or 1970s sci-fi book cover (random example I found in 2 minutes https://www.etsy.com/listing/715136429/david-bowie-moonage-d... ) that's for sure - but I wouldn't want to remove any of mine's elements as each one informs the viewer at a glance their decision whether to attend or not.
Just taking one of your prompts and adding
> N.B. Make sure all the important information pops out (is visible at first glance) like an expert designer would, the information is more important than the design.
Already have me a much better result with the 'Arts & Crafts style', but N=1 so YMMV
I’ve been working on a thing where a bunch of raw content goes through a summarization pipeline and then gets manipulated with a bunch of checks to clean up copy and reduce clutter.
And then the visuals get added with a set of fixed templates. It’s not fully there but is reducing a LOT of the clutter.
Some of the results are even what I’d call good (and I’m a designer). I think a good harness could make non-cluttered results, if one of the AI labs was interested in a “less is more” approach.
Those posters all look pretty damn good to me. Thanks for that page. Super helpful for me and I need that right now.
Are these "fayre" events some kind of UK thing? I also didn't know offhand what "tombola" is and it comes across like it's part of a collection of standard activities for a "fayre" that have no cultural significance to me.
(Canadian here. Not everything is shared across the Commonwealth, I guess.)
1 reply →
Say you want to add an artist or change some information. Regeneration will end up with another poster altogether, right?
1 reply →
There is very often a certain softness to the fonts in generated images. Why is that and is there a name for it?
Thinking more, I thinking the softness is actually inconsistency. Because the letters are generated, no two letters will be exact same and if zoomed in some edge might not even be perfectly straight. Another thing we can do these days (I think author should really try out in V2) is to use code to generate the . You may have seen examples of generating Javascript based videos with Claude. Same can be done with posters. Generate a font sheet and use that in code generated poster with image generated background.
Well, low-stakes clients are usually poor clients because they’re clueless and overly demanding.
Real designers would avoid them in the first place.
1 reply →
Tangent I guess, it would be interesting to have like a AI/not AI quiz. They still look AI to me but idk if it's because I know
6 replies →
Well what's better ? I have so many pictures of posters of old events or storefronts saved on my phone because they were so astronomically bad it'd have been better to not have any poster at all. Today's AI makes it look even worse but I'm hopeful that in five years we'll all live in a world generally more agreeable to look at and not "concrete with pink and yellow fluo paper smashed on top of it" like https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/music-poster-wall.html or https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/france-poster-wall.html?ps... because the cost of making things enjoyable with more colour and detail will have come down. Maybe we can finally go back to Art Nouveau if the cost of making it comes down!
For what it’s worth i think the Bi Nuu poster you share here as reference for something badly designed looks really cool.
Poster design like any visual or artistic field will always cater to conflicting individual tastes - for some it looks great, others hate it.
I like Art Nouveau but a lot of stuff in that style looks kitschy to me.
Your links are supposed to be examples of bad posters? They're awesome!
> we'll all live in a world generally more agreeable to look at and not "concrete with pink and yellow fluo paper smashed on top of it" like https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/music-poster-wall.html or https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/france-poster-wall.html?ps...
Sorry buf I'd take these posters over your “generally more agreeable ” homogeneous slop literally any day.
2 replies →
> too busy, you have to look for information
Have you ever seen a bus schedule, or a parking sign, or a list of events at a local library or an “open hours” sign at a restaurant? Those are 99.9% unreadable, busy, and you have to look for information. And even then it’s not always clear if you got it right. And that was all before the AI.
There is a difference between busy for no reason and busy because of information density. The busy examples in this article aren’t information dense. They just have a ton of different flower types, random animals, background characters, unrelated structures, many different colors and many different shades of those colors, etc. But the information they are trying to communicate is minimal.
A bus schedule or a parking sign is very information dense. It’s trying to communicate a lot in a limited space and as a result require getting used to.
Those examples are filled with real info. The AI posters are filled with meaningless three word slogans, lists of meaningless copy and art where everything is labeled.
None of those are primarily marketing tools, they're things you use after you've already decided you want to use the product. They don't need to grab and hold attention and convince you that they have what you want, they just need to convey information.
Bus schedules are not a good comparison because they have to fit a ton of information into a single page. And I disagree that they are unreadable. Speaking as someone who commuted by bus for years in many different cities, they tend to be quite easy to read because the tabular layouts make them very easy to scan quickly. Once your eyes anchor on the page, you can find what you're looking for without effort.
> Amateurs posters of before AI didn't have this problem.
As someone who made posters in 2000, I respectfully disagree.
The biggest problem in my view is: It's not editable by hand. There is no production data I could open in InDesign, Illustrator or Photoshop (Layers) and change things to my or my clients liking.
I am not familiar with the field, but if there isn't a way to have LLM's generate graphics as editable InDesign or Illustrator files (maybe something Adobe will sell you?), I am sure there will be soon.
This is a problem which is entirely solvable by existing and new design/production apps. Instead of working entirely with raster image agents should programmatically edit the target file format.
You could try having, say Astra, use one of these programs via computer use to design it. I haven't tried it, but I hear it is really good at computer use. Might even have more of a dialogue as it creates, so dictating choices at each stage. Would take longer, but does not require someone who has expertise in the tool, just good design notion.
It can probably ransform most to html.
Wait 6 months...
That also reminds me of AI-generated text, which is also (when done without caring) barely readable because of the useless noise mixed the relevant information that a human that proofread the text would have thrown out.
Technically, AI can introduce rounds of fact-checking, proofreading, etc.
But even without that, AI-generated text is already better than what most humans can write -- particularly when they need something fast, cheap and good.
(It might not be "excellent" -- but humans wouldn't be able to make it fast and cheap...)
People act like making a poster is this absurd Sisyphean task that takes a degree in art to produce.
You don’t need to hire an artist, you don’t need AI. Just download Affinity for free, find a nice font and color palate, and put text on the page. I’ve done my own event posters and they take less than an hour to produce with next to zero prior experience and look massively more appealing than AI slop.
Using a tool where you only fill the blanks in some generic templates made by other humans sounds awfully a lot like what AI already does...
There's an amazing viral twitter thread where someone claimed a real Monet painting was an AI generated imitation, and it got an avalanche of comments from people who claimed it was an obvious fake and a poor imitation at that.
It's not tracking a real thing as much as people would like to think.
This is exactly the problem. Most of the time when people criticise the output of genAI, what they’re actually commenting on is the ethics of AI rather than the output of it. And they then attempt to use the demonstration as a proof of their point rather than forming an unbiased opinion of the output based on its own merit.
Now I’m not saying there isn’t legitimate criticisms that can be made about the ethics of AI, I’m highly concerned about the problems that AI brings too. But that’s a separate argument entirely.
It’s a little like people who are pompous about expensive wine, whisky’s, etc and then fail blind taste tests (plenty of studies there too).
I've generally been very impressed with genAI artwork in "impressionist" styles. But thinking about how the diffusion models work, that seems like exactly what you'd expect them to be good at. Things that call for perfectly straight lines and constrained patterns (and explicitly symbolic elements, like text) seem to be considerably harder but apparently very doable now.
There is still obvious genAI slop being put out there all the time, and you can tell it's genAI slop because it's slop: even doing something at that level by hand would be more time and effort than anyone would bother putting in unless it's paid work that then justifies getting it right and doing it professionally. But now that the sloption exists, there's a flood of people taking it.
Prose, on the other hand, is another story. It became possible to produce "grammatically correct, academic-sounding and generally using words to mean what they actually mean" very quickly, but years later it's still rarely if ever good, it just goes through varying different quirks. Maybe part of this is that the training data can't properly reflect what the target audience was for various pieces of text. A lot of it, surely, is that many people are easily impressed by "grammatically correct, academic-sounding and generally using words to mean what they actually mean", and don't themselves have much of a sense for actually good writing.
I don't think this is true. There are people who claim everything is AI – maybe even to bolster their ego.
But for a lot of things I can with high probability discern between AI and human in every day appearance and I know many other people can as well. One of the things I look for is specifically certain types of extreme... not just flaws... just overall atrocity. When I read posts submitted to HN I often realize that something is bad writing before I can specify this to AI text. Pangram almost always agrees with me. Here is a recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49715657
I don't doubt that there are certain scoped tasks that certain models are quite good at. But in my every day life I constantly encounter AI slop that is so bad that I take it as a personal insult that someone thought it would be okay to subject me to it; to presume that I am so tasteless and numb and have no quality standard whatsoever.
I mean just look at the example posters at the beginning of the article. "The problem with these is not so much that they’re bad." Yes, yes it is. They are horrible. I cannot understand how anyone can describe them as anything but that.
14 replies →
In my world view, the phrase "People are stupid" explains almost everything. Very few people are actually able to think for themselves. The vast majority are basically just sheep, they think whatever the media, their colleagues, friends etc tell them to think. They don't fact check, they don't think critically, they can't understand a well reasoned argument, they basically just believe things based on how much they like whoever said it. They won't accept evidence that disproves those beliefs.
They don't care about the truth, it's all just about being part of the right herd.
23 replies →
Yes, I think this is exactly right. The labelling of a thing as “AI Generated” or “AI Assisted” makes the viewer perceive it as worse in quality. And they really do think it’s worse.
It’s similar to a well known finding about price: people value things that are more expensive more, and tend to think they are of higher quality. You can give people the same thing for a high price or for free and they’ll say the high priced one is amazing the free one is lacklustre.
It’s like an optical illusion driven by labelling.
By many people’s criteria it automatically is worse, because part of what they value in art is thinking about the artist and their intentions behind their creation.
Similarly people may view an IKEA book stand as worse quality than one built by hand even if the hand built one has flaws. Or they might view a microwaved meal as worse than that created by a home chef.
People value the human intention and care that goes into creations. Without that it’s worse even if the output is fundamentally the same.
A drawing by my young niece may not have the same finesse as an AI generated one but I like it a whole lot more
10 replies →
Yeah, but the issue is we are getting constantly exposed to a barrage of really low quality obvious AI generated content. Except a lot of people seem to not know that it's AI and interact with like it's real. The people posting it are being reward by monetization platforms.
Low quality baiting content was a problem before but the barrier to entry has been significantly reduced and the.amount of content is growing quickly.
You can see it here in the discussions for about half the stories. It gets sidetracked into people talking past each other.
The thing is, people are really bad at judging this, except for the most stereotypical cases. You have people crying wolf the moment you use "genuinely" or a dash. Different people use different criteria for their personal heuristics and the result is threads full of tedious, completely irrelevant comments from people in a crusade. People don’t seem to realise that we are very good at tricking ourselves and that a lot of the patterns we think we recognise are actually just noise.
I've seen two resdit threads where people insisted the hands were wrong, and people took photos of their hands in the same pose.
But, then, people did this for digital editing before. Insisted there were "clear signs of photoshop", from people who never opened that app.
Earlier HN discussions about it (both got flagged):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48134400
Unsurprising that they're both flagged. HN commenters really, really don't like to think about a world where they can't tell the difference between real and AI.
One commenter really nailed it[1]: "We didn't get worse at judging art. We just got better at doubting everything."
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48158160
7 replies →
In fact it’s only tracking the quality of the produced image
Every single person I’ve asked, and I’ve asked hundreds, say that knowing it was AI irrespective of anything else was enough to think it was bad.
There’s millions of genai images that people aren’t commenting on because they don’t know it’s AI.
> knowing it was AI irrespective of anything else was enough to think it was bad.
That's prejudice.
9 replies →
Monet got Seinfeld Effected.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/seinfeld-effect
> claimed a real Monet painting was an AI generated imitation
This is like the transvestigator creeps who think they can tell with 100% accuracy who is trans but they are regularly fooled by pictures of cis women when seeded with the notion that they might be trans.
Some AI is obvious. Some much less so, and a lot of non-AI content is being caught up in the amateur dragnets.
One version of this I really loved was some viral clip that I believe was like a local newscast where one guy who really seemed to dislike vegan products was challenged to tell the difference between a real meat product and a vegan alternative, I think sausage or something. And he made a big performance of how instantly he recognized the meat in comparison to the vegan product only to be shocked to learn, after he confidently declared that one of the two dishes was meat, that both dishes were plant-based.
If nothing else, simply as a matter of self respect you've got to make your peace with a certain amount of healthy uncertainty if even just to avoid making a fool of yourself.
But more importantly, it's important to be honest with yourself about what you actually know versus what you're very motivated to believe. Because I think AI equals bad is poisoning some people's ability to talk about this in a healthy way.
I've worked with some of the top designers in the world. I don't think that AI will beat them (for now), but the examples in his sample page[0] beat the junk that I've seen a lot of non-top-designers do.
As he states, he isn't trying to make stuff that doesn't "look like AI did it," he just wants to introduce variety, and has proposed a disciplined way to do that.
[0] https://john.hartnup.uk/poster-prompts/
can you please list some of the people you worked with? I really appreciate good design and am always looking for great artists that I don’t know about yet, thanks.
Pentagram and DDO.
Kinda pricey, though.
2 replies →
If people were not lazy enough to "introduce variety" to begin with, AI wouldn't have the slop reputation we know it to be today.
But any UX designer/engineer will tell you defaults are important. And on social media we're seeing a ton of "default". Which explains the disparity in reactions. "Default code" isn't bad in most contexts. "Default art" is bland by definition; pre-AI it wasn't exactly kosher to use stock art by itself either. It's designed as a placeholder.
It sure seems like, while LLMs and diffusion models won't completely eradicate the middle class, the bar has now risen significantly to actually contribute in a lot of areas.
For programmers, sure SV startups and actual software-first shops are probably only augments with LLMs and not replacing. But what % of software engineers are employed in such shops? Well, from my graduating class in CS, approximately 30% of grads all went to the same contracting shop whose business model seems to be, take the bottom 30% of each CS class, underpay the fuck out of them, bootcamp them into something vaguely usable + teach the house style of CRUD/LOB app framework, then throw them at clients. And this seems to still be a step above "offshore to barely baseline capable (or worse) body shop for extremely dubious results."
That entire bottom 50% is probably about to be eviscerated. The "offshore + pray" approach is probably going to be completely zapped, much easier to just vibe code for probably better (or at least not worse) results. And the onshore-but-cheaper contracting shops are probably going to need a lot fewer people whose main contribution is translating low-ambiguity tickets into syntactically valid java spring code.
Similarly, for artists, disney is probably not going to use AI in a way that substantially speeds them up because they won't tolerate the quality loss at all. But how many artists work for disney? And how many make anime waifus for the gacha apps? The latter of which I can only assume has already switched substantially to AI assets.
I'm not sure about coders but for artists I don't think a massive number were making anime waifus, but instead were making graphic designs for advertisements, publications & websites.
Currently AI is actually replacing some of these jobs. But there's kinda a hitch there - when you target me with ads or show me your company's website and it has obvious AI art I tend to think that you're either selling me something very low quality or are a scammer. If you show me the novel you've written and it has an AI art cover I assume the contents are also AI generated garbage writing. So I wonder if those jobs will really be replaced? It all depends on society's acceptance of AI art and if AI art doesn't get any better. I thought it would get to the point that I couldn't tell it was AI by now, but so far it hasn't.
I think AI waifus and porn and memes and browser based zynga type games will be a place AI is going to be accepted because nobody cared too much about the authenticity and quality of those things before either. But an advertisement selling me a car? The cover of a book on philosophy? A website that I'm going to give my credit card number to? I'm not sure about those things.
> I'm not sure about coders but for artists I don't think a massive number were making anime waifus, but instead were making graphic designs for advertisements, publications & websites.
There was an old joke among designers that their biggest competitor was the boss' nephew playing with photoshop.
Now they need to compete with the boss' nephew playing with AI.
Cars feels like a bit of an odd one out because there's basically no low end. If you have the money to produce even a single car from a Camry to a hummer, you are probably going to not try to pinch pennies on marketing because a single car sale pays the salary of a designer for a year.
1 reply →
We really should start being more precise when we say "replace". Are we talking about replacing 90-100% of that particular job? Or 50-80%?
Because it feels like people argue as if they were talking about the former, but if probed it turns out they admit it's the latter.
There will be still people making car advertisements, but they will be using ai tools and will get asked to produce X times faster. Effectively, some of them will get replaced, or rather have been replaced.
1 reply →
>But how many artists work for disney?
Given their empire these days: a lot. Mostly because outside of Disney there's really not much such thing as "modern salaried artist". You work for any of Disney's 50 subsidiaries, you work at a games studio (because Disney gave up its expansion early in that medium), or you're likley freelancing/commissioning and grabbing whatever gig comes along.
I'm exaggerating, but less than I care to adnit. Disney makes up that much of "normal" full time artistry these days. And it's no secret how little respect artists have had in the US, even before AI.
>And how many make anime waifus for the gacha apps? The latter of which I can only assume has already switched substantially to AI assets.
In America? Less than you think. Asia has plenty of cheaper and more talented artists to exploit. AI adoption is interesting there because it's already such a sweatshop that you need to consider if AI really saves that much time for its cost. Larger studios are dabbling, smaller ones use sparingly.
No, North/South American slop is fully focused on the hyper-casual market. It's fueling thousands of asset flips for quick mobile games or copying indie games into Roblox/Fortnite. That's where the effort (or lack thereof) is going.
> a human artist would do better.
Except we have all seen really awful human made posters long before AI. People are just upset just to be upset at this point.
Code was nosediving before AI badly.
> Code was nosediving before AI badly.
What? What are you comparing this pre-AI 2020s code to? 90s and 00s code for sure was worse.
2010s to 2020s code has been bad. We used to have 100% natively compiled apps, now everything is a Chrome browser wrapped JavaScript abomination, and before anyone assumes I hate JavaScript, I love doing front-end web development, and backend, and automation... and an unhealthy number of things (my GitHub is a mess). My point being, software quality has been downhill before AI, we just have nonsense rosy eyeglasses.
1 reply →
>People are just upset just to be upset at this point.
Despite this being a technical community we seem to be really bad at understanding scale.
A bad artist is at worst like a fee pieces of trash littered in your lawn. Bad AI art is like a dump truck tipping over into your yard. And you see 10 more dump truck coming in at 90mph. It doesn't matter if it's a recyclables truck and all the bottles are individually cleaner and more Eco friendly than candy bar wrappers. The magnitude is still overwhelming.
You can ignore a few bad artists you don't like. You can't ignore swimming through slop day in and day out. Friction in a previously smooth environment angers people, and AI creates a lot of newfound friction.
There's a theory that when everyone can access some "good", then the rich and powerful will automatically differentiate themselves by switching to a different good that has a visible contrast to the common one. So for example, if the common people can afford only wool, the rich will wear cotton. Once the price of cotton drops, they'll switch to cashmere, which is... a kind of wool. It's not about the specific material or category of thing, it never was, it's just the contrast that matters.
So if everyone has "too busy" AI slop art, then the rich will switch to very plain art, even downright minimalist.
I'm betting that up-market stores will soon have hand-carved wood signs out the front just like in the 1800s to show off that a Real Human(tm) made their signage.
It's not that plain wood is better, it's just that it's not commonly available.
1 reply →
If the AI makes a “better” poster that everyone hates because it’s AI, and a person makes a “worse” poster that everyone likes because it’s human, isn’t the business better off with the “worse” poster?
I think the issue there is that, in the absence of the AI poster, people will still dislike the "worse" poster.
Since this is idealogical, a business owner's choices are: * use AI and some people hate it on principle, don't use AI and don't pay enough and some people hate it because it looks cheap, don't use Ai and pay a bunch more and people don't hate it...maybe, depending on style and skill of the artist.
As a business owner, it's not an encouraging situation.
Do people really care much about how beautiful a human made poster look like? I don’t think I’ve ever seen that as an issue, a poster doesn’t have to look fancy. Though if I love any art piece then learn later it was made by AI I will for sure update my judgement and dismiss it as if I was tricked in the first place. You’re way better using Word art for your poster than delegating to an AI if you don’t want to receive negative attention
An AI generated poster signals low effort. If you're too lazy or too cheap to make a real poster it makes me wonder what other corners have been cut.
1 reply →
None of the AI haters (or haters in general) are willing to put money where their mouths are. None of them are willing to pay for better human artwork, yet have the audacity to criticize as if top artists owe them free output.
9 replies →
You could, of course, prompt the AI to produce a poster in the style of the "worse" human poster, and see where that gets you.
I suspect it would do quite a convincing job.
Though it's fairly unconvincing at handwriting.
No. There is a limit. Most non-trained people don’t know how to draw a straight line or layout type. If you go to a restaurant and see a poorly laid out menu you often think of the food more negatively. I think that the opposite is true too. If you go to a hole-in-the-wall restaurant and see a menu that looks like it was generated by a top New York design firm you will also think negatively because is it inauthentic.
It's not everyone though.
Honestly, the business would probably be best off if it showed whatever poster had the biggest and most exposed tits regardless of where it came from. Humans be humans and sex sells.
There aren't small problems in these posters though. They're huge, obvious, and an indicator that the one who made the flyer didn't care whatsoever.
When it includes an American Flag with more than 50 stars + the bottom row is cut off, you know they didn't even bother to proofread it.
This is the kind of garbage we're suffering with.
Those are, comparatively, small problems for the medium of a poster.
You have to understand that 99% of people who will see the poster will view it for <5 seconds. They wont sit there and count the stars.
And, of the people who do examine the poster closely, they’re looking at the text. They want to see the date, time, event details. The background is background.
But what is the point of the background then? I mean, it seems like we're admitting that the design doesn't matter, then why keep up the ruse? Let's drop design, and keep just plain textual information. There is no substance to it, it's just performative, a simulacrum of design.
1 reply →
You should try typing "American flag clipart" into Google and see non-AI images with the wrong number of stars.
Aren’t those ai generated too?
3 replies →
> They're huge, obvious, and an indicator that the one who made the flyer didn't care whatsoever.
Remember when this sort of ascending tricolon was supposed to be a dead giveaway for LLM-written prose?
Not every poster has that issue as you can see from the posting. It is a simple matter of caring enough to look at the output in more detail. These are issues that can be overcome.
Sure, but the basic value proposition of AI is that you don't have to care. These issues could be overcome, but they aren't, because the whole way the technology is promoted and sold guides the user away from caring.
2 replies →
This is the important part. Right now, AI is a tool. You can use it to generate high quality output, or you can use it to generate slop. If the output is slop, that is a reflection of the person using the tool, not AI.
I get AI slop from employees sometimes. If they provide poor quality work that hasn't been proofread, that is an employee problem, not an AI problem.
You know the saying where a million dollar company failing is "their" problem, but a billion dollar company failing is "our" problem?
We're going to quickly approach that problem in the conning years at this current rate, like the obesity epidemic. At some point you can't just dismiss things as personal responsibility when a significant portion of society suffers from it and need to instead look at the underlying systematic issues empowering bad incentives.
Of course, the US is awful at the latter. So I'm not holding my breath.
These are small problems. Details, even. You can be quite successful and get all that stuff wrong. Not that I'd recommend it.
https://www.theverge.com/gadgets/931347/trump-mobile-t1-phon...
People really will take any possible excuse to derail a thread and talk about political figures they don't like, huh?
Step 1: develop a cult of personality, to the point of becoming president 2 (even after openly failing to coup a lost election)
Step 2-3: sell anything to your cult followers, doesn’t matter how good or bad it is
Step 4: profit
Simple recipe for success
True. But an organizer who doesn't care, will also not be willing to pay for good artwork. AI haters should put money where their mouths are and fund human top artwork.
Posters for small events, a well known space where you will find „top artwork“… you really just need to spend 1h in Inkscape to get something decent
3 replies →
Absolutely. I've had the identical experience hiring artists for game art/UI. Every once in a while you find an artist who is stellar but most everyone else is not that good.
The TFA is pointing to a prompting skills/creativity issue, but I get equally frustrated with hired artists as with genAI image models. Even with skilled human artists (remote/offshore), I find they're best at copying a particular style so I end up having to google for images of the look that we're targeting, then spend hours painstakingly describing the changes needed. Then iterating many times, and with artists in remote time zones that means each iteration takes a whole day. The process is ironically very similar to using AI image models but can take much longer due to time zones.
Well that's why and how we got the current model. Lots of noise, so tools were made to curate and figure out the most consistent artists But it goes both wwys; artists that stand out get ebough of a reputation to boost their prices. Unless you get very lucky with budding taletnt, you generally get what you pay for.It's not much different from how you'd run your gaming team.
True, but whats even dumber is that 99% of the use cases people are getting angry at would never be given to a real designer anyway (too low value).
The funniest genre of AI backlash imo is normies yelling at small businesses for using AI on social posts.
There's no world where your local flowershop has both the time and money to brief a design agency to create a flyer for Fridays social post.
Yet, in the mind of the mob, they imagine some designer is losing a job due to the existence of AI...not realizing that every social post they've previously been looking at from the same flower shop was just a 1-click Canva template.
The only person losing a job due to AI design is Canva, which itself was hated for taking jobs away from Photoshop designers, whom in the 90s ended up taking jobs away from the phototypesetting industry, who took the jobs away from the manual typesetters, etc etc etc. Meanwhile the economy and living standards grew each time.
Not to mention that I can also tell when a poster has been generated using Photoshop and not real artist tools, like brushes and pens. I've seen a lot of these Photoshop-generated posters, and they are in no way comparable to something DaVinci or Picasso would create.
> not real artist tools
Nice no true Scotsman fallacy. PS is a "real" artist tool.
Wouldn't say that, there is a huge shift in art style between what we got before Photoshop and what we got after. Just look at book covers in the 1970/80s and book covers in the 1990/2000s. The old stuff was full of custom illustrations, while the new stuff is often just copy&paste of generic stock images or some rather hideous early 3D renderings. Even the bad covers of the 80s (see /r/badscificovers/) still have some personality to them that is lacking in a lot of more modern ones.
It's not that you can't create good art with any tool, it's just that the economy and expectations change with the tools available, and the tools being faster/cheaper doesn't translate into better art.
I believe that comment is satire. Look at the last six words.
I agree.
To be precise, the tool and the artist are two different things. You can make crap with brushes or PS, and you can make art too.
AI is a tool too. What I build with it is orders of magnitude less important/interesting compared to what a talented artist can build with it.
This bullshit disingenuous false equivalency again.
In both photoshop and painting, the human using the tool decides what strokes to use. That isn't true with AI art. It's not "just another tool" for doing the activity when it does the entire activity for you.
> In both photoshop and painting, the human using the tool decides what strokes to use.
except for the million posters and album covers unironically made with a real photo passed into one of photoshop's "Artistic" filters to make it look like some impressionist painting
It is exactly “another tool”. Just like Abelton with an automated drum machine is another tool for creating music. As the posting shows the tool isn’t doing the entire activity for you. The author is reprompting the tool to generate a result more inline with their vision.
2 replies →
HEH. It seems like you don't remember the early days of Photoshop.
The analogy holds perfectly well. We can "no true Scotsman" this all day long.
Any "real" artist could dunk on PS: "Oh, you didn't have to go out and buy a canvas and paint and brushes. Hell, you probably don't even know how to properly mix paint on a palette! Not only do you not to clean your brushes, you don't even have brushes!"
And the right response is: "Who gives a shit?" The answer is "Some folks, but their opinion decreasingly matters." And the same exact logic applies to AI. You might as well be complaining that Google doesn't pay cartographers to hand draw Google Maps.
> when it does the entire activity for you.
This is total fiction, and has spawned an entire cult of "just give me the prompt" folks that think using AI requires no skill, and anyone using AI is just a "meat proxy". But that's not true, at all, as evidenced by years of commentary on this site with people getting radically different outcomes using AI. We've gone from "stochastic parrots" to "gonna destroy humanity" in 2 years.
AI will do jobs that we used to go to Fiverr for -- it'll eat the bottom of the market, just like automation does elsewhere. The bottom of the market is blog art, clip art, menus, commercial signage, event posters, and the like. That's completely natural, and hating it is shouting into the wind. The local cafe owner was never particularly incentived to have their menus crafted by some local artist.
If the hole in the wall teriyaki restaurant’s menu wasn’t hand painted by Monet I turn right around and walk out. I want nothing to do with an eating establishment that can’t at least spring for a realistic rendition of chicken yakisoba hand painted by Michelangelo himself.
Photoshop basically destroyed a centuries-old artistic tradition of depicting six gyoza on a white plate. Now with all this AI nonsense, you might as well just make your food at home rather than stare at yet another “six finger hipster eating a vegetable spring roll” cranked out by ChatGPT.
You forgot the /s.
Sadly, if it hadn’t gone on to DaVinci, I wouldn’t be sure.
If you can convince Chat GPT to stop putting icons next to every single thing, it would be loads better. 1940s cubist style seems sort of there, then bam a tiny cake icon next to the word cakes and drinks. Why? Each of these posters, including the original would be so much better without these tiny stupid icons. No one at the Bauhaus ever made a poster with tiny icons! Chat GPT just cannot drop the icons. Like just have it read a graphic design history book. These secondary attempts might pass more people's AI aversion filter but they would all receive an F in a graphic design class.
Students in a graphic design class are expected to create something that graphic designers like; but that's not the same as what other people like.
The blog also mentions, several times, that it wasn't the goal to be indistinguishable.
I think it's actually a feature when people can recognize it as AI.
Why would someone want it to be unrecognizable as AI? What is the reason people want to hide AI usage ? (other than when "cheating" in studies or examns or such, obv)
AI generated visuals are becoming a signal of A) low-effort, B) and/or unwillingness or inability to spend resources to genuinely present your product or brand.
Both of these communicate that I will probably not get a good value for my money when buying your product or service.
> Both of these communicate that I will probably not get a good value for my money when buying your product or service.
This is where I stop following. Businesses should focus on where they differentiate, and I really don't care how they generate signage if I can read it. I don't get anything by them paying Banksy to make their menu instead of having Gemini generate it. And if there is any connection to getting good value, it's the inverse: I'm more likely to get good value when I'm not paying for fancy advertising. See: every drugstore that puts generics alongside brand names for cheaper.
4 replies →
You are conflating the use of AI with effort. It does not need to imply low effort or low care. I’m hoping this tired narrative dies out soon.
3 replies →
The AI art is also a class/status marker.
If a business markets itself with these AIgen posters, you get wildly different responses from different groups.
boomers that spend all their time on Facebook will think “this is such a nice pretty poster” and be oblivious to the fact it is even ai. Even if they knew it was ai they don’t care.
Young people will think it is low class/trashy. Some hate it because it’s ai, others hate it because the poster is ugly/busy/confusing.
Because there is a big anti-AI movement and some people will think you're destroying the planet and putting people out of a job if you make one prompt to a chatbot.
Maybe if there were fewer people foaming at the mouth to enrich themselves while destroying the planet, and putting people out of work, there would be less pushback.
11 replies →
> Why would someone want it to be unrecognizable as AI?
If we operate under the assumption that the AI generated posters are bad (which this HN thread is), then making them not look like AI generated posters would be directionally toward making them not bad. That doesn't necessarily mean it's good though, it could be average and fulfill that constraint.
> Why would someone want it to be unrecognizable as AI?
Because the reason for any given AI work being "recognizable as AI" is considered inherently a quality issue. For the suspicion to arise, there has to be something that someone considers "wrong" about the work, in order to point at that thing and say "this must be the work of an enemy 「ＭＯＤＥＬ」".
> Why would someone want it to be unrecognizable as AI? What is the reason people want to hide it
Because a lot of “everyday” folks really strongly dislike AI. I’ve lost count of the number of AI generated Instagram ads I’ve seen where the comments are filled with “AI slop!”.
It’s not a positive signal for anyone who wants to persuade someone of the value of whatever they’re advertising because it’s associated with being cheap and lazy.
I think "a lot" is very subjective. I can also say "a lot of people really like AI-generated arts" and that would be true as well. HN is a place where a lot of normally objective, informed, and probably very nice folks in the real life come to engage in endless of debates that go nowhere.
19 replies →
[flagged]
1 reply →
AI thumbnails outperform human thumbnails on YouTube by a lot, I've seen click-through rate spreads of 4%+ (~5% -> ~9% in AB tests). Yet people will do drive by comments trying to excoriate creators for using AI thumbnails. It's really quite ridiculous.
"Since I've added gambling and pornography to my old niche hobby website, my profits are up 4% - how can anyone criticize me?"
Not a perfect analogy, but adding some bait that does indeed work for grabbing attention can of course be criticized.
And of course those criticisms can and should be dismissed if the creators goals are purely to maximize engagement
6 replies →
A lot of any real gain will be due to novelty, and that will wane once you've been doing it a short time (or once other people in your field are doing it so you all go back to looking the same).
I suspect a lot of the gain isn't even that useful to the channel: it being people clicking to complain. You might not see that mean actual complaints because many will see the existing ones and either just upvote them or move on without doing anything (their chance to repeat their regular comment to get a few upvotes having been taken by someone already having said it).
So you’re saying it boosts engagement, advancing the creators primary goal of putting something on YouTube to begin with?
9 replies →
Do those rates hold across multiple videos over a period of time? I've seen at least one case where someone did an A/B test of an AI thumbnail and the reason his engagement went up because everyone hated it and was commenting to say as much.
> Yet people will do drive by comments trying to excoriate creators for using AI thumbnails. It's really quite ridiculous.
That's just a loud minority. Most people really don't care about using AI in what you do as long as it is entertaining. The real world ain't Reddit.
Maximizing click-through rates leads to garbage clickbait and often misleading thumbnails, it is not a good metric. Those kinds of thumbnail, and channels built on low effort but high engagement content, were widely derided before AI came along.
Novelty is a significant driving factor here. Gen Thumbnails are eye catching because they are new and viewers haven’t adapted to skimming over them like they do with everything else.
Thumbnails, same as everything that is supposed to attract attention, have styles that change over time due to saturation and fatigue.
It’s the current iteration of the red arrow with a (staged) surprised face and as you’re saying we will all learn to just skip it as well. These things are always an arms race, and given LLM’s can only generate facsimiles of things I don’t see how it can stay ahead of it
Maybe.
I don't think clickrate on Youtube is a meaningful metric if all you want is for the right people to show up at your event.
There are channels I watch regularly because they cover topics I want to see covered and I've seen their previous videos and they met my expectations. Then they'll use AI thumbnails while focused on finding the right topics and thinking about how to present them. Some of them are clearly letting an AI write the main part of a script and reading it off (while still being clearly a human doing this and not some weird TTS monstrosity). It annoys me to think that I'm incentivizing people to do this, or letting The Algorithm get the wrong idea about the quality of these shitty thumbnails that don't matter now that the creator is in my feed and I can read the video titles.
(I also end up watching a fair bit of stuff where the thumbnail is literally just a random frame from the video, which lets me know the subject, and the title is some clickbait nonsense that I don't care about. There are a lot of ways for this stuff to work.)
I watch a lot og gaming videos on youtube, often of new indie games to see if I want to play them. Some creators will use AI-generated thumbnails that look nothing like the actual game, and before I recognize them and ignore that creator, they'll get clickthroughs. And then I'll see that I was bamboozled and exit the video.
I don't care if someone uses AI to "style" their thumbnails, but if you use it to completely misrepresent what the video is about I'll leave in protest. That has nothing to do with AI, and everything to do with the fact that it's clickbait. I don't like human-generated clickbait either.
What's ridiculous about that?
[dead]
The alternatives are not horrible, but look like I’m being lured to a Spring Fair by an alien. It makes no sense to associate with Japanese imagery or 90s computer graphics for an event that has nothing to with these topics. Design is a language and these speak gibberish.
The Spring Fair is a lorem ipsum, here.
They asked the AI for a list of different styles.
The author then picked them out, not the AI. For curiosity I assume.
I love the idea of using unexpected styles. I think it can be very creative. I appreciate it if someone does that deliberately as a humor.
You’re comparing the sub-minimum-wage offshore template jockeys to average designers, not “high end” designers. A high-end designer making a one-off poster for a local fair is about as likely as a senior engineer at a FAANG company making a website for it.
It would be like someone paying for a simple website for their small business saying off-shore fiverrrr Wordpress hacks are average coders, and anyone making anything close to a reasonable dev salary in this job market was a high-falutin’ luxury option.
An average graphic designer would ask what unique, non-informational things about the event the poster should portray, do a little bit of research and exploration, and then figure out how to communicate that in pure visual terms. It draws people into the vibe of your event, and hints at the visual impact of experiencing it. You get the nice type work, information hierarchy, attractive layout and color scheme, etc. for free because those are the tools average graphic designers use to visually communicate. This is not expensive compared to the expertise required. With both AI and the Fiverrrr designers, at best, you only get nice type work, information hierarchy, attractive layout and color scheme, etc. You’re not paying for design — you’re paying a graphics software technician for a graphic, like you would at a sign shop.
An average designer is who you’d want to make your posters and maybe a few other types of advertisements, such as postcards, or bus shelters or billboards or banner ads. Someone in a country with a minimum wage of less than a dollar is who you get on fiverrrr. A high-end graphic designer is who you’d contract to do a complete branding and identity overhaul.
Anecdotally, I was reading https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematicians-build-long-awa... from another HN post and I could have sworn the image was AI generated but https://www.pangram.com/ said was legit human created. Sad that my new default is assuming everything is AI created or vibed nowadays.
This is my experience as well. I run a bootstrapped business, so we don't have a ton of backing. We can't afford the top design firms, and Fable can do better than those within our budget. So it's not that we prefer AI over human designers; we just don't have the money!
This technology is super new and I've only seen AI posters really proliferate in the past few months and suddenly... people don't know how to live without it?
They're not saying they can't live without it, they're saying it's helpful. If you've been walking to the well for years to get buckets of water, and suddenly have running water in your kitchen, going back to trudging buckets doesn't sound very appealing.
Well, no. Before genAI, I used fiverr, and I was also shamed for hiring those humans.
> we just don't have the money!
You don't have ANY money? Plenty of students would do a great job for a little money and a professional reference. Now you just helped the workforce, helped the local economy and cost you little.
Have you ever tried doing that? In my experience, art students don't like to work for "little money" and "professional reference" and stablished artists don't like when you try to pay "little money" to students.
Just a note about language: when folks say they "don't have the money" or "don't have the time", it's almost never the case that they don't have any of the resource in question...it's about priorities. What they are saying is that there are far more effective ways to spend their money than incidentals like this, especially when cheap alternatives exist.
In year 2026 you are likely going to pay for a meat proxy who would still use the same model just without you controlling the prompt.
What is your experience with design done by students? Because mine isn't great. It's not bad either, but it's just... mediocre.
These days a cheap designer is just going to be a meat proxy for AI anyway.
AI, at least for now while it's still free/very cheap, enables producing a lot of very low-value content that in the past you never could have justified spending money and human labor on. The cost or time needed to make a poster or a flyer acted as a value-based gatekeeper. Today, it costs nothing to make an AI slop image and blast it out on social media, so we're drowning in it.
Depends on which economy the buyer and the seller respectively come from.
the problem is that AI does better than those students, especially if you don't know what good design looks like... which is most people
but of course this means the entire market will dry up because no one pays students anymore
Creativity does not have to be expensive to be good. Yall just dont want to bother dealing with it.
I was the person who "had to bother dealing with it" many years ago before we had AI, Canva, or even Adobe cloud.
I volunteered and designed a good amount of posters for student organizations.
Don't enjoy it but did it to help my peers and friends out.
I find it ironic that back then we had a lot of trouble finding people who were willing to design posters and promo media on print.
Now the comment section on this post has people mourning AI taking over poster making in 2026. Where was the help back then?
From the perspective of someone who had to burn the midnight oil to do it for years, trust me, I would rather not do it and spend that time with my family and friends. And judging from how hard it was to find others who were willing to do it, I think its a reasonable argument that most people were not actually willing to do the work either.
So mourn away but I wouldn't cry if I "missed out" on making posters. If we had AI back then, I would not take on any of those poster making requests.
8 replies →
For every human good art that is cheap I can show you ten that are not. The problem is you don't know which version you'd get. Someone charges less because they are unknown. Fixing AI art is much less hassle than human one.
This is like anything. If you want good and inexpensive it's going to be a pain in your arse one way or another.
Exactly. Sad to see another industry getting decimated by AI just to save a bit of cash.
5 replies →
These people just doesn't have a good taste, imo.
Damn, how did businesses survive decades without being able to pay some intern or someone in the office to quickly put up a poster? Like come on, claiming 'budget' is the issue here when I can see indie bands operating with twigs and some chewing gum figure out how to put together a poster for their band is embarassing.
You have the money, you just don't have the contacts or skills to find a good designer which charges you a fair price. Big design firms will rip you off. Their job is to get corruption contracts from the public sector or big enterprises, and then reward their insider later with a nice fake job.
Saying you don't have the money for a designer is a bit like saying you can't go on business trip because the company can't afford to purchase a jet airplane right now.
You said it - and the same is true for many of the other talents from Ai. I've worked with gobs of artists, accountant, MBAs, developers, appliance repair techs, and so on. Ai does a better job than most of them, but not as good as the best of them.
This is an excellent point, and it doesn't only apply to art/design.
In almost any intellectual domain, including coding, the models are already ahead of the average human. But instead, we compare them to the very best humans, which almost no one on the planet has access to.
$20 for a lot of access to better-than-average is a world-changingly good deal!
This reads like the opening scene of the Monkey’s Paw. Doubt it will feel like a good deal in the long run.
> they can tell they’re AI and point to things that the AI did “wrong” and a human artist would do better.
Pretty much all of the designers we contacted recently were using AI to draw. Especially on those kinds of cheap work. They are just a bit more professional in the prompting and can do final touch in Photoshop.
You’re absolutely right! (See what I did, there?)
I mentioned something similar, in a previous comment.
The sad part, is that the same thing is likely to happen to design, as is already happening with software development.
The junior training track is going to get the bottom ripped out. Established outfits like Pentagram will do fine, but lesser ones, like small design shops, are likely to get run out of business by AI image generation, which will improve quickly.
The problem is that these are the shops that train the designers that end up in companies like Pentagram.
Or only Ivy-League sheepskins will get junior jobs at the big studios, which will be the only ones left standing, when the dust settles.
If taste is all that's left you can't fault people for discriminting on taste
Totally agree. Opinions are cheap. People can be drawn to “horrible” art, and small artists - especially social media managers - right now are creating intentionally bad mspaint.exe 1994 aesthetics because AI art looks like it was created by real artists, and it’s the only way to differentiate
You can’t even differentiate it that way. AI generates perfect MS paint aesthetics
>I think it would be interesting to see if people could reliably distinguish between AI generated flyers and human made flyers
i think people can point those out pretty consistently for in-the-wild cheap posters, since the 2 types are often bad in different way
My take is most users (who generate these posters) are not aesthetically astute and/or care enough to put in more effort.
> I’ve worked with dozens of budget friendly designers on Fiverr and consistently get way worse results than I’ve gotten from AI models.
That makes sense given they're on Fiverr. However, Fiverr freelancers are now just AI prompters :) doesn't matter whether it's code or art.
To me, they look very much like Canva style designs. Some pre-existing design template that someone took and then smooshed their own dates and information into.
Yea these look bad you don't need to be a pro designer to see that.
This misses the point about complaints of AI slop. It’s not about “worse”, it’s about “distracting”. It’s about AI fingerprints overwhelming the consumer. It’s not too different from hiring a freelancer who does a blatant stylistic ripoff of a popular artist in an unflattering way: the consumer of the work sees the ripoff first, focuses on the ripoff, is unable to appreciate the message being delivered. AI slop is overwhelming and distracting to the consumer in that it communicates messages of laziness, disinterest, disregard for the underlying message. Whether this is true or not in every case, we’ve seen enough cases where we have to start by considering it. It’s the vehicle for scams and spam. It’s like sending an email that starts with “FIVE TRICKS TO HAVE BETTER SKIN” or any other meme spam line.
A human freelancer might do work that is technically worse. Worse can be distracting in ways that are, well… worse. But it’s different, it doesn’t tap into a collective cultural understanding of “AI slop.” It may communicate even more poorly, but it’s not the same problem.
It doesn't have to look "cartoony". Harness issue. Your 2026 models are trained on a sufficiently broad set of images that style is almost a solved problem.
Have you considered looking up designers you like and asking them instead of "budget friendly designers on Fiverr"?
At least for me, the enumerated svg-like icons give it away, but that's merely a prompt fix.
>but a small local event or business probably won’t have the budget to hire them or know where to find them.
And yet, somehow, up until what maybe 2024, every single small event or business in every local market around the earth managed to figure this out. I guess we've lost that ancestral knowledge of how this was possibly done and afforded in a few dozen months.
Maybe it's just me, but even on pure aesthetic reasons I would take a Comic Sans and clipart poster made in Word over the slop.
At this point I have some kind of a physical repulsion to the generated posters, and it's always easy to tell from the fontwork and the iconography, let alone illustrations if there are any.
Nah, AI cant design prooper pages, and posters. Period. Even someone with basic aesthetic skills and a knack for illustrations will create a much better postan, than these. Because you'll immediately recognize the human in them. AI has no soul, no experiences, it's just a primitive neural net.
The problem’s not so much that the posters are AI generated, but that they’re too crowded and unfocused. Their individual elements seem fine and look good, but when taken as a whole they feel wrong.
This may be a failure mode similar to juniors using AI and making it much harder for seniors to find the bugs, because the code actually looks good at first sight.
I don’t think the blog author actually has any design skills based on the prompts and the AI obviously can’t nudge them in the right direction or help them clarify their brief, like a real designer (i.e. not random online freelancers) would.
I’ve been diving into Ink Master highlights on YouTube lately. These are typically all excellent artists but they don’t always produce excellent work. I’ve seen some hands that could have come out of an early gen ai model permanently inked into someone’s skin.
I sure hope it’s better than some random person you paid $20
i would never go to an event that cares so little about people buying tickets they can't even put a pen to paper or just use a photograph. it reeks of laziness.
>Maybe, but a small local event or business probably won’t have the budget to hire them or know where to find them.
This is funny to read given I am currently on a Japan trip with 3 friends and we actively avoid every small restaurant that have AI generated images of their food. Using AI generated bullshit just shows that you really dont want to put in the work to produce something actually charming. Hell, we've seen a food menu drawn by a toddler and it was infinitely more sympathetic than all the AI generated Wagyu images.
You reminded me of this tweet I came across recently
https://x.com/tylerglaiel/status/2099382887045108154
This is exactly what I meant.
That'll be a real debate at the moment in Japan, I'll bet. Because the law is pretty strict when it comes to accurate advertising.
Given that any advertisement with AI generated food would be illegal there I don't imagine you have to avoid very many!
I just got back from a month there and recall perhaps 2 posters that may have been AI. I actually ran into several public art exhibits as well.
>Given that any advertisement with AI generated food would be illegal there
So you never actually walked the streets ive been in recently lol
I was in Japan in Spring, I didn't notice any AI-generated ads/menus (not implying you're lying, just curious if it's become a trend since then, or if it's a particular area).
But I recall this simple looking promotion: https://imgur.com/a/fbM8Akb . The photo looks professionally done, and not AI. Then again, maybe they googled for "cheesecake photo".
I just image searched for "cheesecake", I didn't find this photo in the results, but there are a few results where I now have to wonder "Is that AI?"
[flagged]
[dead]
Cool man, how good of a job would you do at your craft if I only gave you $5
To me if you ask to a 10 years old kid and give him a PC with Microsoft Paint on it it will you will have a much better result than any AI-generated option in the post. If there are graphics designer that produce a worse result of what AI creates, it's because they probably use AI as well.
The problem of AI generated stuff (we see the problem of manifests, but I'm a software engineer and with computer programs it's exactly the same thing) is that they immediately look non-human, and our brain trained itself to detect, and thus get irritated by, AI generated content.
It looks fake, it hurts to see, it seems fine at first glance fine but it's not, everyone seems identical because the AI is not, despite of the name, creative, it just a hyper complex copy/paste machine, and obviously the result just looks copy/paste as well.
> To me if you ask to a 10 years old kid and give him a PC with Microsoft Paint on it it will you will have a much better result than any AI-generated option in the post.
FWIW, statements like this are so patently ridiculous that it actually hurts your cause.
> To me if you ask to a 10 years old kid and give him a PC with Microsoft Paint on it it will you will have a much better result than any AI-generated option in the post.
Sorry, if it's a joke it doesn't land very well.
Before AI, if a 10yo did these posters for a school project, people would just tell their parents to not do the homework for their kid. These are far above what 99.9% 10yo can do.
> a 10 years old kid and give him a PC with Microsoft Paint
You'd run afoul of child labor protestors. I'd just prompt the AI to generate a poster in the style of a 10-year-old with Microsoft Paint.
Sure but why?
Outside of a small joy of the organizing committee, is an incrementally "better" (which is almost entirely subjective anyway) worth the trouvle?
AI irritates people. This is fine if you're making political cartoons or racist memes, but not so fine for ad copy.
2 replies →
This is provably false. AI YouTube thumbnails trounce human thumbnails (often nearly doubling the click-through rate according to A/B testing), and people rate AI art more highly than human art on average when they don't know that it's AI.
Just admit that you are scared of the future that's coming and it's eliciting irrational hatred, and that's causing you to lash out. At least that'd be honest and we'd understand where your coming from even if we didn't share your views.
> trounce human thumbnails (often nearly doubling the click-through rate according to A/B testing)
That stat sounds more than dubious. Do you have a reference for it that isn't published by someone with a vested interest in people using AI?
Not engaging with your second argument, it's just trollbait. But for your first argument, there is a big difference between info graphics trying to convey information and video thumbnails trying to trigger a click