Comment by glenstein

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.

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.

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

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.

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

> knowing it was AI irrespective of anything else was enough to think it was bad.

That's prejudice.

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.