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.
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.
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.
For example, you have to know about a style to know to ask for it or some variation on it.
LLMs are very good at satisfying the requirements you give them. They’re much worse at knowing which requirements should be challenged, reframed, or ignored because you don’t know enough about the field to know what actually matters. That’s why they’re such force multipliers for experts: the expert can spot when the model chose the wrong abstraction or checked every box and still produced something bad. A novice often can’t. I’d argue the model mostly raises the novice toward “average.”
“Tell it to push back” doesn’t really solve this either. Too little and you get “aye aye captain!” Too much and you get Opus 5 / claudise, where it seems compelled to find something wrong with everything.
I see this in a Home Assistant project I’ve mostly vibe coded. I can ask Codex to make the kitchen brighter on school days and it’ll happily implement something. But maybe an HA expert would say “you really shouldn’t model it this way.” Maybe they’d even question HA itself. The model could conceivably know that too, but it only sees a tiny slice of my world. There are infinite side quests it could raise, and a good professional’s real skill is knowing which one matters enough to interrupt you about and which 99% to silently ignore.
Very generous way to say "executive greed has drained bespoke design out of society. I've been seeing more videos on such a topic, but this one was by far the best one I've seen yet: https://youtu.be/HgjXjPP_p3s?is=yVsto8SCnY-SsnVY
(Just in case, don't let the thumbnail fool you. The car simply frames as it expands to general society).
Design-differentiated products still exist (Apple as mentioned, IKEA, Nike, Linear to name a few), but they're outnumbered in the current landscape and arguably still greedy.
I believe that was ultimately what my response wanted to emphasize, and partially the call to action of the video. There is great design out there, but you need to wander through oceans of slop to find it. I had no clue about "Superblocks" until that video.
Likewise, to link the ideas back to Herr; AI is creating an ocean of slop that will make it nearly impossible to find the truly innovative used of AI out there. Curation was already a hard problem pre-AI and this only increases such difficulty by magnitudes. Among reducing said slop (which is nearly impossible now), the call to action is to have proper tastemakers lead the charge and bring out good ideas. Not just ones that generate the most money. Curation by definition almost always lowers view traffic to increase customer satisfaction, and that's not something our ad-based datascape wants.
The more charitable perspective (that falls more important point #2) is simply that taste is different now among the modern billionaire. Someone who can wander onto a stage in a turtleneck and denim jeans simply won't be the type of person who wants a "loud and bold" car. But they might still want to say that they had Ferrari make it. Jony Ive's perspective on design may simply be the product of the people and environments he surrounded himself with.
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.
> 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
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.
(Canadian here. Not everything is shared across the Commonwealth, I guess.)
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.
Real designers would avoid them in the first place.
And that default look - that might not be shit either. Except we've now seen it repeated so many times that we're sick of it.
Do you think you will find good artists working for that fee?
I don't think so, unless they are working to prove a point -- that humans can be as good as AI.
And that's the problem:
Humans can be as good as AI, but they are much more expensive.
I suppose human artists will continue to exist, but they will be like chess players: they will continue to exist simply because they love art, but they won't be able to compete with AI.
ETA: less than 2 years.
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.
Sorry buf I'd take these posters over your “generally more agreeable ” homogeneous slop literally any day.
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.
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.
As someone who made posters in 2000, I respectfully disagree.
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...)
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.
It's not tracking a real thing as much as people would like to think.
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).
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.
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.
It’s easy to say that when you already know the answer. But my point is people frequently misattribute stuff as being AI generated when it wasn’t. The GPs Twitter example is proof of this. And you only have to look at the number of times people accuse someone of being AI on HN because they happen to use em dash or an Oxford comma (or any other writing style that was part of the corpus models were trained on), and it’s pretty clear that “obvious tells” are just guesswork.
There was a study years ago where a group of individuals were given white wine with red food colouring, and they were asked to describe the wine. All the participants described plumb and other notes that are exclusive to red wines.
These weren’t dumb people. And the people who claim to spot “obvious AI” aren’t dumb either. It’s just very easy to identify tells if you believe you already know the answer. Unfortunately that’s just how fucked up our human psychology is.
So, please forgive me, but this means that you are good at finding out some patterns in AI output. There are always a lot of false positive and negatives, and I haven’t found a convincing study showing that people are good at finding AI in general.
What helps is that the market is very concentrated so if you know GPT-isms and Claude-isms that’s basically the current situation covered. It does not mean that you can reliably identify AI in general.
There might be AI generated things in my every day life that I do not recognize as AI, but that's not what's being discussed.
I mean, this situation is a textbook case of ground for a lot of common fallacies, starting with confirmation bias. We need to remember that our brain wants to be tricked. If you think you are special, you are not. You’re just not aware of it and even more prone to falling into these traps.
They don't care about the truth, it's all just about being part of the right herd.
But if you grab an average person off the street they're overwhelmingly likely to be pretty daft and not know much about anything.
Just look at how many people in the US vote for that orange clown even after the complete farce of his previous term.
Maybe try differentiating a bit? You could see if there certain scenarios that leave room for a better outcome for both you and a less intelligent person. You might even learn something interesting.
Right now, I’d say you are painting with an overly broad brush.
P.S. Have you done any soul searching to see if this is largely a comforting thought that helps assuage the frustrations of dealing with the BS of life? If you are open to the idea, might be valuable.
It explains why religion is so prevalent - anyone with any amount of critical thinking ability can see that religion is a bunch of bullshit. Yet most people in the world are religious, because all it takes is someone with a little authority to tell people something and they'll just believe it and that's that, you can't reason them out of it because they didn't reason themselves into it. They were just born into this herd and that's where they intend to stay.
It explains why big "green" organizations are and have been against nuclear energy - even though nuclear energy has been the obvious answer to climate change the people who want the world to take climate change seriously have been against nuclear, despite the fact that nuclear was the obvious answer to climate change. They simply don't/didn't know that nuclear was clean energy, and they never took a few minutes to learn some stuff to realize that in fact nuclear energy is clean energy. Obviously it doesn't solve the entire problem but it would have been a huge improvement over all the coal we've been burning. But they didn't know, because they're a bunch of idiots who don't know anything about anything, they just parrot whatever they've been told and that's that and here we are.
And that's the explanation for everything. Politics is just a popularity contest. Whoever says the shit the hordes of sheep have been conditioned to want to hear, get elected. If you grab a random person off the street they most likely couldn't even tell you how bracket tax works but you can be sure as shit they'd have strong opinions about taxes. And those opinions will most likely be straight up factually wrong, based on an incorrect view of how taxes work.
Everyone's just wrong about everything, nobody knows anything about anything. A few people have a decent understanding of how things work but nobody listens.
And again yeah, it's not actionable. There's nothing to be done about this, it's just the way it is. I can't stop the entire human population from being a bunch of religious cultist morons. That's just what they are. But at least knowing that and accepting it helps me keep my sanity in a world where everyone makes the wrong decisions at every turn and everything is clearly going to shit while everyone's acting like everything's fine. Except of course all the inconsequential bullshit the sheep bicker about like immigration and taxes windmills and data centers and whatever else the media has them bickering about to distract them from the shit that actually matters.
Yeah, we simply should not forget that there is very different types of religions. Some religions, for example has it main belief that climate change is a big problem for the Earth and Humanity.
> It explains why big "green" organizations are and have been against nuclear energy - even though nuclear energy has been the obvious answer to climate change
Exactly. I mean my model explain that, not yours. Like in any other religion generally churches exists not to solve the MAIN PROBLEM, even if the religion says otherwise. Because churches are hierarchical structures, and on the top will end up pretty SMART people, who mainly focus on solving their personal problems, and not the MAIN PROBLEM of their religion. Often they even does not believe in existence of the problem at all.
> Whoever says the shit the hordes of sheep have been conditioned to want to hear, get elected.
I don't know. If we look at the elections of the "world's biggest fucking clown", it was more describing of his opponents. But he still got elected, twice.
this thread looks like it's folding in on itself
Doesn't guarantee there isn't a steel version of their straw out there that you're deliberately ignoring.
Have you read every single study about the last vaccine you took and what the positives and negatives are and where potential problems are and so on? Of course not, we trust that the experts have done enough. Same with learning physics or driving over a bridge and so many other things.
We're not going extinct, LOL. We're more resilient than cockroaches. As a species we will survive nuclear apocalypse, climate changes short of turning the planet into Venus and even the collapsing fertility rate.
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.
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
I think that's true enough for what it is but, as the other commenter also noted, a bit of a different topic here. The Monet example shows that people work backward from AI to direct conclusions about the quality of the work itself, which isn't the same as agreeing a work is by all appearances equivalent to Monet but lacking in underlying deliberation.
One can inform the other to be sure but that conversation exists in parallel with another conversation that's a straight one-shot assessment of quality.
That’s a bit separate to what I’m talking about, but I don’t think there are many of these people. I think this whole thing is about AI anxiety coupled with American social norms, and as soon as one of those things changes the artists are going to be left out in the cold again.
I think there are lots of people who value art for the ideas of the artist. There are also lots of people who think that they value something like quality of brushstrokes, and these are the same people, mostly. I mean they don't know what they like it for, but the raw graphical data is what's in front of them, so they ascribe their preference to its (supposedly) measurable qualities.
Hence this thing about I can tell it's AI because its graphical quality is bad. In a way that's correct though! The artist's ideas are hinted at in the brushstrokes (or whatever other graphical aspects). In the gen AI picture you get hints of a phony mind. It becomes hollow when you know that, or when you think you know that. It's not delivering the cultural experience, if the hints you pick up on are false.
What did you think about my other examples? (The bookshelf and the microwaved meal)
I think at least for your niece’s drawings example, you’d probably prefer AI art if you had to choose one or the other until the end of time, not just one or two drawings that go on your refrigerator.
I would definitely choose my niece’s drawing for all time. Do you have young family members? That seems like a bizarre perspective to me.
I’d go mad if the only art available was AI art as well!
Such as with RLHF-boosted writing from LLMs, where side by side comparisons of human vs. AI writing have been used as proof of revealed preference for AI. But an A/B test of a few sentences doesn't mean that someone would enjoy reading a 5000 word blog post in the same style, as the densely packed rhetorical flourishes become exhausting and repetitive tells start to jump off the page. Nor does it capture the signal/noise problem where despite technical ability and incredible verbosity, realization sets in that nothing in 2000 words has said anything at all while continually stringing the reader along. A side by side comparison with a few AI posters might be preferred in a five 5 minute test, but seeing the same visual elements from three frontier models in a loop on every surface for your entire life could quickly become actively repulsive.
And the problem with agency arises when limited freedom exists to truly make a different choice because the available options are externally determined. I've seen the argument made on HN that people's revealed preference is for AI maximalism, pointing to the fact that consumers keep buying products with AI, hundreds of billions of dollars are spent building new datacenters every year, workers (including creatives!) and students report using AI for daily work, etc.
But consumers aren't really given true choices that could reveal a real preference. The tech giants behind the phone duopoly have crammed AI features into both OS choices. With few exceptions every large company made an "AI strategy" their main focus since 2023 and competed to put chatbots and GenAI features into every inch of their product lines. Hyperscalers started a bidding war on datacenter buildouts in the expectation of future demand back when really only ChatGPT had any real market penetration outside the tech industry. Students and workers feel pressure to keep up with their peers by using AI to avoid getting fired/worse grades, artists struggling for work worry clients will go elsewhere if they take the time for their normal process.
Revealed preference when used haphazardly could be used to come to absurd conclusions like "people want to get scammed", "people like to be overweight", etc. Broadly and incautiously applied it just becomes a way to justify any given status quo as inherently optimally and reflective of collective will. With a creepy paternalistic implication that regardless of what you think you believe, forcing you do something against your will is secretly what you really want, and will make you happy even if you pretend not to realize it.
It's pretty questionable if a preference truly exists as "revealed" for something like AI art when it's preconditioned on active deception. An AI art-hater who gets tricked into picking AI doesn't mean they're lying/confused and actually love it. That sort of reasoning can get uncomfortably close to an anti-democratic argument for mass manipulation of people who can't be trusted to advocate in their own best interests.
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.
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.
But, then, people did this for digital editing before. Insisted there were "clear signs of photoshop", from people who never opened that app.
One commenter really nailed it[1]: "We didn't get worse at judging art. We just got better at doubting everything."
Did you even realize basically all commercial images you've seen for the last 30 years were already heavily modified?
Most people aren't aware of the prevalence of stock imagery during the 2000s. AI is just synthetic stock images, which I have zero problem with.
Artists with taste are the ones creating the best AI images, just they were the ones who photoshopped the best things out of stock images when that was the main mode, and just as they created the best stuff when everything was manual typesetting and dark room photography.
In reality it is seeping into our lives at an alarming rate which I worry is disrupting our shared sense of reality (which was already tenuous.)
AI has capabilities that were impossible (or very difficult before.) You could easily generate a realistic video of me saying terrible things or kicking a puppy or doing a pornographic act. You could clone my voice and call my grandma asking for money. It’s very hard to tell what is real now and it will get harder as the capabilities improve.
These tools are also much more accessible than photo editing software. Before, few people had the skill to create realistic fakes. Now anyone can do it. This has led to a flood of fake images, videos, and text online. This crowds out real humans and makes it hard to know what is real. My older relatives especially have Facebook feeds filled with fake content they think is real.
The capabilities combined with the scale make it hard to know what is real in a way Photoshop never did.
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.
That's prejudice.
Do you think it’s unfair for people to dislike AI generated art based on their principles?
And no - I don't think it's fair to call the art bad when in fact what you mean is you don't like the way it was made. Saying "I don't like AI art" is not the same as "This piece is shit", which is how it is almost always framed.
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.
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.
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.
Kinda pricey, though.
On a side note, I wanted to link that collection here, but unfortunately there's no hyperlink, it just opens in a popup. You'll have to scroll down to the bottom of their home page to find it. I hope for their sake they just overlooked this one thing, because if designers don't see the role of hyperlinks in user experience, I can't take them seriously.
They had a structure, where each studio was run by a partner, and had its own specialty. Almost a separate company.
We worked with the San Francisco one, which specialized in digital design (looks like it’s no longer around, or transitioned to an independent company). We used them for graphic design. We used DDO (they are still around[0]), for interaction design (we worked with both, simultaneously). It was quite an experience, and taught me a great deal about integration of professional designers, into a technical project. I still use a lot of what I learned, to this day.
They had that “AI vibe,” back then, so I guess we know where the LLMs got some of their training materials.
Their Web sites have always been like that. I’m assuming that part of the reason, is to discourage scraping, and another, is to be fairly pretentious. There was quite a bit of showmanship, back then, and I have no reason to think that it’s any less, these days. They are certainly not alone. New York is filled with studios like that. I know a chap that designs top-end jewelry, and is almost a caricature. On any given day, his outfits cost more than my car. It seems to work. He makes a lot of money, so someone takes him seriously.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Real estate is interesting because they seem to be really getting into using AI to stage individual houses. So I guess on the same vein maybe someone will try making an add with AI that shows some car driving down your local mainstreet or at some scenic location nearby your ip address that you might have positive associations with. Or maybe even your own home-street and parking in your driveway and you (or facebook you from 10 years ago when you had that hipster-moustashe because you haven't updated your photo) opens the door with a big smile on your face).
Seems crazy, but who knows.
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.
But I don't see why it couldn't replace thousands, with design/content factories.
So it could be 99-99.9% (leaving all the money for the top 0.1%).
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.
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.
What? What are you comparing this pre-AI 2020s code to? 90s and 00s code for sure was worse.
Yes, we lost speed and resource usage but regular people don't care enough to pay for that or to punish offending apps in the marketplace.
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.
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.
I think modern day life has had two major paradigm shifts that will make this potebtisl "real human(TM)" marketing not emerge among corporate, though. Definitely among smaller business (I'm already seeing it in my field), but not larger onesexcept that generally instead of realising we all have enough of we share, we raise the threshold of what we consider to be enough comfort and stuff.
1. Despite the legal insistence, corporations are not people, and they do not have "taste" to adjust to. Nor do the ways the leaders act and behave make it seem like they feel the company's actions and reputation reflects onto them. This is surprisingly a huge contrast from characters like Trump who traditionally place much importance on legacy and image and use that to shape their mannerisms and actions, aiming for a positive reaction (at least among his audience).
So there's no point in a new marketing scheme that will likely cost a lot more to not receive a lot more. Serving as cheaply as possible is too big a draw, and there's little human(TM) factors to divert from that. Which leads directly into the 2jd point
2. The modern hundred-millionaire/billionaire no longer "participates" in society. There's a decent video that gives an overview of this phenomenon, but I don't think it's a huge revelation to suggest that a billionaire who can be anywhere in the world within a day will truly feel like they are a part of their community the way, say, a Hollywood star would have personal ties to keep LA functional for them. And their social circles are so tiny that they are willing to travel a lot in order find such people.
In this lens, why would such people care about the taste and culture of the common citizen, Unless it's PR to get them more money? They don't go to the same stores (or go to stores at all themselves), they aren't participating nor hosting community events in town, they aren't (usually) performing the same kinds of recreation as their non–rich neighbors. They've already managed to completely divide themselves out from such people, so why care about standing out among them?
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.
Does a restaurant that doesn't grow its own vegetables "too lazy or too cheap?"
That is a bizarre stance
I know plenty of people (including myself) who pay for good human artwork :)
Literally nobody is saying that, what are you talking about
I suspect it would do quite a convincing job.
Though it's fairly unconvincing at handwriting.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The first one I clicked on is at a stock photo site that says:
Every visual at iStock is crafted through human expertise, creativity, and ingenuity. We do not allow AI-generated visuals in our library.
Did you even look?
Remember when this sort of ascending tricolon was supposed to be a dead giveaway for LLM-written prose?
I suspect that what drives the compulsive lying and exaggeration is that they know what LLMs can actually do is not worth the development and operating costs (at least for now), so, like Bernie Madoff, they pretend that they're more capable than they are in the hopes that the next round of investment will somehow bridge the gap and let them actually produce what they've been falsely promising their investors they can do, and make the whole thing worthwhile.
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.
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.
https://www.theverge.com/gadgets/931347/trump-mobile-t1-phon...
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
Nice no true Scotsman fallacy. PS is a "real" artist tool.
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.
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.
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.
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
Would you consider me to have "created" Billie Jean if I type "eighties music" into a music search engine and select "Michael Jackson" from the list. Or to have "designed a logo" if I pay a human to design some logos for me and pick one.
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.
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.
Sadly, if it hadn’t gone on to DaVinci, I wouldn’t be sure.
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)
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.
The worst generative AI posters and restaurant menus I'm seeing from newer small businesses do not instill the same feeling that I'm getting generic-like value. To keep with the drug analogy, they feel like the combo pills you find somewhere in the back of a gas station which combine 10+ random supplements to help with 20+ different symptoms. Especially for new restaurants where real reviews are limited, menus with terrible AI generated food drawings really give me the same ick - that they might not be providing any good value at all.
However, i do admit that part of this is also that i live in an area where there is tons of competition for most cuisines I'm interested in, so I can use menu quality as a differientiating factor in the first place. If enough places around me were using sloppy AI menus i would probably ignore it.
I'm saying I don't particularly value businesses that focus on things that are low impact for me. I'd rather my barista focus on sourcing good beans and making good coffee than paying someone to do a fancy custom menu for them. We see this all the time when we visit new areas. It's considered naive to follow whatever looks most glitzy -- every seasoned traveler will tell stories about all the tourist traps, and how the real quality is the hole-in-the-wall place all the locals gather.
What I'm saying is we shouldn't conflate quality with marketing and advertising, which is what posters are. You seem dead set on doing so anyway, and I'm not sure why.
AI-generated visuals aren't the first to go through this. I'd say the early-to-mid 90's "desktop publishing" went through this too - as soon as everyone could make ads and flyers cheaply with Word, everyone did.
If you can tell that it's AI, that's probably because it is low effort. Higher-effort attempts pass more easily.
(Of course, that also requires an understanding that there are ways to apply effort to making a short request; and believing that it would make a difference; and noticing for yourself that the first output is bad; and trying. Quite a lot of people seem to lack at least one of these.)
It won't die off until AI stops being used with low effort. Which it is the majority the time used for.
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.
Among many other things, it's about "am I getting scammed". So my mind needs to develop called ID in some sense. Not a perfect indicator, but enough to protect me. That can open me up to criticism as being overly cynical. And my response is: yes, that's what a low trust society does to people. That's the point.
Yes, the fact that we are in a low trust society makes us behave we do. Can we change this? Should we even try?
I've seen societies band together in the face of (acute) natural disasters (floods, wildfires...) or big disasters like wars, but how do we get to — if not high trust — not-low trust society when all is good and is it even worth pursuing?
It's perfectly possible. Another aspect of humanity pointed out to me from others is that we are surprisingly sensitive not to the current "quality of life", but to the rate of change in that QoL. So we don't necessarily need to fix all of humanities woes to restore trust, we need to get on a trajectory where people believe a better future is coming. That optimism and morale makes all the difference in building momentum towards restoring trust.
But whether we should ultimately comes down to your own personal paradigm. Do you feel you succeed when you reach your goals and lifestyle you desire, or do you get more satisfaction helping others succeed and survive where you can? Would you rather feel more secure wandering around your neighborhood, or are you fine paying for extra protection (directly or indirectly) to get by your day-to-day? Do you prefer a variety of public places to take your family to or would you rather have a nicer dwellings to invite friends over to? There's no correct answer to such questions, but they affect the trust of your community.
>how do we get to — if not high trust — not-low trust society when all is good
Not to sound snide, but: you increase trust by doing actions that make people more trustful. There's no magic to building trust, but it's also not complicated. You simply perform genuine, intentional actions made primarily to help others. I won't say altruistic, but the more altruistic the better the effect.
To break it down a bit more, I'd say there's 3 main layers of trust to build: local, institutional, and societal. Unless you have outsized influence already and a passion to lead the charge, you generally need the lower layer's trust improved before it expands to the next layer.
1. in your local community, with people you interact with in your day-to-day. Simply being more available to meeting up with people and doing small actions to assist helps to build up trust. As well as in what kinds of activities and groups you join to meet such people. It's the layer you most likely have the most power over
2. in the institutional level, to influence structures you directly interact with. The school your kids goes to, the emergency services, the platforms you consume media on, the businesses you go to regularly, your local town initiatives. Having trust that these systems (at the bare minimum) aren't actively trying to make you or your family worse off builds trust that the structures around your immediate community will improve and benefit everyone. Many of these are influenced by local policy, either through coalitions to get such proposals to leadership or getting leaders in who care about such factors. They can't do something like giving people a 4-day workweek, but it can make a park cleaner or create more/better public transportation.
3. Then on the societal level, to influence wider culture well beyond your sphere. This is all the larger level thinking concerning economy, technology, environment, this topic here on the trustworthiness of AI generated posters, etc. that the internet often talks about (which make sense, as a medium well beyond your sphere), so I won't need to expand on this much. This is pretty much exclusively larger policy issues to enact in laws, so influencing wider state/federal law requires larger populism movements.
bit of a problematic argument in this context given that the entire usage of generative AI rests on people's unwillingness to do just that
I want the products of it (how many phones with lithium batteries in those protests), but not the side effects.
Which is not to say these are wrong perspectives to hold, but it's important to understand where the root of the complaint is before you try to come up with generic solutions.
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.
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」".
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.
> About half of Americans said in the June survey that AI will worsen people’s ability to think creatively and form meaningful relationships with others. Far fewer said AI will make these things better.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/03/12/key-findi...
“about half” surely objectively qualifies as “a lot”.
> I can also say "a lot of people really like AI-generated arts" and that would be true as well.
Yes but without the corresponding negative. If someone who likes AI generated art sees some human created art they don’t think “gross, why didn’t they use AI to do that?”. So for something like advertising using AI will alienate some potential customers. Not using AI will alienate no one.
If most people aren’t shareholders but instead workers whose jobs are threatened by AI, we should expect this response.
It has nothing to do with artists, it has everything to do with trying to mount a collective response to the apparent threat, poorly expressed as crowds tend to do.
This is a form of the broken window fallacy. Society is not worse off when production requires less labor, any more than it's worse off when someone uses an open source library rather than paying someone to reimplement it.
I’m not sure I see it, can you elaborate?
The narrative we're seeing around AI and current automation isn't "we're going to automate one category of jobs". If it were then sure, we could be relatively confident that the excess labor from that industry would be absorbed by other segments
But that's not what the future looks like to me. The future to me looks like "we want to automate a large majority of labor"
So what then? If tons of labour is displaced then the Broken Window Fallacy doesn't really apply, because it is based on the assumption that there will always be something for displaced labour to do.
Call it the Excess Labor Corollary. If there's no way to absorb excess labor in other segments, then what.
Or of course, a few billionaires could hoard the wealth.
There's a Wikipedia page about it.
We could be in a post scarcity economy now, except that generally instead of realising we all have enough of we share, we raise the threshold of what we consider to be enough comfort and stuff.
It definitely could be. With current trajectory as of now, do you think it will be?
>except that generally instead of realising we all have enough of we share, we raise the threshold of what we consider to be enough comfort and stuff.
I see the opposite sentiment. I see previous basic necessities further out or reach then they were last generation. People aren't raising their standards, they are sinking towards poverty.
But then their worries are dismissed because they can get a flatscreen TV for 200 dollars. A TV that is likely feeding your data back to corporate to make thousands off you.
Like, if we all settled for a 1950s British living standard, using current manufacturing technology, we could achieve that while everyone works a little bit less.
But, we'd prefer to keep labouring and have nicer things.
And your theoretical implies we have choice in the matter. I'm sure many would in fact take a smaller home with less amenities over a modern home with cheap appliances. Not that I'd actually be given that choice given my family lineage, but the general living standard of the 50's was quite high. I doubt the act of AC and the lack of knowledge of abestos are the things that made housing skyrocket over the decades.
So here you never have to pay anyone to fix your windows, because they fix themselves, but conversely nobody will give you money to fix their windows! And then you have to pay your self-fixing windows a rent in tokens without an income.
That's a pretty big leap.
Society is definitely worse off when people who exchange their labor for capital have no opportunities to do so
Not objectively in every situation. But that does seem to be the case and objective here.
Not to mention, there’s a reason why AI is seen as cheap and lazy… because it is! There’s no good parallel to vaccines here.
Not a perfect analogy, but adding some bait that does indeed work for grabbing attention can of course be criticized.
This whole conversation makes me want to throw up
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).
It’s their job, their source of income (or they’re aspiring to it). Making bait thumbnails is a necessary evil. If they don’t they’re leaving money on the table for no reason.
If they AB test some thumbnails and the AI ones get more views/engagement then of course they are going to do that.
I think the overall premise of “if AI thumbnails are even getting more engagement, it must be from haters” is faulty to begin with. It just fits your personal narrative. We simply don’t know.
> It’s their job, their source of income
You seemed to be reacting to my low opinion of the practices of attention dredgers, as if I'm bad for holding that opinion and a should respect all career choices and income generation attempts. Perhaps I read that quite wrong.
I didn’t say anything like that, you pulled that feeling out of yourself.
I’m just pointing out that they are doing it for money. Most white collar workers are using AI as part of their job these days.
There are plenty of channels I'll watch semi-regularly that have god-awful thumbnails. But the same is true of almost everything that I immediately click "don't recommend channel" on.
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.
Thumbnails, same as everything that is supposed to attract attention, have styles that change over time due to saturation and fatigue.
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.
(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 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.
The author then picked them out, not the AI. For curiosity I assume.
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.
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.
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.
but of course this means the entire market will dry up because no one pays students anymore
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.
I can totally see how doing more than a couple would start to feel like work, but having one or two experiences like that was awesome.
we should have asked the arts students! (and find a way to return the favor) i did not think about that.
that being said there were some intense rivalry between various studies, my presence may not be have been well received.
and judging how i am here, you can guess what i studied :-)
thank you for this. really feel like i got a missing piece of a puzzle reading this.
I don't see the word free here. Of course you'd have trouble finding people to do anything for free.
It's not that hard to understand. Here, I've linked it for your convenience: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49765890
Wait, we've gone from "pay the local artists" because AI shows you're "lazy and cheap" and "don't care about your brand".
And now whatever my 7-year-old draws is good enough.
My only conclusion reading these threads is that folks come in with their mind made up, and will argue absolutely anything so long as it amounts to "AI bad".
If ChatGPT churns out your ad you've signaled nothing. And that's obviously why you can criticize AI for every imaginable reason. That's indeed the difference and why people, regardless of how 'good' your AI art will be, will attempt to hide it, because it defeats the purpose of advertising as such.
It is not, in fact, more pleasant to look at.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So you never actually walked the streets ive been in recently lol
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?"
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.
FWIW, statements like this are so patently ridiculous that it actually hurts your cause.
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.
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.
Outside of a small joy of the organizing committee, is an incrementally "better" (which is almost entirely subjective anyway) worth the trouvle?
I walk past countless of such arts everyday, none of them registered after even 15 mins. Maybe you have better taste, but don't try to project your opinion as that of the majority.
Sometimes that's okay, but probably not in ad copy.
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.
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?