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Comment by tivert | Hacker News Reader

> Their solution has been to develop satellites made mostly of wood, which will burn completely upon reentry.

I like how the Google image search for "japan wooden satellite" (https://www.google.com/search?q=japan+wooden+satellite&udm=2) is gummed up with garbage AI generated images of satellites with wooden solar panels. This wooden Borg cube with off-kilter panels is my favorite: https://indianspacetechnology.com/wooden-satellite-lignosat-.... This one is also great: https://www.universetoday.com/161473/building-a-satellite-ou.... I guess the satellite went back in time to the Cretaceous period, where North America had an inland sea?

The future is looking bright, guys!

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Without AI you'd still be looking at dozens of artists' mockups of wooden satellites because they have to put something at the top of the blog post or news article to catch viewer attention.

Seriously - have people forgotten what so much of the Internet looked liked prior to just a few years ago? That is to say, exactly the same? SEO spam, quick artist mockups, mass-generated crap.

When it takes actual effort to create something, you tend to think about what exactly you are creating ahead of time. Time commitment and opportunity cost mean that the resulting work is a combination of both your raw mechanical effort and critical thought (both ahead of time and during the actual work).

> Without AI you'd still be looking at dozens of artists' mockups of wooden satellites

No, that's a false equivalence. The artists' mockups wouldn't be this bad. They'd either have gotten a real photo or based their artwork on one.

Now Google Images is flooded with images generated in two minutes from half-assed prompts.

> because they have to put something at the top of the blog post or news article to catch viewer attention.

They do not. That's just a current-year web design tic, which "AI" will probably kill.

> current-year web design tic

IIUC it's more that you do it to expand the page-inches on social media so that it's more likely readers will click through to your story, because social media displays the preview banner.

Kagi returns basically the same result set including the AI generated slop, which is disappointing.

I'm not sure how they could do any better. AI is enabling the degradation of the public web, and that's what they search.

Pretty soon the web's going to be one big Mikkelsen Twins ebook.

Well, here's an actual photo they could have used: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2024/05/29/japan/science-h...

And here is an earlier rendering from 2021: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2021/12/31/national/japan-...

And it only took a simple Google search to find, from a reputable news source.

This really says it all. Theres the right thing and then 1000 signs pointing every which way saying Eat At Joe's like a bugs bunny cartoon.

Blaming AI for the current trajectory of the Internet is like blaming the Internet for the current trajectory of public discourse & trust - they're both only instruments for the real reasons.

I don't buy the whole "tools are neutral, it's the people who are good or bad" responsibility-dodge argument. It's definitely true that many tools can be used for good or bad, certainly. But the people who create a tool should consider how they expect people will use their tool, and the ease at which people can use it for bad. This is pretty much Engineering Ethics 101.

When you zoom out though, this engineering problem is a cultural and political one.

If you are designing apps in an environment of scammers and shameless grifters, the options for the societies you can build are reduced.

Focusing on the core issue of "how can we stop people from destroying nice things" is critical for society-scale engineering, as it frees ethical engineers to create more magnificent tools.

Ignoring law / politics / etc, and solely focusing on "how can I design this given presence of grifters" is muted engineering.

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