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Comment by huehehue | Hacker News Reader

There's this FinTech ad on the NYC subway right now. I can't remember the company, but the entire ad is just a picture of a guitar and some text.

Anyway, the guitar is AI generated, and it's really bad. There are 5 strings, which morph into 6 at the headstock. There's a trem bar jammed under the pickguard, somehow. There's a randomly placed blob on the guitar that is supposed to be a knob/button, but clearly is not. The pickups are visually distorted.

It's repulsive. You're trying to sell me on something, why would you put so little effort into your advertising? Why would you not just...take a picture of a real guitar? I so badly want to cover it up.

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> You're trying to sell me on something, why would you put so little effort into your advertising? Why would you not just...take a picture of a real guitar?

Is this not evident? Because using AI is much cheaper and faster. Instead of finding the right guitar, paying for a good photographer, location, decoration, and all the associated logistics, a graphics designer can write a prompt that gets you 90% of the vision, for orders of magnitude less cost and time. AI is even cheaper and faster than using stock images and talented graphic designers, which is what we've been doing for the past few decades.

All our media channels, in both physical and digital spaces, will be flooded with this low-effort AI garbage from here on out. This is only the beginning. We'll need to use aggressive filtering and curation in order to find quality media, whether that's done manually by humans or automatically by other AI. Welcome to the future.

I was able to find a similar public domain image in all of 5 seconds, so neither faster nor cheaper in this case.

In fact, it's not hard to imagine people using AI tools even if they're slower, more expensive, and yield worse quality results in the long run.

"When all you have is a hammer...".

Just need to add a hand with 6 fingers strumming it and it could be a meme.

Reminds me of the new Coca Cola Christmas ad which is equally off-putting.

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