Hacker News Reader

Comment by leovingi | Hacker News Reader

And it's not just vulnerability reports that are affected by this general trend. I use social media, X specifically, to follow a lot of artists, mostly for inspiration and because I find it fun to share some of the work that other artists have created, but over the past year or so I find that the mental workload it takes for me to figure out if a particular piece of art is AI-generated is too much and I start leaning into the safe option of "don't share anything that seems even remotely suspicious unless I can verify the author".

The amount of art posts that I have shared with others has decreased significantly, to the point where I am almost certain some artists who have created genuine works simply get filtered out because their work "looks" like it could have been AI-generated... It's getting to the point where if I see anything that is AI it's an instant mute or block, because there is nothing of value there - it's just noise clogging up my feed.

View on HN

Genuine question; if you cant tell, why does it matter?

It's a fair question and one that I've asked myself as well.

I like to use the example of chess. I know that computers can beat human players and that there are technical advancements in the field that are useful in their own right, but I would never consistently watch a game of chess played between a computer and a human. Why? Because I don't care for it. To me, the fun and excitement is in seeing what a HUMAN can achieve, what a HUMAN can create - I apply the same logic to art as well.

As I'm currently learning how to draw myself, I know how difficult it is and seeing other people working hard at their craft to eventually produce something beautiful, after months and years of work - it's a shared experience. It makes me happy!

Seeing someone prompt an AI, wait half-a-minute and then post it on social media does not, even if the end result is of a reasonable quality.

But how can't you tell?

To me AI generated art without repeated major human interventions is almost immediately obvious. There are things it just can't do.

For the most part I can actually tell, but it also depends on the style of the art. A lot of anime-inspired digital images are immediately obvious - AI tends to add quite a lot of "shine" to its output, if that makes sense. And it's way too clean, sterile even. And it all looks the same.

But when the art style is more minimalist or abstract, I find it genuinely difficult to notice a difference and have to start looking at the finer details, hence the mental workload comment. Often times I'll notice an eye not facing the right direction or certain lines appearing too "repetitive", something I rarely see in the works of human artists. It's difficult to explain without actual inage examples in front of me.

> To me AI generated art without repeated major human interventions is almost immediately obvious.

You can’t know that for sure. It’s the toupée fallacy.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Toupee_fallacy

That's a kind of survivorship bias though; sure, 100% of AI art that you identified as AI art turned out to be AI art, but what about the ones you didn't realise were AI art? It's the unknown unknowns. Was this comment written by AI?

The success rate of AI evading detection will only increase; the issue with "too many fingers" was solved years ago, and there's probably companies actively working on avoiding AI detection already. And on detecting it. It's the new spam / anti-spam, virus / anti-virus arms race.

All the current active chess players learned by playing the computer repeatedly.

So what the human is achieving in this case is having been trained by AI.

> As I'm currently learning how to draw myself, I know how difficult it is and seeing other people working hard at their craft to eventually produce something beautiful, after months and years of work - it's a shared experience. It makes me happy!

Today I learned: LLMs and their presence in society eventually force one to producing/crafting/making/creating for fun instead of consuming for fun.

All jokes aside, you got the solution here. ;)

An olympic weightlifter doing clean and jerk with 150kg is worthy of my attention. A Komatsu forklift doing the same is not.

> A Komatsu forklift doing the same is not ... [worthy of attention]

It is, if you're managing a warehouse; then it's a wonderful marvel. And it is a hidden benefit to everyone who receives cheaper products from that warehouse. Nobody cares if it's a human or the Komatsu doing the heavy lifting.

Well warehouse mangers excluded....

You just made me realise why many people have trouble with analogies, to the point it seems they are arguing in bad faith. You have to consider the context the analogy is being applied to.

It is patently obvious (though clearly not to every one) that the person you’re replying to is describing a situation of seeing a human weightlifter VS a mechanical forklift doing the same in a contest, for entertainment. The analogy works as a good example because it maps to the original post about art.

When you change the setting to a warehouse, you are completely ignoring all the context and trying to undermine the comment on a technicality which doesn’t relate at all to the point. If you want to engage with the analogy properly, you have to keep the original art context in mind at all times.

And you're failing to understand that people can understand the analogy, and think that it fails to capture the entire situation, and so extend the analogy to make it obvious (although clearly not to everyone) that the analogy is lacking, and not very convincing.

A deliberate misreading is not the same as engaging with the analogy in good faith and your reply here seems to indicate that you’ve done the former while simultaneously engaging in some name calling.

What name calling?

> people can understand the analogy, and think that it fails to capture the entire situation, and so extend the analogy to make it obvious (although clearly not to everyone) that the analogy is lacking, and not very convincing.

Of course, that could definitely happen. My point is that I don’t think it did in this case, and that it stretched the analogy so far beyond its major points, that it made it clear to me a pattern that I have seen several times before but could never pinpoint clearly.

I am grateful to that comment for the insight. Understanding how people may distort analogies will force me to create better ones for more productive discussions.

There was no distortion. You seem to want people to only take the desired implication, and not think too much more about it. But if you instead think for a second, you'll see that the analogy was crafted to send a message that is incorrect and limited. Rather than trying to create better analogies to handcuff a reader into your viewpoint, you might instead stop for a moment and see why this analogy wasn't actually as insightful as it might appear at first glance. And maybe even appreciate how my response shed light about that limitation. There are indeed people who get great entertainment out of machines that do heavy lifting, and they don't care how much a person can lift.

> the analogy was crafted to send a message that is (…) limited.

All analogies are limited. That’s the point of an analogy: to focus on a shared element.

https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/978019...

> There are indeed people who get great entertainment out of machines that do heavy lifting, and they don't care how much a person can lift.

But crucially not the person making the analogy. They didn’t say a lifting machine would be uninteresting to everyone, only that it isn’t worth their (the commenter’s) time. They made an analogy to explain what they themselves think, not to push their point of view as ultimate universal truth.

And my reply was to expand the context to show that there are people who feel otherwise. And yet you insist that my opinion is illegitimate and a "distortion". You've dug your heels in, and refuse to see that you had blinders on.

> You have to consider the context the analogy is being applied to.

But that particular reply did not constrain itself to the context. It implied that a forklift lifting 150kg is not interesting at all. Which offends those of us who do appreciate watching heavy machinery do its work. That explains the unavoidable kneejerk replies of "actually, it is [interesting]".

I think this is actually a good counterpoint to something that OP missed. It's not that it's not great that a Komatsu can also do it. Both are great. But we need to have the appropriate expectations, to end up with the feeling of appreciation. In the AI case, the art looks like "human art", and often it's also presented as such. Then, learning that actually AI did it is akin to betrayal. But actually people like to appreciate a whole lot of artful things that people didn't, or only partially "did": electronic music, the sounds and visuals of nature, emergent behavior of things like the game of life, visual output of algorithms, and so on.

Much of what makes art fun is human effort and show of skill.

People post AI art to take credit for being a skilled artist, just like people posting others art as their own. Its lame.

If I am to be a bit controversial among artists; we're exposed to so much good art today that most art posted online is "average" at best. (The bar is so high that it takes 20+ years to become above average for most)

Its average even if a human posted it but fun because a human spent effort making something cool. When an ai generates average art its ... just average art. Scrolling google images to look at art is also pretty dull, because its devoid of the human behind.

To continue your point, following the human doing it is also infinitely more rewarding because you can witness their progress.

Definitely very fun...

But I think thats less generally applicable. There is alot of the online art community and market that is really circular; people who like art do art and buy/commission art from others they follow and know.

That market will likley never disappear even if AI fully surpass humans; because the specific humans were the point all along.

But I think my previous comment applies more broadly beyond that community.

A human artist puts in work and passion to create beautiful art from almost nothing. It brings them joy that their art brings someone joy. Every art piece has a story behind it, sharing their art with others gives them motivations to not only continue doing it and bless the world with more art but it also gives them feedback that yes this art is liked by someone out there. This feedback loop is part of what creates healthy civilizations.

For the same reason dealing in counterfeit money matters — just because I can't tell it's fake doesn't mean the person I try to pay won't know or care. If your reputation is your currency, you don't want to damage it by promoting artwork that other people know is AI generated, so it's likely better to play it safe.

One of the reasons why people react so badly to AI art is because they encounter it in a context that implies human art. Then the discovery becomes treachery, a breach of trust. Not too much unlike having sex lovingly, only to discover that there was no love at all. Or people being nice to someone, but not meaning it, and them finding this out.

It's about implications, and trust. Note how AI art is thriving on platforms where it's clearly marked as such. People then can go into it by not having the "hand crafted" expectation, and enjoying it fully for what it is. AI-enabling subreddits and Pixiv comes to mind for example.

It's tantamount to sharing a forgery and not caring because you "can't tell".

Volume.

It's like spam. Something like art used to have a value, like a message, because someone had to go to the trouble of making it. Now, nothing matters or has value because it's a flood of meaninglessness, like spam, so it stops mattering whether you can tell if it's a scam or whether maybe some random person DOES have a neat idea for stopping my back from hurting.

That person, and any artist, is now out of luck, because of volume. There are too many cheap reasons to pretend to be them, and like spam it's just unmanageable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com