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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

With the notable exception of gpt-image-1, discussion about AI image generation has become much less popular. I suspect it's a function of a) AI discourse being dominated by AI agents/vibe coding and b) the increasing social stigma of AI image generation.

Flux Kontext was a gamechanger release for image editing and it can do some absurd things, but it's still relatively unknown. Qwen-Image, with its more permissive license, could lead to much more innovation once the editing model is released.

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There's no social stigma to using AI image generation.

There is what's probably better described as a bullying campaign. People tried the same thing when synthesizers and cameras were invented. But nobody takes it seriously unless you're already in the angry person fandom.

In practice AI image generation is ubiquitous at this point. AI image editing is also built into all major phones.

Useless AI art (which is almost all of it) is not like the camera or the synthesizer, it's closer to when 50-60yo moms were sharing Minion memes on facebook: cringe and tasteless. It getting better won't make it more accepted, it will simply make people suspect of actual art until no one really gives a chance to any of it.

I think it’s revolutionary. My use case has been creating visuals for use in various VDMX workflows. One cool trick I’ve found has been generating starter images with green screens and then putting those into my local LTX video creation workflow, then using VDMX built a chroma layer with the green screen video and go from there, lots and lots of creative fun. So no not useless AI art.

I've qualified with "useless" for a reason. It's cool if you've got a novel use case, but so far I think most uses of AI art are either uncanny filler for blogs and slides; or a driver for the deprofessionalization and commoditization of artworks, with AI art producers flooding art sites to fight regular artists for attention, and industry forcing artists to paint over AI generated works (already common in mobile games) until their cheaper substitutes can replace them, and their next job forces them to set art aside.

Your argument might actually be suggesting that you don't like art in general more than that there is a stigma against AI. If there is no value in artisanal art that differentiates it from AI-produced works and therefore both will be discarded as the quality converges, what was supposed to be the value in art to start with?

So far, the times had allowed artworks to be proxies for the artistry behind them; the artwork itself conveyed enough information to appreciate it. But as forgery of the art process itself spreads, that signal disappears and artworks, out of context, simply are. The artwork is still necessary, but now insufficient, to understand and appreciate its artistry, because there might not be any, or at least not any intentional one.

There absolutely is - everytime someone uses an AI image in a presentation slide, or in an article to illustrate the point, everybody just rolls their eyes - in my opinion a stock photo or even nothing is preferable to a low effort AI image.

Who is everybody? How do you know? What is your personal bubble? Could it be you're presenting your opinion for the thing that commonly happens?

Responding to myself, as I realized that my post above feels too dismissive. Being a long time privacy advocate for non-tech-adjacent people, I'm perfectly aware about my bubble and biases. For any normal person, anything I say about digital privacy sounds absolutely abstract and detached from real life, where convenience and low effort dominates everything else. Even in 2025 with all political shenanigans, they just fail to see the link and how it applies to their life. AI imagegen is the same from my observations, most concerns are contained in a tiny bubble of perpetually online people. Not even all artists share the loud opinions (for reference, I used to manage a couple hundred artists), especially not VFX and 3D folks. And that tiny bubble only really exists in the anglosphere - you'll see a completely different picture in other cultural bubbles. There's absolutely no stigma of any kind outside of it.

gpt-image-1 is the League of Legends of image generation. It is a tool in front of like 30 million DAUs...

Social stigma? Only if you listen to mentally ill Twitter users.

It's more that the novelty just wore off. Mainstream image generation in online services is "good enough" for most casual users - and power users are few, and already knee deep in custom workflows. They aren't about to switch to the shiny new thing unless they see a lot of benefits to it.

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