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Comment by dakiol | Hacker News Reader

> On the flip side, there are hundreds of ways that these tools cause genuine harm, not just to individuals but to entire systems.

Yeah, agree. I think it's the first time I'm asking myself: Ok, so this new cool tech, what is it good for? Like, in terms of art, it's discarded (art is about humans), in terms of assets: sure, but people is getting tired of AI-generated images (and even if we cannot tell if an image is AI-generated, we can know if companies are using AI to generate images in general, so the appealing is decreasing). Ads? C'mon that's depressing.

What else? In general, I think people are starting to realize that things generated without effort are not worth spending time with (e.g., no one is going to read your 30-pages draft generated by AI; no one is going to review your 500 files changes PR generated by AI; no one is going to be impressed by the images you generate by AI; same goes for music and everything). I think we are gonna see a Renaissance of "human-generated" sooner rather than later. I see it already at work (colleagues writing in slack "I swear the next message is not AI generated" and the like)

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> I think it's the first time I'm asking myself: Ok, so this new cool tech, what is it good for?

I feel like this is something people in the industry should be thinking about a lot, all the time. Too many social ills today are downstream of the 2000s culture of mainstream absolute technoöptimism.

Vide. Kranzberg's first law--“Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.”

Completely unrelated, but I am curious about your keyboard layout since you mistyped ö instead of - these two symbols are side by side in the Icelandic layout, and the ö is where - in the English (US) layout. As such this is a common type-o for people who regularly switch between the Icelandic and the English (US) layout (source: I am that person). I am curious whether more layouts where that could be common.

This is also a stylistic choice that the New Yorker magazine uses for words with double vowels where you pronounce each one separately, like coöperate, reëlect, preëminent, and naïve. So possibly intentional.

Yes, this is exactly correct, and I will die on this hill. Additionally, I don't like the way a hyphenated "techno-optimism" looks and "technOOPtimism" is a bit too on-the-nose.

That makes sense[1] but it prompts the obvious question: does this style write it as typeö then?

1: Though personally I hate it, I just cannot not read those as completely different vowels (in particular ï → [i:] or the ee in need; ë → [je:] or the first e here; and ö → [ø] or the e in her)

No. Firstly because it is spelled “typo.” Secondly you typically use the diaeresis to tell the reader to not confuse it with a similarly spelled sound or diphthong. So it tells a reader that “reëlect” is not pronounced REEL-ect, “coöperate” is not COOP-uh-ray-t, and “naïve” is not NAY-v.

Because written English makes so much sense normally. God forbid someone has to figure out the ambiguous pronunciation of those particular words. It seems like a silly thing to provide extra guidance on to me.

I suspect the diaresis was intentional, in “New Yorker” style.

https://www.arrantpedantry.com/2020/03/24/umlauts-diaereses-...

I can’t design wallpapers/stickers/icons/…, but I can describe what I want to an image generation model verbally or with a source photo, and the new ones yield pretty good results.

For icons in particular, this opens up a completely new way of customizing my home screen and shortcuts.

Not necessary for the survival of society, maybe, but I enjoy this new capability.

Is that worth the cost of this technology? Both in terms of financial shenanigans and its environmental cost?

Depends on if you believe it will ever become cheaper. Either hardware, inspiring more efficient smaller models, or energy itself. The techno optimist believes that that is the inevitable and investable future. But on what horizon and will it get “zip drived” before then?

The environmental cost is significantly overblown, especially water usage.

I work with direct liquid cooled systems. If the datacenter is working with open DLC systems (most AI datacenters in the US in fact do), there's a lot of water is being wasted, 7/24/365.

A mid-tier top-500 system (think about #250-#325) consumes about a 0.75MW of energy. AI data centers consume magnitudes more. To cool that behemoth you need to pump tons of water per minute in the inner loop.

Outer loop might be slower, but it's a lot of heated water at the end of the day.

To prevent water wastage, you can go closed loop (for both inner and outer loops), but you can't escape the heat you generate and pump to the atmosphere.

So, the environmental cost is overblown, as in Chernobyl or fallout from a nuclear bomb is overblown.

So, it's not.

It's not that it doesn't use water; it's that water is not scarce unless you live in a desert.

As a country, we use 322 billion gallons of water per day. A few million gallons for a datacenter is nothing.

The problem is you don't just use that water and give it back.

The water gets contaminated and heated, making it unsuitable for organisms to live in, or to be processed and used again.

In short, when you pump back that water to the river, you're both poisoning and cooking the river at the same time, destroying the ecosystem at the same time too.

Talk about multi-threaded destruction.

No, you're making that up. Datacenters do not poison rivers.

To reiterate, I work in a closed loop DLC datacenter.

Pipes rust, you can't stop that. That rust seeps to the water. That's inevitable. Moreover, if moss or other stuff starts to take over your pipes, you may need to inject chemicals to your outer loop to clean them.

Inner loops already use biocides and other chemicals to keep them clean.

Look how nuclear power plants fight with organism contamination in their outer cooling loops where they circulate lake/river water.

Same thing.

Dude you can’t fight Dunning Krueger. They all think they’re experts in everything now.

Just because some countries waste a lot at present time does not mean it's available as a resource indefinitely.

The environmental cost of Chernobyl is indeed often overblown. Nature in the exclusion zone is arguably off much better now than before!

The cost to humans living in affected areas was massive and high profile, but it’s very questionable if it was higher than that of an equivalent amount of coal-burning plants. Fortunately not a tradeoff we have to debate anymore, since there are renewables with much fewer downsides and externalities still.

Nuclear bombs (at least those being actually used) by design kill people, so I’m not sure what the externalities even are if the main utility is already to intentionally cause harm.

Are you asking if the 10 seconds it takes AI to generate an image is more costly to the environment than a commissioned graphics artist using a laptop for 5-6 hours, or a painter who uses physical media sourced from all over the world?

Cheaper/faster tech increases overall consumption though. Without the friction of commissioning a graphics artist to design something, a user can generate thousands of images (and iterate on those images multiple times to achieve what they want), resulting in way more images overall.

I'm not really well versed on the environmental cost, more just (neutrally) pointing out that comparing a single 10s image to a 5-6 hour commission ignores the fact that the majority of these images probably would never have existed in the first place without AI.

Also, ignoring training when talking about the environmental costs is bad faith. Without training this image would not exist, and if nobody generating images like these, the training would not happen. So we should really ask, the 10 seconds it took for inference, plus the weeks or months of high intensity compute it took to train the model.

You'd want to compare against the fraction of training attributable to the image

In short, yes.

A modern laptop is running almost fanless, like a 486 from the days of yore.

A single H200 pumps out 700W continuously in a data center, and you run thousands of them.

Also, don't forget the training and fine tuning runs required for the models.

Mass transportation / global logistics can be very efficient and cheap.

Before the pandemic, it was cheaper to import fresh tomatoes from half-world away rather than growing them locally in some cases. A single container of painting supplies is nothing in the grand scheme of things, esp. when compared with what data centers are consuming and emitting.

these are unfair comparisons. it's not just a single laptop running all day it's all the graphic designer laptops that get replaced. it's not a single container of painting supplies it's all off them, (which are toxic by the way).

so if power were plentiful and environmental you'd be onboard with it?

> these are unfair comparisons. it's not just a single laptop running all day it's all the graphic designer laptops that get replaced. it's not a single container of painting supplies it's all off them, (which are toxic by the way).

Please see my other comment about energy consumption and connect the dots with how open loop DLC systems are harmful to fresh water supplies (which is another comment of mine).

> so if power were plentiful and environmental you'd be onboard with it?

This is a pretty loaded way to ask this. Let me put this straight. I'm not against AI. I'm against how this thing is built. Namely:

    - Use of copyrighted and copylefted materials to train models and hiding under "fair use" to exploit people.
      - Moreover, belittling of people who create things with their blood sweat and tears and poorly imitating their art just for kicks or quick bucks.
    - Playing fast and loose with environment and energy consumption without trying to make things efficiently and sustainably to reduce initial costs and time to market.
    - Gaslighting the users and general community about how these things are built, and how it's a theater, again to make people use this and offload their thinking, atrophying their skills and making them dependent on these.

I work in HPC. I support AI workloads and projects, but the projects we tackle have real benefits, like ecosystem monitoring, long term climate science, water level warning and prediction systems, etc. which have real tangible benefits for the future of the humanity. Moreover, there are other projects trying to minimize environmental impact of computation which we're part of.

So it's pretty nuanced, and the AI iceberg goes well below OpenAI/Anthropic/Mistral trio.

> I support AI workloads and projects, but the projects we tackle have real benefits [...]

As opposed to the illusory/fake/immoral benefits of using LLMs for entertainment purposes (leaving aside all other applications for now)?

How do you feel about Hollywood, or even your local theater production? I bet the environmental unit economics don't look great on those either, yet I wouldn't be so quick to pass moral judgement.

Why not just focus on the environmental impact instead of moralizing about the utility? It seems hard to impossible to get consensus there, and the impact should be able to speak for itself if it's concerning.

This is a plainly dishonest comparison. A single H200 does not need to run continuously for you to generate a dozen pictures. And then you immediately pivot to comparing the paint usage against "the grand scheme of things"- 700W is nothing in the grand scheme of things.

In fact it's pretty fair.

Many people think that when a piece of hardware is idle, its power consumption becomes irrelevant, and that's true for home appliances and personal computers.

However, the picture is pretty different for datacenter hardware.

Looking now, an idle V100 (I don't have an idle H200 at hand) uses 40 watts, at minimum. That's more than TDP of many, modern consumer laptops and systems. A MacBook Air uses 35W power supply to charge itself, and it charges pretty quickly even if it's under relatively high stress.

I want to clarify some more things. A modern GPU server houses 4-8 high end GPUs. This means 3KW to 5KW of maximum energy consumption per server. A single rack goes well around 75KW-100KW, and you house hundreds of these racks. So, we're talking about megawatts of energy consumption. CERN's main power line on the Swiss side had a capacity around 10MW, to put things in perspective.

Let's assume an H200 uses 60W energy when it's idle. This means ~500W of wasted energy per server for sitting around. If a complete rack is idle, it's 10KW. So you're wasting energy consumption of 3-5 houses just by sitting and doing nothing.

This computation only thinks about the GPU. Server hardware also adds around 40% to these numbers. Go figure. This is wasting a lot for cat pictures.

And, these "small" numbers add up to a lot.

Definitely worth considering in a world in which there are any H200s idling in data centers.

Now that's one fine No True Scotsman.

    A: GPUs use a lot of power!
    B: Not all of them are running 100% continuously, eh?,
    A: They waste too much power when they're idle, too!
    C: None of the H200s are sitting idle, you knob!

I mean, they are either wasting energy sitting idle or doing barely useful work. I don't know what to say anymore.

We'll cook ourselves, anyway. Why bother? Enjoy the sauna. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'm not saying that this isn't "true idling", I'm saying that idling H200s simply don't exist, i.e., I disagree with B. Do you, A, even disagree?

> they are either wasting energy sitting idle or doing barely useful work

Now here's a true (inverse) scotsman, or more accurately, a moved goalpost: Work on things you don't deem valuable is basically the same thing as idling?

> We'll cook ourselves, anyway. Why bother? Enjoy the sauna. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'm very concerned about that too, but I don't think we'll avoid the sauna with fatalism or logically unsound appeals to morality about resource consumption.

B is supposed to be me? I said the H200 doesn't need to be running continuously to generate a dozen images. If a million people generate a dozen images, it no longer makes sense to compare to the costs of a single artist for 6 hours. I really don't understand why this is hard and that makes this feel very uncharitable.

This argument is so flawed that its conclusion almost loops back around to being correct again:

No, in terms of unit economics, I'm almost certain that the painting supplies have a bigger ecological/resource footprint than an LLM per icon generated, and I'm pretty sure the cost of shipping tomatoes does not decrease that footprint, even if it possibly dwarfs it.

But yes, due to Jevon's paradox, the total resource use might well increase despite all that. I, for example, would have never commissioned a professional icon for my silly little iOS shortcuts on my homescreen, so my silly icon related carbon footprint went from exactly zero to slightly above that.

Wow, do you hold a degree in false dichotomies?

absolutely without a doubt it is

If that energy is used for research, maybe. If used to answer customer questions or generate Studio Ghibli knock-offs, it's not worth it, even a bit.

what’s the difference between those two? how can you say one has more value than the other?

One is trying to save the future of the planet and the humanity with science, the other one is mocking a man who devoted his whole life to his art, even if it means spending years to perfect a three-second sequence for kicks and monies.

If you see no difference between them, I can't continue to discuss this with you, sorry.

To you. Fortunately nobody elected you chief resource allocator of the planet.

And I say that as somebody that also finds Ghibli knock-off avatars used by AI bros in incredibly bad taste (or, arguably an even worse crime against taste, a dated 2025 vibe).

Thanks for your personal jab. Another nice comment to frame and hang to my wall.

I like your discussion style.

Passing moral judgement about other people's value preferences seems pretty preposterous to me as well, so I was being a bit glib, but to be clear:

I don't want to live in a world in which people get to decide what others can and can't do with their share of resources (after properly accounting for all externalities, including pollution, the potential future value of non-renewable present resources etc. – this is where today's reality often and massively misses that ideal) based on their subjective moral criteria.

Not even just for ethical/moral reasons, but also for practical ones: It’s infinitely harder to get everybody to additionally agree on value of use than on fairness of allocation alone.

After thoroughly mixing these two quite distinct concerns, you'll also have a very hard time convincing me that your concerns for river pollution etc. (which I take very seriously as potentially unaccounted negative externalities, if they exist) are completely free from motivated reasoning about "immoral usage".

So we get a fresh new cheap way to spread propaganda and lies and erode trust all across society while cementing power and control for a few at the top, and in return get a few measly icons (as if there weren’t literally thousands of them freely available already) and silly images for momentaneous amusement?

What a rotten exchange.

I wonder what will happen to the entire legal system. It used to be fairly difficult to create convincing photos and videos.

AI can probably fool most court judges now. Or the defense can refute legitimate evidence by saying “it’s AI / false”. How would that be refuted?

By having people also testify to authenticity and coming down like the hand of God on fakers, the same way we make sure evidence is real now.

Yes, that is a major worry of mine, too. CCTV evidence is worth nil now (could be generated in whole or part), and even eye-witness testimony can be trusted (sure, a witness may think they saw the alleged perpetrator, but perhaps they just saw an AI-generated video/projection of someone).

MS13 was literally tattooed on his knuckles!

Multiple data sources, considering the trustworthiness of the source of the information, and accountability for lying.

You might generate an AI video of me committing a crime, But the CCTV on the street didn't show it happening and my phone cell tower logs show I was at home. For the legal system I don't think this is going to be the biggest problem. It's going to be social media that is hit hardest when a fake video can go viral far faster than fact checking can keep up.

If it means anything, I have a 1990 Almanac from an old encyclopedia that warns the exact same thing about digital photo manipulation. I don't think it really matters at this point

For better or worse, the only admissible evidence going forward will probably be either completely physical or originated in attestation-capable recording devices, i.e. something like a "forensics grade" camera with a signing key in trusted hardware issued by somebody deemed trustworthy.

Given the obvious personal safety upsell ("our phone/dashcam/... produces court-admissible evidence!"), I think we'll even see this in consumer devices before too long.

Trials have rules for evidence. You can't just pull out some footage out of nowhere. Where did that come from? From what camera? What was the chain of custody on its footage? Etc.

Don’t blame the tools. Stalin, Mao and Hitler didn’t need AI.

That pro forma response grows oh so very tiresome.

For the nth time: scale, easiness, and access, matter. AI puts propaganda abilities far beyond the reach of those men in the hands of many more people. Do you not understand the difference between one man with a revolver and an army with machine guns? They are not the same.

Nowhere in my comment am I “blaming the tools”. I’ll ask you engage with the argument honestly instead of simply parroting what you already believe absent reading.

Did you do a net benefit calculation? If not, all these knee jerk anti-AI comments are tiresome and predictable (see luddites).

> I’ll ask you engage with the argument honestly instead of simply parroting what you already believe absent reading

I did engage with argument. The argument is a tiresome old argument that is knee-jerk anti tech. You seem to be the thoughtless one in this discourse repeating for the infinite time an anti-tech position assuming net negatives outweigh massively net +ves.

Also, why attack me instead of the argument? Did I touch a logical sore point? I believe so.

> For the nth time: scale, easiness, and access, matter.

By that logic, So the printing press was evil? Remember, Mao/Stalin/Hitler used presses to spread their propaganda.

Also, for the n+1 time, using your own style, don't be lazy:

1. Come up with a net benefit calculation for AI. What? You can't? Then, don't try to claim this is all net negative.

2. Explain how AI is different from other tech like the printing press, that also had scale, easiness, and access.

AI can also be used to fight propaganda, for instance BiasScanner makes you aware of potentially manipulative news: https://biasscanner.org .

So that makes AI a "dual good", like a kitchen knife: you can cut your tomato or kill you neighbor with it, entirely up to the "user". Not all users are good, so we'll see an intense amplification of both good and bad.

It's more work to fight bullshit than it is to generate it, though. Saying "Use AI to fight it" is inherently a losing strategy when the other side also has an AI that is just as powerful.

And no amount of BS detecting tells you what is true. The challenge that I see a lot of people have is they really don't have a framework to incorporate new information into.

They're adrift, every new "fact" (whether true or false) blows them in a new direction. Often they get led in terrible directions from statements that are entirely true (but missing important context).

A lot of financial cons work that way, a long string of true statements that seem to lead to a particular conclusion. I know that if someone is offering me 20% APY there will usually be some risk or fee that offsets those market-beating gains (it may be a worthwhile risk or a well earned fee, but that number needs to trigger further investigation).

We need people to be equipped with that sort of framework in as many areas as possible, but we seem to be moving backwards in that area.

AI is certainly a dual good but I think the project is misguided at best.

I put in one of the driest descriptions of the Holocaust I could find and it got a very high score for bias, calling a factual description of a massacre emotional sensationalism because it inevitably contains a lot of loaded words.

It also doesn't differentiate between reporting, commentary, poetry, or anything else. It takes text and spits out a number, which is a very shallow analysis.

This is where I’m at. If you can’t be bothered to write/make it, why would I be bothered to read or review it?

Because I'm not an artist and can't afford to pay one for whatever business I have? This idea that only experts are allowed to do things is just crazy to me. A band poster doesn't have to be a labor of love artisanal thing. Were you mad when people made band posters with MS word instead of hiring a fucking typesetter? I just don't get it.

> can't afford to pay one for whatever business I have

At small scales what "art" does your business need? If you can't afford to hire an artist (which is completely fine, I couldn't for my business!) do you really need the art or are you trying to make your "brand" look more polished than it actually is? Leverage your small scale while you can because there isn't as much of an expectation for polish.

And no, a band poster doesn't have to be a labor of love. But it also doesn't have to be some big showy art either. If I saw a small band with a clearly AI generated poster it would make me question the sources for their music as well.

I dunno, I have some band posters that are pretty cool pieces of art that obviously had a lot of thought put into them (pre-AI era stuff). I don't think I'd hang up an AI generated band poster, even if it was cool; I'd feel weird and tacky about it.

I was hosting a Karaoke event in my town and really went out of my way to ensure my promotional poster looked nothing like AI. I really really really did not want my townfolks thinking I would use AI to design a poster.

My design rules were: No gradients; no purple; prefer muted colors; plenty of sharp corners and overlapping shapes; Use the Boba Milky font face;

Yes, but…

https://imgur.com/a/cYn68Cp

I mean: https://imgur.com/a/BYikxEI

The difference is very stark:

- The AI has a hard time making the geometric shapes regular. You see the stars have different size arms at different intervals in the AI version. This will take a human artist longer time to make it look worse.

- The 5-point stars are still a little rounded in the AI version.

- There is way too much text in the AI version (a human designer might make that mistake, but it is very typical of AI).

- The orange 10 point star in the right with the text “you are the star” still has a gradient (AI really can’t help it self).

- The borders around the title text “Karaoke night!” bleed into the borders of the orange (gradient) 10-point star on the right, but only half way. This is very sloppy, a human designer would fix that.

- The font face is not Milky Boba but some sort of an AI hybrid of Milky Boba, Boba Milky and comic sans.

- And finally, the QR code has obvious AI artifacts in them.

Point I’m making, it is very hard to prompt your way out of making a poster look like AI, especially when the design is intentional in making it not look like AI.

I hear what you’re saying and at the same time I don’t agree with some of your criticisms. The gradient, yep, it slipped one in. The imperfect stars? I have seen artists do this forever, presumably intentional flair. The few real “glitches” would be trivial to fix in Photoshop.

But they are very different certainly. ChatGPT generated a poster with a very sleek, “produced” style that apes corporate posters whereas you went with a much more personal touch. You are correct that yours does not look like typical AI.

My point is certainly not that the AI poster is better, only that it’s capable of producing surprising results. With minimal guidance it can also generate different styles: https://imgur.com/a/zXfOZaf

I think the trend to intentionally make stuff look “non-AI” is doomed to fail as AI gets better and better. A year or two ago the poster would have been full of nonsense letters.

> And finally, the QR code has obvious AI artifacts in them.

I wonder if this is intentional, to prevent AI from regurgitating someone’s real QR codes.

ETA: Actually, I wonder how much of the “flair” on human-drawn stars is to avoid looking like they are drag-and-drop from a program like Word. Ironic if we’ve circled back around to stars that look perfect to avoid looking like a different computer generated star.

> I think the trend to intentionally make stuff look “non-AI” is doomed to fail as AI gets better and better.

What’s the mechanism that makes an AI ‘better’ at looking non-AI? Training on non-ai trend images? It’s not following prompts more closely. Even if that image had no gradients or pointier shapes, it still doesn’t look like it was made by an individual.

To your counterpoints, notice that you are apologizing for the AI by finding humans that may have done something, sometime, that the AI just did. Of course! It’s trained on their art. To be non-AI, art needs to counter all averages and trends that the models are trained on.

> What’s the mechanism that makes an AI ‘better’ at looking non-AI?

I don’t know. Better training data? More training data? The difference over the past year or two is stark so something is improving it.

> Even if that image had no gradients or pointier shapes, it still doesn’t look like it was made by an individual.

The fact that humans are actively trying to make art that does not look like AI makes it clear that AI is not so obvious as many would like to pretend. If it were obvious, no one would need to try to avoid their art looking like AI.

> To your counterpoints, notice that you are apologizing for the AI by finding humans that may have done something, sometime, that the AI just did. Of course! It’s trained on their art.

Obviously.

> To be non-AI, art needs to counter all averages and trends that the models are trained on.

So in order to not look like AI, art just has to be so unique that it’s unlike any training data. That’s a high bar. Tough time to be an artist.

My point is not that the AI version looks bad (although it does) it is that I hate AI, and so do many people around me. And I hate AI so much, and I know so many people around me hate AI as much, that I am consciously altering my designs such to be as far away from AI as I can. This is the moving from Seattle to Florida after a divorce of creative design.

About the stars. I know designers paint unperfect stars. I even did that in my design. In particular I stretched it and rotated slightly. A more ambitious designer might go further and drag a couple of vertices around to exaggerate them relative to the others. But usually there is some balance in their decisions. AI however just puts the vertices wherever, and it is ugly and unbalanced. A regular geometric shape with a couple of oddities is a normal design choice, but a geometric shape which is all oddities is a lot of work for an ugly design. Humans tend not do to that.

> I am consciously altering my designs such to be as far away from AI as I can

I don’t think this is a productive choice, but it’s certainly yours to make.

> but a geometric shape which is all oddities is a lot of work for an ugly design. Humans tend not do to that

I find this such an odd thing to say. It’s way easier to draw a wonky star than a symmetrical one. Unless “drawing” here means using a mouse to drag and drop a star that a program draws for you.

Vintage illustrations are full of nonsymmetrical shapes. The classic Batman “POW” and similar were hand drawn and rarely close to symmetrical.

I draw mine in Inkscape (because I like open source more then my sanity) and inkscape has special tools to draw regular geometric shapes. You don‘t need to use those tools, you can use the free draw pen, or the bezier curve tool, or even hand code the <path d="M43,32l5.34-2.43l3.54-0.53" />, etc. But using these other tools is suboptimal compared to the regular geometric tool.

Apart from me, my partner also does graphic design, and unlike me she values her sanity more then open source so she uses illustrator for her designs. In adobe’s walled garden world of proprietary software it is still the same story, you generally use the specific tools to get regular shapes (or patterns) and then alter them after the they are drawn. You don‘t draw them from scratch. If you are familiar with modular analog synthesizers, this is starting with a square wave, and then subtracting to modulate the signal into a more natural sounding form.

I don't know why you're downvoted, I think that's a reasonable use of AI and it looks pretty good.

Edit: I think I misread what you were saying, but I do think it's a nice poster! I get that design is going to have to avoid doing things that AI does, which is kind of unfortunate, because AI is likely trained on a lot of things that are generally good ideas.

I agree and whose to say your life experience isn't as valid as someone with less years but more time at just the traditional tools? I'd think either extreme could produce real art if the tools moat was reduced with AI.

I actually love MS word posters. It's a million times more authentic and enjoyable than a slop generation. If a band put up an AI poster I'd assume they lack any kind of taste which is the whole reason I'd want to listen to a band anyway.

I know this is controversial in tech spaces. But most people, particularly those in art spaces like music actually appreciate creativity, taste, effort, and personal connection. Not just ruthless efficiency creating a poster for the lowest cost and fastest time possible.

It's just as low effort. This is silly.

Because I'm not an artist and can't afford to pay one for whatever business I have?

If your business can't afford to spend $5 on Fivr, it's not a business. It's not even panhandling.

Why is that better? They're going to use AI anyway. It's fiver.

> band poster doesn't have to be a labor of love artisanal thing

Very few bands would agree with that statement.

I think you're misunderstanding - most people's beef with AI art isn't that it "isn't made by experts", it's that

1) it's made from copyrighted works, and the original authors receive no credit; 2) it is (typically) low-effort; 3) there are numerous negative environmental effects of the AI industry in general; 4) there are numerous negative social effects of AI in general, and more specifically AI generated imagery is used a lot for spreading misinformation; 5) there are numerous negative economic effects of AI, and specifically with art, it means real human artists are being replaced by AI slop, which is of significantly lower quality than the equivalent human output. Also, instead of supporting multiple different artists, you're siphoning your money to a few billion dollar companies (this is terrible for the economy)

As a side note, if you have a business which truly cannot afford to pay any artists, there are a lot of cheaper, (sometimes free!) pre-paid art bundles that are much less morally dubious than AI. Plus, then you're not siphoning all of your cash to tech oligarchs.

How about going without? I can’t afford an artist, either, so I don’t have art. Don’t foist slop on people because you are trying to be something that you aren’t.

What, a music band's poster, 'typeset' in Microsoft Word? I cannot imagine bothering to go to such a band's concert.

<joke>What's your rock band called, "SEC Form 10-K"?</joke>

I would rather see a MS word poster than be lied to.

No one is saying that only experts can do things; that's a totally inaccurate reading of the argument and the post.

People are saying, very clearly, that they're not willing to put effort into something produced by someone who put no effort in.

Nobody can be bothered to make my cat out of Lego and the size of mount Everest but if an AI did I'd sure love to see it.

Your quip is pithy but meaningless.

I'm not saying it's worthless for yourself, it's worthless to me as a viewer. AI content is great for your own usage, but there is no point posting and distributing AI generation.

I could have generated my own content, so just send the prompt rather than the output to save everyone time.

And when the distilled knowledge/product is the result of multiple prompts, revisions, and reiterations? Shall we send all 30+ of those as well so as to reproduce each step along the way?

Maybe reread my comment. Would you not want to see a mount Everest sized Lego cat? Even if it were my cat?

Again - your quip sounds good but when you think about it, it's flatly wrong.

This doesn't make sense, if I want to see a lego-cat slopimage I can just prompt a model myself (and have it be of my own cat). There's no reason for you to be involved in any part of that process, because the point of this stuff is that you are not doing anything.

The claim is that people don't / shouldn't want to see something if humans can't be bothered to make it. I provided a counter example. So the claim is nonsense.

Exactly how I feel. There is already more art, movies, music, books, video games and more made by human beings than I can experience in my lifetime. Why should I waste any time on content generated by the word guessing machine?

The issue is that the signalling makes sense when human generated work is better than AI generated. Soon AI generated work will be better across the board with the rare exception of stuff the top X% of humans put a lot of bespoke highly personalized effort into. Preferring human work will be luxury status-signalling just like it is for clothing, food, etc.

"Artisanal art" as it were.

Only novel art is interesting. AI can't really do novel. It's a prediction algorithm; it imitates. You can add noise, but that mostly just makes it worse. It can be used to facilitate original stuff though.

But so many people want to make art, and it's so cheap to distribute it, that art is already commoditized. If people prefer human-created art, satisfying that preference is practically free.

AI can be novel, there is nothing in the transformer architecture which prohibits novelty, it's just that structurally it much prefers pattern-matching.

But the idea of novelty is a misnomer I think. Any random number generator can arbitrarily create a "novel" output that a human has never seen before. The issue is whether something is both novel and useful, which is hard for even humans to do consistently.

Anthropic recently changed their take-home test specifically to be more “out-of-distribution” and therefore more resistant to AI so they can assess humans.

I’m so tired of “there’s nothing preventing”, and “humans do that too”. Modern AI is just not there. It’s not like humans and has difficulties with adapting to novelty.

Whether transformers can overcome that remains to be seen, but it is not a guarantee. We’ve been dealing with these same issues for decades and AI still struggles with them.

There are lots of things that are novel to you without necessarily being novel to the universe.

I'm probably in a weird subgroup that isn't representative of the general public, but I've found myself preferring "rough" art/logos/images/etc, basically because it signals a human put time into it. Or maybe not preferring, but at least noticing it more than the generally highly refined/polished AI artwork that I've been seeing.

There’s no reason to think people broadly want “better” writing, images, whatever. Look at the indie game scene, it’s been booming for years despite simpler graphics, lower fidelity assets, etc. Same for retro music, slam poetry, local coffee shops, ugly farmers market produce, etc.

There is a mass, bland appeal to “better” things but it’s not ubiquitously desired and there will always be people looking outside of that purely because “better” is entirely subjective and means nothing at all.

The issue being, it's not an expression of anything. Merely like a random sensation, maybe some readable intent, but generic in execution, which isn't about anything even corporate art should be about. Are we going to give up on art, altogether?

Edit: One of the possible outcomes may be living in a world like in "Them" with glasses on. Since no expression has any meaning anymore, the message is just there being a signal of some kind. (Generic "BUY" + associated brand name in small print, etc.)

Can't the expression come from the person prompting the AI and sometimes taking hours inpainting or tweaking the prompt to try get the exact image / expression they had in their mind? A good use I've found is to be able to make scenes from a dream you had into an image. If that's not an expression of something then I'm not sure anything is.

Notably, this process of struggle is meant to go away, to make room for instant satisfaction. This is really about some kind of expression consumerism. (And what will be lost along the way is meaning.)

I always find this argument to ring hollow. Maybe it's because I've been through it with too many technologies already. Digital photography took out the art of film photography. CGI took out the wonder of practical effects. Digital art takes out the important brush strokes of someone actually painting. The real answer always is the mediums can coexist and each will be good for expression in their own way.

I'm not sure you immediately lose meaning if someone can make a highly personalized version of something easily. The % of completely meaningless video after YouTube and tiktok came about has skyrocketed. The amount of good stuff to watch has gone up as well though.

I think "better" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this argument. Better how?

Is an AI generated photo of your app/site going to be more accurate than a screenshot? Or is an AI generated image of your product going to convey the quality of it more than a photo would?

I think Sora also showed that the novelty of generating just "content" is pretty fleeting.

I would be interested to see if any of the next round of ChatGPT advertisements use AI generated images. Because if not, they don’t even believe in their own product.

The goal of art isn't to be perfect or as realistic as possible. The goal of art is to express, and enjoy that unique expression.

> Preferring human work will be luxury status-signalling just like it is for clothing, food, etc.

What? Those items are luxuries when made by humans because they are physical goods where every single item comes with a production and distribution cost.

Here’s one example:

I just recently used for image generation to design my balcony.

It was a great way to see design ideas imagined in place and decide what to do.

There are many cases people would hire an artist to illustrate an idea or early prototype. AI generated images make that something you can do by yourself or 10x faster than a few years ago.

Did the same for my front garden.

Not withstanding a few code violations, it generated some good ideas we were then able to tweak. The main thing was we had no idea of what we wanted to do, but seeing a lot of possibilities overlaid over the existing non-garden got us going. We were then able to extend the theme to other parts of the yard.

100%. A picture is worth a thousand words only when it conveys something. I love to see the pictures from my family even when they are taken with no care to quality or composition but I would look at someone else’s (as in gallery/exhibitions) only when they are stunning and captured beautifully. The medium is only a channel to communicate.

Also, this can’t be real. How many publications did they train this stuff on and why are there no acknowledgment even if to say - we partnered with xyz manga house to make our model smarter at manga? Like what’s wrong with this company?

I'm working on an edutech game. Before I would've had much less of a product because I don't have the budget to hire an artist and it would've been much less interactive but because of this I'm able to build a much more engaging experience so that's one thing. For what it's worth.

We need to flip the script. AI is trying to do marketing: add “illegal usage will lead to X” is a gateway to spark curiosity. There is this saying that censoring games for young adults makes sure that they will buy it like crazy by circumventing the restrictions because danger is cool.

There is nothing that cannot harm. Knives, cars, alcohol, drugs. A society needs to balance risks and benefits. Word can be used to do harm, email, anything - it depends on intention and its type.

I see your point but reconsider: we will and need to see. Time will tell and this is simply economics: useful? Yes, no.

I started being totally indifferent after thinking about my spending habits to check for unnecessary stuff after watching world championships for niche sports. For some this is a calling for others waste. It is a numbers game then.

The technically (in both senses) astonishing and amazing output is not far off from some of the qualities of real advertising: Staged, attention grabbing, artificially created, superficially demanded, commercially attractive qualities. These align, and lots of similarities in the functions and outcomes of these two spheres come to mind.

>and even if we cannot tell if an image is AI-generated, we can know if companies are using AI to generate images in general, so the appealing is decreasing

Is that true? Don't think I'd get tired of images that are as good as human made ones just because I know/suspect there may have been AI involved

I think there's real value to be had in using this for diagrams.

Visual explanations are useful, but most people don't have the talent and/or the time to produce them.

This new model (and Nano Banana Pro before it) has tipped across the quality boundary where it actually can produce a visual explanation that moves beyond space-filling slop and helps people understand a concept.

I've never used an AI-generated image in a presentation or document before, but I'm teetering on the edge of considering it now provided it genuinely elevates the material and helps explain a concept that otherwise wouldn't be clear.

yeah I'm not sure I'm in agreement that we can hand-wave assets and ads as entire classes of valuable content

This is the key point. In my view it's just like anything else, if AI can help humans create better work, it's a good thing.

I think what we'll find is that visual design is no longer as much of a moat for expressing concepts, branding, etc. In a way, AI-generated design opens the door for more competition on merits, not just those who can afford the top tier design firm.

Are there any models that are specifically trained to produce diagrams as SVG? I'd much prefer that to diffusion-based raster image generation models for a few reasons:

- The usual advantages of vector graphics: resolution-independence, zoom without jagged edges, etc.

- As a consequence of the above, vector graphics (particularly SVG) can more easily be converted to useful tactile graphics for blind people.

- Vector graphics can more practically be edited.

You can get them to produce mermaid diagrams, but you can also generate these yourself from text.

I tend to share your same view. But is there really a line like you describe? Maybe AI just needs to get a few iterations better and we'll all love what it generates. And how's it really any different than any Photoshop computer output from the past?

>In general, I think people are starting to realize that things generated without effort are not worth spending time with

Agreed mostly, BUT

I'm building tools for myself. The end goal isn't the intermediate tool, they're enabling other things. I have a suspicion that I could sell the tools, I don't particularly want to. There's a gap between "does everything I want it to" and "polished enough to justify sale", and that gap doesn't excite me.

They're definitely not generated without effort... but they are generated with 1% of the human effort they would require.

I feel very much empowered by AI to do the things I've always wanted to do. (when I mention this there's always someone who comes out effectively calling me delusional for being satisfied with something built with LLMs)

> What else?

I used to have an assistant make little index-card sized agendas for gettogethers when folks were in town or I was organising a holiday or offsite. They used to be physical; now it's a cute thing I can text around so everyone knows when they should be up by (and by when, if they've slept in, they can go back to bed). AI has been good at making these. They don't need to be works of art, just cute and silly and maybe embedded with an inside joke.

I don't care how many times you write "cute," having my vacation time programmed with that level of granularity and imposed obligation sounds like the definition of "dystopian."

If I got one of your cute schedule cards while visiting you, I'd tear it up, check into a cheap motel, and spend the rest of my vacation actually enjoying myself.

Edit: I'm not an outlier here. There have even been sitcom episodes about overbearing hosts over-programming their guests' visits, going back at least to the Brady Bunch.

> If I got one of your cute schedule cards while visiting you, I'd tear it up, check into a cheap motel, and spend the rest of my vacation actually enjoying myself

Okay. I'd be confused why you didn't voice up while we were planning everything as a group, but those people absolutely exist. (Unless it's someone's, read: a best friend or my partner's, birthday. Then I'm a dictator and nobody gets a choice over or preview of anything.)

I like to have a group activity planned on most days. If we're going to drive to get in an afternoon hike in before a dinner reservation (and if I have 6+ people in town, I need a dinner reservation because no I'm not coooking every single evening), or if I've paid for a snowmobile tour or a friend is bringing out their telescope for stargazing, there are hard no-later-than departure times to either not miss the activity or be respectful of others' time.

My family used to resolve that by constantly reminding everyone the day before and morning of, followed by constantly shouting at each other in the hours and minutes preceding and–inevitably–through that deadline. I prefer the way I've found. If someone wants to fuck off from an activity, myself included, that's also perfectly fine.

(I also grew up in a family that overplanned vacations. And I've since recovered from the rebound instinct, which involves not planning anything and leaving everything to serendipity. It works gorgeously, sometimes. But a lot of other times I wonder why I didn't bother googling the cool festival one town over before hand, or regretted sleeping in through a parade.)

> There have even been sitcom episodes about overbearing hosts over-programming their guests' visits

Sure. And different groups have different strokes. When it comes to my friends and I, generally speaking, a scheduled activity every other day with dinners planned in advance (they all get hangry, every single fucking one of them) works best.

You are kidding, right?

It's good that my friends don't make a coffee date feel like a board meeting (with an agenda shared by post 14 working days ahead of the meeting, form for proxy voting attached).

I'm not seeing how it takes more than 5 minutes to type up an itinerary. If you want to make it cute and silly, just change up the font and color and add some clip art.

If this is the best use case that exists for AI image generation, I'm only further convinced the tech is at best largely useless.

> not seeing how it takes more than 5 minutes to type up an itinerary

Because I’ll then spend hours playing with the typography (because it’s fun) and making it look like whatever design style I’ve most recently read about (again, because it’s fun) and then fighting Word or Latex because I don’t actually know what I’m doing (less fun). Outsourcing it is the right move, particularly if someone else is handling requests for schedules to be adjusted. An AI handles that outsourcing quicker for low-value (but frequent) tasks.

> If this is the best use case that exists for AI image generation

I’ve also had good luck sketching a map or diagram and then having the AI turn it into something that looks clean.

Look, 99% of my use cases are e.g. making my cat gnaw on the Tetons or making a concert of lobsters watching Lady Gaga singing “I do it for the claws” or whatever so I can send two friends something stupid at 1AM. But there does appear to be a veneer of productivity there, and worst case it makes the world look a bit nicer.

You might not be able to tell how bad the AI slop looks, but I guarantee some of your friends can. AI is awful at maps and diagrams.

I’m not giving my friends AI maps and diagrams. And yes, they don’t look great. But they work. If I want to communicate something spatial, I can spend an hour in R or five minutes in Claude. The point is to communicate that information, and for a quick task, AI means the other person gets a map versus block of text they have to reason through.

>Like, in terms of art, it's discarded (art is about humans)

I dunno how long this is going to hold up. In 50 years, when OpenAI has long become a memory, post-bubble burst, and a half-century of bitrot has claimed much of what was generated in this era, how valuable do you think an AI image file from 2023 - with provenance - might be, as an emblem and artifact of our current cultural moment, of those first few years when a human could tell a computer, "Hey, make this," and it did? And many of the early tools are gone; you can't use them anymore.

Consider: there will never be another DallE-2 image generation. Ever.

While I agree with you, hacker news audience is not in the middle of the bell curve.

I get this sounds elitist - but tremendous percentage of population is happily and eagerly engaging with fake religious images, funny AI videos, horrible AI memes, etc. Trying to mention that this video of puppy is completely AI generated results in vicious defense and mansplaining of why this video is totally real (I love it when video has e.g. Sora watermarks... This does not stop the defenders).

I agree with you that human connection and artist intent is what I'm looking for in art, music, video games, etc... But gawd, lowest common denominator is and always has been SO much lower than we want to admit to ourselves.

Very few people want thoughtful analysis that contradicts their world view, very few people care about privacy or rights or future or using the right tool, very few people are interested in moral frameworks or ethical philosophy, and very few people care about real and verifiable human connection in their "content" :-/

I recently shoulder-surfed a family member scrolling away on their social media feed, and every single image was obvious AI slop. But it didn't matter. She loved every single one, watched videos all the way through, liked and commented on them... just total zombie-consumption mode and it was all 100% AI generated. I've tried in the past pointing out that it's all AI generated and nothing is real, and they simply don't care. People are just pac-man gobbling up "content". It's pretty sad/scary.

I'd be a bit more humble rather than terrified, because I enjoy some AI slop too, especially funny animals that remind me of my old pets' antics. There are levels of slop. But tasteless stuff with crap graphics plastered all over, loud edits or badly calibrated tts voices were already all over reels/tiktok long before AI, and people still liked that.

The unsettling thing on social media is the mind hijacking with the recommendation algo and scrolling motion that resembles a slot machine, more than the content itself.

HN is absolutely not more critical of AI output than the norm.

It's been true for various technologies that HN (and tech audiences in general) have a more nuanced view, but AI flips the script on that entirely. It's the tech world who are amazed by this, producing and being delighted by endless blogposts and 7-second concept trailers.

I think we are conflating usage vs consumption.

I think HN probably uses GenAI more than average population.

But I think HN consumes less GenAI content than average population.

Look at Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, TikTok, etc. All I see is my non-techie friends being amazed and mesmerized by - cute animals, creepy animals, political events, jokes, comedy, outrage, events, speeches - that never ever happened. As if we don't have actual real puppies that are cute, my acquintenances and family are oooing and awwwing at fake howling huskies, fake animals being jump-scared by fake surprises.

HN may be amazed by potential of AI output the improve the world more than average person. But hustlers are laughing their way to the bank as they actually use AI to make ridiculous, and I do mean ridiculous, amount of "content" for cheap, that is, absolutely is, being consumed at prodigious rate with no sign of stopping. This is not 7-second trailers and concepts for some future years - this is mega-years of actual content being liked, shared, engaged with and consumed, right now. This is what OP is hoping that tides will turn against, and this is what I see no sign of rejection in my non-techie/non-geeky circles :(

You're on a site where the commenters read AI-generated articles about how they can generate new images to include in their generated websites that they themselves generate more articles about.

Sure, the weird cat-people adverts aren't aimed at HN's commentariat, but every 'democratise art and build that game you've dreamt of' pitch is. Every breathless paean to AI assistants/companions/partners is targeted at the users here.

Usage is a form of consumption; thinking of yourself as a creator while you consume doesn't mean you consume less.

Non-tech users are being fed fake images when they browse idly. Tech users are restructuring their entire lives around these tools.

Seems good enough to generate 2D sprites. If that means a wave of pixel-art games I count it as a net win.

I dont think gamers hate AI, it is just a vocal miniority imo. What most people dislike is sloppy work, as they should, but that can happen with or without AI. The industry has been using AI for textures, voices and more for over a decade.

AI for textures for over a decade? What AI?

Efros–Leung, PatchMatch? Nearest neighbours was "AI" before difusion models.

Don't you think it's a huge stretch to compare those to modern generative AI in this context? Those don't raise any of the questions that make current usage questionable.

Are you kidding? I think I see more vitriol for AI in gaming communities than anywhere else. To the point where steam now requires you to disclose its usage

Crimson Desert failed to disclose on release and (almost) nobody cared, gamers kept buying it.

There are already more games being released on Steam than anyone can keep up with, I'm not sure how adding another "wave" on top of it helps.

> Seems good enough to generate 2D sprites.

It’s really not. That's actually a pet peeve of mine as someone who used to spent a lot of time messing with pixel art in Aseprite.

Nobody takes the time to understand that the style of pixel art is not the same thing as actual pixel art. So you end up with these high-definition, high-resolution images that people try to pass off as pixel art, but if you zoom in even a tiny bit, you see all this terrible fringing and fraying.

That happens because the palette is way outside the bounds of what pixel art should use, where proper pixel art is generally limited to maybe 8 to 32 colors, usually.

There are plenty of ways to post-process generative images to make them look more like real pixel art (square grid alignment, palette reduction, etc.), but it does require a bit more manual finesse [1], and unfortunately most people just can’t be bothered.

[1] - https://github.com/jenissimo/unfake.js

> Like, in terms of art, it's discarded (art is about humans)

If a work of art is good, then it's good. It doesn't matter if it came from a human, a neanderthal, AI, or monkeys randomly typing.

Whether art is considered good is in practice highly contextual. One of those contexts is who (what) made it.

Provenance is part of the work. If a roomful of monkeys banged out something that looked like anything, I'd absolutely hang it on my wall. I would not say the same for 99% of AI generated art.

The connection with the artist, directly, or across space and time, is a critical part of any artwork. It is one human attempting to communicate some emotional experience to another human.

When I watch a Lynch film I feel some connection to the man David Lynch. When I see a AI artwork, there is nothing to connect with, no emotional experience is being communicated, it is just empty. It's highest aspiration is elevator music, just being something vaguely stimulating in the background.

I don't agree. If a poem is moving, it's moving. It doesn't matter who wrote it.

I understand these are fundamental questions about aesthetics that people differ over. But that's how it works for me. However, ultimately, I think people will realize that I'm right around the time that AI does start generating good art.

My only actual use of image or video AI tools is self-entertainment. I like to give it prompts and see the results it gives me.

That's it. I can't think of a single actual use case outside of this that isn't deliberately manipulative and harmful.

The Human Renaissance is something I've been thinking of too and I hope it comes to pass. Of course, I feel like societally, things are gonna get worse for a lot of folks. You already see it in entire towns losing water or their water becoming polluted.

You'd think these kickbacks leaders of these towns are getting for allowing data centers to be built would go towards improving infrastructure but hah, that's unrealistic.

WTF is that unrealistic? SMH

>You already see it in entire towns losing water or their water becoming polluted

Do you have any references for such cases? I have seen talk of such thing at risk, but I am unaware of any specific instances of it occuring

I know I've seen such a story on HN before, you can probably find it by searching for "water" and "data center/AI."

The closest match I found was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44562052

The article tries to play sleight of hand with the specific instance that they cite but it seems that the loss of water is alleged to be caused by sediment from construction rather than water use.

It's not great that it happened and it is something local government should take action on, but it is also something that could have been caused by any form of industrial construction. I suspect there are already laws in place that cover this. If they are not being enforced that's another issue entirely.

That's exactly the article I was thinking of.

Data center construction exposing weaknesses in local infrastructure is a double-edged sword; you wanna know if things need upgrading but you don't wanna be negatively affected by it.

Maybe there should be some clause in these contracts that mandate tech companies foot the bill for local infrastructure improvements.

In that case it does not depict the scenario you suggested.

This is not a data center issue at all, it is a construction issue, that it was a data center being constructed was incidental.

I believe there are regulations that cover things like this already.

To characterise it as representative or specific to data centers is ad best disingenuous.

I didn't write the article man

I completely disagree, this replaces art as a job. Why does human art need monetary feedback to be shared? If people require a paycheck to make art then it was never anything different than what Ai generated images are.

As for advertising being depressing - its a little late to get up on the high horse of anti-Ads for tech after 2 decades of ad based technology dominating everything. Go outside, see all those bright shiny glittery lights, those aren't society created images to embolden the spirit and dazzle the senses, those are ads.

North Korea looks weird and depressing because the don't have ads. Welcome to the west.

AI loopidity rearing it's head. Just send the bullet points that we all want anyway, right?! Stop sending globs of text and other generated content!

Porn and memes. Obviously. This is all that Stable Diffusion has been used for since it was released.

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