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Comment by Mindless2112 | Hacker News Reader

> In this Gemini-reconstructed scene, ...

I'm generally pretty pro-AI, but I find this icky. Of course, I wouldn't have noticed except the whiteboard drawing seemed not quite right, so I'll probably be fooled in the future.

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Yep, I was totally nerd-sniped by the image. I've never seen an engineer draw a whiteboard diagram anywhere near that detailed and tidy. No acronyms, consistent title case, descenders on a baseline - everything about it is wrong. It's so counter to reality, I seriously wondered if it was a joke.

The Nano Banana team should be pissed Google PR is distributing such a terrible photo. The poses are stilted, expressions frozen, even the eye-lines are off. Why couldn't they just use a Google Pixel phone to snap a photo of real Google engineers in a real Google office and upload it to Google Photos? Not Google enough?

I have seen such detailed and tidy whiteboard diagrams, but the catch is that they never occur in active discussion. It doesn't make room for scribbling, and stopping a discussion for 5-10 minutes to draw slowly and nicely doesn't make sense...

True, no one can understand my whiteboard drawings the next day, not even I.

Perfect operational security!

I think the logic follows: If we are already staging a scene just for PR purposes as was usually done then why not generate it using AI?

I actually didn't full-stop on it because I thought it was AI. For the first few seconds I thought it was a staged photo. I was nerd-sniped because it was staged so badly.

This is why we need smart glasses recording everything you see 24/7 to gather relevant real training data.

Based on what I've heard, Google is monitoring per-org usage and strongly / incessantly encouraging teams to experiment with the technology, so a lot of tokens get spent on pointless stuff like that. The preceding diagram, which is needlessly busy and blurry, appears to be AI-generated too.

This was not a factor. It was either staging the photograph or AI. Photographing inside the office can be a complex process with seeking appropriate permissions, and I didn't have an alternative space to do the photography. AI felt like an easier solution.

> It was either staging the photograph or AI.

The third option is to just not, because an image of two people standing in front of a white board has little value even when the photo isn't staged and the white board content isn't generic.

This discussion happened in a chat window in reality, but is based on a real discussion between me and Luca, leading to reversing the order of "ac strategy" from splitting to joining.

My favorite part of the drawing is where it talks about Variable Black Sizes.

Came here to say the same thing. Why add this fake image?

Website Obesity mentioned ! [0]

  This project led me to propose the Taft Test:

  Does your page design improve when you replace every image with William Howard Taft?

  If so, then, maybe all those images aren’t adding a lot to your article. At the very least, leave Taft there! You just admitted it looks better.

[0] (idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity): https://web.archive.org/web/20260421022440/https://idlewords...

Two reasons: The people in the pic look more or less like our real ourselves. The synthesized photo shows the process of discussing highly conceptual approaches, which was our everyday for 10 years or so.

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