Comment by jodacola | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jodacola | Hacker News Reader

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My perspective on this, as someone skeptical of (but also bullish on) AI, is complex and I haven't completely nailed it down.

My knee-jerk reaction is instant credibility loss for the business/person/thing.

Follow-on is sadness (what are we losing in society because of this?), and curiosity: if a polished appearance (even if it is mega plastic) is no longer a sign of quality, then what is? What signals do I need to look for now?

But, wait! Was a high degree of polish ever truly a sign of quality? I've certainly had experiences where a place made every effort to look polished and professional (and generally did a good job at it), but quality missed the mark. In the case of restaurants, a common refrain of mine used to be, "they're trying too hard in the wrong places." Now, I guess, they don't have to try too hard... but they're still not focusing in the right places.

I don't know what to make of it and I go back to still trying to figure out new (or old?) signals for quality.

I have the opposite impression. For me the quality is the cake; polish is just the icing. Putting out a 5-min of effort output with an AI as your image, is all icing and no cake: it has all the right proportions, layout, etc, but something is very wrong with it.

Not sure how diffusion models work in detail so consider this wet neural slop, but I feel like the training data had a sizable portion of it of high quality art, photography, design, and the models captured mostly the polish: the crispiness, the geometry, the contrast: they're after all computable features. It's more difficult to capture the meaningful blurs, the deliberate deviations, and the organic rule breaking. They're properties much harder to "featurize" for, and rely on tags/labeling/descriptions, etc of variable quality.

By all means you can get that with AI anyway, but it also requires you to understand the art itself, and describe it in a way the model produces satisfactory results.

> if a polished appearance (even if it is mega plastic) is no longer a sign of quality, then what is? What signals do I need to look for now?

AI produces apparent uniformity, it makes it harder to distinguish the quality of the underlying process. Same thing happens in all fields, we are all harder to differentiate, then why would you pick me over the others? this is the hard question we are facing now, and it's a desperate situation to be in. Not just artists and people looking for a job, but also companies to their investors and products to customers. All harder to tell apart.

I think this drives a lot of the AI craze. If I can't own my niche anymore, what is my new specialization? We have no answers yet. We have seen this kind of total competition in a domain with cheap imitation in SEO and slop writing.

A high degree of polish was tangible evidence that someone in the organization gave a shit about their work.

Or a third party was paid a one-time fee to make something look good - which still isn't a testament to the quality of the first party's service they're providing.

Sure, but it means that they managed to pick third-parties they work with that give a shit. They could have always picked ones that didn't.

When you're buying a pig in a poke (which is always the case when you're a first-time customer), this is a positive signal.

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