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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

How many of the people who answer polls like that also have the ability to look at a poster and instantly clock that it was AI-generated?

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I agree with others saying that this doesn't disqualify complaints.

In fact, it can be precisely because they can't tell the difference that they would be concerned about consuming AI outputs when they don't know they are. If someone wants to take a stand and only read human text and human art then we may need regulation to add notices when text and images are LLM outputs.

> have the ability to look at a poster and instantly clock that it was AI-generated?

But soulless corporate bullshit was the same before "AI". It doesn't matter how it was produced, it's just that "AI" does it faster and cheaper.

So it doesn't have to be machine generated, just looking like it is is enough.

This touches on the heart of it. AI generates bullshit. By definition. Bullshit is something that is produced without any care for whether it is true or authentic. The bullshitter's only concern is its value to the bullshitter. AI has no notion of truth or honesty. It's all just prompted, predictive streams of output. When we recognize it, we have the same reaction as we do to human-produced bullshit. Maybe even a little worse, because human bullshit at least may have some evidence of humanity in it. AI bullshit doesn't even have that.

Almost none, sadly. Most of the population just doesn't have that skill, which is why places like Facebook are just reams of AI Jesus upvoted to the Moon.

I saw this menu online the other day, and it's not even discernable from the photo what the food products are; it even sets off trypophobia:

https://imgur.com/a/YvyRjts

But people are still ordering it.

I suspect it is a fair representation of the food you would receive - looks kinda like real food, but actually isn't.

Here is a picture of the food you actually get along with the poster.

https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1uv0xcq/...

Waiter, I wanted AI slop for lunch! What is this??

I agree. For most people I've talked to, when this topic comes up, they'll tell me they don't like AI, but then cannot really identify it. Especially the elderly folks in my neighborhood. You look at their facebook feeds and it's 100% slop. No joke. Every. Single. Post. Is. AI. Slop. And for the most part they can't tell.

The problem is in 2026 I work in this space and it's getting to the point where I can no longer tell sometimes. By next year we're probably all cooked. My first go-to now on an image is TinEye.. if it first appeared before AI then I know it's safe.

Most people I encounter who complain about AI use it as a shorthand for 'anything I don't like or disagree with'. When asked why they think something was created using genAI, they cannot point out reasons.

They don't care, because it's only tangentially about the concrete output. It's about the hollowing of human communication and creativity.

What's the argument here? People don't like spit in their food, how many people can tell their food got spat in? Does that mean they're somehow wrong or to be belittled for not liking spit in their food?

It's not an argument, it's an open question: do people who express a dislike of AI know when they see a poster that was generated with assistance from AI?

I meant to ask what the point of the question is basically. What would change, what would it matter for, if the answer was yes or no?

Besides it being so general a question to really be useless as anything but an insinuation IMO, which is why I'm trying to tease that insinuation out. E.g. are people who use Apple left-handed? Are they gay? The answer is "yes, some of them, of course, but also many aren't... why are you asking?"

There is no thing as "just a question, nothing in mind really". That does not exist. The mind that can ask a question cannot arrive at it in a vacuum.

OK, my point here is that a YouGov poll about people's attitude to AI may not tell us anything actionable about how people feel about AI posters - it depends on how good they are at detecting them.

So how would either answer inform any "action"?

I'm sure many/most don't know that specifically. But as a sibling poster pointed out, people do have a strong sense for "bullshit"--defined here as fairly crass and/or greedy, low-effort marketing or design. Plenty of people detected bullshit before (correctly or not). I suspect that they often detect it more often or more potently now, both as a result of more desperate non-AI marketing/UX and as a result of increasing corporate use of AI. When they identify bullshit, they're able to map that through the current zeitgeist to "this might be AI", or "I am going to call it AI because I don't like it".

I suspect this cohort is a lot larger than the cohort that directly, independently identifies "that was made with AI". But that's just, like, my opinion, man--take it with a grain.

If true, this phenomenon is conflating years of increasingly invasive/desperate marketing spends, widespread product enshittification, and AI usage, but is simultaneously a genuine indication of a big segment of people's distaste.

All that is separate from revealed preference--however disliked, both past and AI-generated-present marketing of the SALE SALE SALE BUY NOW OR YOU'RE INADEQUATE variety works on a lot of people. So whether "dislike of AI" translates into meaningful behavior changes is anyone's guess. But I think there is a phenomenon being identified here, whether or not it's just AI or something more nebulous.

I think that many people are against toxic pesticides in food too, or meat that was inhumanely slaughtered, but there are few signals in the packaging to tell how things are made (besides labels that are dubiously trustworthy). So people might be against everything LLMs represents (bad for local and global environment, made with slave-labour, made by stealing material, removing jobs), without being able to tell something is LLM-generated. However, when they can tell, the gut reaction is disgust and the brand takes a big hit. I know when I notice something as LLM-generated, which I know I don't always do, I'm immediately disgusted by it and avoid it if I can.

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