Hacker News Reader

All small business marketing material now looks exactly the same.

LLMs produce an extremely small range of artistic expression, and its kind of ironic, that while it certainly looks functionally good. It immediately becomes noise because everything looks identical.

So companies are going to have to hire creatives again, in order to stand out, and be "creative"

> We now have nearly-perfect AI image generation

No, we don't. It's quite good, but it's nowhere near perfect. For example, you can see: https://genai-showdown.specr.net/ or others that highlight how far from perfection we still are.

> and it hasn't really changed the nature of human expression.

It sure has changed our discourse. Look at hackernews, where people just can't help themselves to engage in ragebait and flamewar comment threads about llm generated accusations. We've got half the people convinced that looking at ai content is like consuming food.

I'd venture a guess that it's too early to determine how this technology will change expression. A good analog would be photography, which caused a similar meltdown in the arts at the time.

> I don't see my friends getting wildly creative.

Maybe you don't have creative (enough) friends.

I'm mostly seeing the impact of GenAI images in everydays life for example in the small posters small associations or individuals usually attach on streets to promote some small local event. We went from just text created with PowerPoint and maybe some stock image just a Google search away to now images depicting the topic closely. But yeah, it's not like a revolution.

And this personal media thing, yeah maybe for terminally online persons that are REALLY into a sub-genre but otherwise, it's too much effort, I agree. Until we get machines that can read our (subconscious) mind, that will not exist.

I yearn for the old days of bad photoshop/wordart/powerpoint flyers.

They were visually bad but honest and sometimes soulful or playful.

The AI slop that's everywhere now looks superficially more professional but it's very busy, samey, unnatural and it really turns me off.

I don't want to say this is indicative, but my local library used AI-generated event poster/images for the past year. But recently they switched back to word/clipart event posters. When I was checking out, I query the librarian about it, and apparently they saw a 40-60% drop in attendance. On one hand, I found that hard to believe, but on the other hand, simple word/clipart event posters do have a certain inviting charm about them.

I think that word/clipart posters make it clearer the date and time, with GenAI material you end upo adding a big colorful image that takes most of the space and relegate the important bit to a second place. At least that's what I see around me.

> We now have nearly-perfect AI image generation

Not even close. Current AIs have very poor spatial awareness, they can generate some kind of scene but they can't tell you where objects are in the scene, nor can they move objects into different places. They're very useful but it's difficult to be very creative with them because they can't update an image to make it more aligned with your vision for what should be in the image.

Ultimately, most people don't have ideas for the kinds of personalized entertainment they want

1:1 AI entertainment probably won't be a cold start experience.

Much like the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books of the 80's, consumers choose a baseline template, customize the characters, and interact at various points within the plot.