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I think this is the actual image: https://cdn.saffire.com/images.ashx?t=ig&rid=OhioStateFair&i...

Notably, the zipline is all wacky, and two piggies are #1, probably more things I didn't notice at a skim?

I guess they didn't explicitly forbid AI, and it wasn't noticed until after the winner was selected, and now you can't "roll back"? It seems this was later added to the page:

> [...] we recognize that the use of AI has changed greatly over the last few years in ways we didn’t anticipate, and will be reevaluating the rules and processes for 2027, which will include prohibiting the use of AI [...]

July 7 2026 mirror of the page without that updated notice: https://web.archive.org/web/20260707145158/https://www.ohios...

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> I think this is the actual image: https://cdn.saffire.com/images.ashx?t=ig&rid=OhioStateFair&i...

"Celebrating Ohio's and America's 250th birthday"

Ohio is 223 years old, having officially joined the United States as the 17th state in 1803.

It actually says “celebrating Ohio and America’s 250th” (not Ohio’s) so this works ok

> https://cdn.saffire.com/images.ashx?t=ig&rid=OhioStateFair&i...

> "Celebrating Ohio's and America's 250th birthday"

> Ohio is 223 years old

You might have misread the text? I see something different in the “Celebrating Ohio and America’s 250th birthday”, which I read as celebrating:

1. Ohio overall 2. America’s 250th

Without the Oxford comma, it was the most reasonable way to read it.

You would never put an Oxford comma in a list of two items

Exactly. If someone says, “I’m running to the grocery and McDonald’s drive-thru,” no one assumes they are sharing a drive-thru…

Pedantic HNers might...

For real there is no single collection of online pedantry more pedantic than HN.

Actually, before HN there was Usenet which I assure you, as I know everything, was much more pedantic than HN ever was.

To my memory they are very similar amounts of pedantry. Not sure to how measure it tbh! Regardless, you're making a solid point. :)

page is now 404, this one still works https://cdn.saffire.com/images.ashx?t=ig&rid=OhioStateFair&i...

Ohio, not Ohio's

Amusingly, there are 18 stars in the header banner of the poster. Missed opportunity!

Maybe it's just me, but that font and its layout feels extremely recognizable to me as the "AI image sign font" that I've already seen on posterboards for a bunch of restaurants in SF.

> extremely recognizable to me as the "AI image sign font"

Also seen in every FB post by small businesses as well as every garage sale post in my country

and packed into every thumbnail for slopiganda on youtube.

Not just you, it's immediately obvious as an AI image, it's got the piss filter and all kinds of telling details. Detecting AI images like this should be a basic skill at this point.

It immediately looks like AI slop because nearly every square inch is filled with with something, however meaningless and useless it might be to the overall composition.

AI is good at filling an image with shit, and bad at knowing when to leave space and what isn’t necessary.

sure, but just look at that butter cow!

Yeah, my takeaway here is less about AI, and more that these judges have no sense of taste and just gave more points to whatever packed in the most pointless details.

I'd guess they're representative of the average person going to the Ohio state fair, so no damage done.

Most people have no sense of taste, and I bet the jury’s average age indicates people that have no exposure or defense to newer technologies.

AI or no AI, it’s incredible that this design won. Either the judges have questionable judgement or the other entries must not have been very good.

#3 was nice

Reporter to Kindergarten teacher: How is it that your students class paintings are so much better than all the other class paintings?

Teacher: You just have to know when to take their finger paintings away from them.

Not criticizing this in particular, but I'm genuinely curious: why is everyone talking about how obvious or not the details of the poster are as AI, when they didn't take the 30 seconds in most good image editing software to remove the sepia/yellow/brown tint all over? You could put a 100px blur on the smallest thumbnail on that page of it, and I'd still recognize it as AI generated.

> they didn't explicitly forbid AI

Yes they did; the contestants must be at least 18 years old and residents of Ohio.

AI is neither.

Would it be within contest rules if an 19-year-old resident of Ohio served as an artistic director, giving suggestions to a 12-year-old from Kentucky who does the actual work?

No they didn’t—from TFA:

  When the poster contest was originally formed in 2024, the use of AI was permitted if explained as a part of the application process.

Since current US legal decisions indicate that genAI works are not copyrightable, this is troublesome for any organization that wants exclusive licensing for publicity. The State Fair would expect to incorporate their art winners into marketing, posters, and expect to strike down derivative works and other commercial uses.

Not to mention that any Ai-entrant piece could be duplicated by any other entrant.

Whether is not copyrightable is not relevant to this. The parent poster's point is just as salient. The creator, not the sumbitter needs to meet the criteria in question. A clanker isn't a resident of Ohio.

I'm largely in the not fond of AI artwork camp and the weird rigging on the chair lifts in the winning entry bug me no end (first thing that caught my eye), however ...

Is Jeff Koons (and others in the "massive installation" artwork game) the creator of his works or does that honour go to the minions that instantiate his wishes?

We're talking "grand vision" description here .. now you 30 people go and flesh out the details.

Not really, AI is a tool and so it's assumed that the submitter is the creator. The Ohio judges will not be as pedantic as you and then other comment above try to make it seem.

So that is your personal interpretation of an implicit rule. Well, the Ohio State Fair has explicitly ruled differently than you.

Do we need to bust out the Wiktionary links again here?

Probably they figured that the risk of any of that stuff causing actual problems was less than the headache of publicly disqualifying an already-announced winner who has a colorable argument that she didn't break any rules.

Not to mention that any Ai-entrant piece could be duplicated by any other entrant

With great difficulty, maybe. You'd need the exact model, prompt, seed, and hardware, and even then I believe there is some nondeterminism.

I was thinking more like C-c C-v, or just take a photo of a competitor’s poster, but you do your seeding

No AI is a tool. It’s like you saying they didn’t say you can’t use oil paint.

Oil paint would be a bit more controversial if it painted the picture all by itself…

You're right, for example photography was controversial.

And photography is something where the image determines whether or not it’s art. If you are constructing an image using form, shape, light, subjects, tool selection, and all sorts of other factors to translate a 3D scene into a 2D image, revealing your particular perspective, then that is art, and pretty difficult at that. If you take a flat, objective, documentary picture of a painting, that’s not art. If you take a picture of something at the store you’d like to research later, that’s not art. If you’re telling someone, with your words, maybe some sketches and marked-up iterations what you want the picture to look like but they actually take it and finish it, you’re not the artist— you’re commissioning art.

Is taping a banana to the wall art?

As a performance maybe? Frankly I don’t give a flying fuck about how those rich kids entertain themselves. It’s like a jobs program for creative kids from big moneyed families. It has no bearing on what happens in the rest of the art world and it could not matter less when considering how credit and attribution work in commercial art.

If this is what I think it’s referring to, then Yes. In the same way that a refutation of a previously stated position is part of an argument.

Repeating that refutation verbatim, while calling it your intellectual work does not actually make it so.

It shows, at best, your ability to remember things.

It depends. Personally, the banana taped to the wall, doesn’t do anything for me, but I once saw a canvas with just three slightly raised simple curved ridges in an interesting pattern, all in white. It was very simple and could probably be done in under 20 minutes, but it was very compelling.

As much as a can of soup is.

Sure, but you can't tell your photograph to make another one, or steal a soul. That's what AI is for.

Nope. At best, they are like commissioning work from a computer. When you commission a piece, especially as an art director, you often have lengthy conversations, exchange sketches, do multiple iterations, and have pretty fine-grained control over much of the final outcome. Art direction is a fundamentally creative process. But an art director would never, ever take credit for the piece. Why? They understand that so much of that artist’s voice, granular artistic perspective, and so much more are the building blocks of the piece. Image generators could provide reference material, make images for mood boards, and all sorts of other things useful in the artistic process, but the prompter is absolutely not making art.

There's no creativity or skill in handing something off to a generative model. At best, it's analogous to commissioning a work (as another poster said). It's not remotely like using a tool to create art.

People who say this must not really know just how much work goes into crafting the image via something like ComfyUI workflows, which is where the actual skill and creativity is. Now I don't know if this poster was that or whether it was just a single ChatGPT prompt, but look on places like r/StableDiffusion where people share their workflows, it's not really much different than EDM production, they're not actually playing the instruments but organizing them together into a cohesive pipeline.

Exactly. This was ultimately the work of a human who used AI to create something.

Just like the incredible pizza I made when I picked up my phone and said to it “one large supreme”, and there it was at my door, 30 minutes later. I really love how good the stuffed crust I made came out. /s

You can't drop ship creativity and still take credit for it.

Grubhub is also a tool. If you order a pizza, you didn't make a pizza "just using a different tool"

You can't speak to oil paint in English and get a picture.

Until recently, the only such a "tool" used to be a human being.

They only care who submitted it not who actually created it.

“Yes, the 7th grader who submitted this poster calls it the ‘Mona Lisa’. Doesn’t have anything to do with the state fair, but I swear this one belongs in a museum! Honorable Mention for sure!”

If it's not easily recognizable then yes they'll think the 7th grader did create it, it's just the default assumption. Maybe now they should run every submission through reverse image search then.

Jebus, that image is dogshit. There is no way in a million years I would put my name on something like that. It truly is the age of the shameless. If you have no shame and no ethics, you really can go far.

> Notably, the zipline is all wacky, and two piggies are #1, probably more things I didn't notice at a skim?

To nitpick, the Flags can't decide on if the US had 9 or 11 original colonies -- for celebrating "America's 250th birthday" the person that created it could have at least made sure the flag wasn't weird. Sheldon would be having a field day...

Huh, I thought I was reasonably good at this but didn't see them.

Rather than getting annoyed about it, maybe it could be a fun puzzle? Spot the AI glitches in this image.

Maybe do that contest before giving the award, though, among the finalists?

Next step: see if AI can fix them.

I noticed two kids in Costco looking at some image on a box and calling it AI.

> …[we] will be reevaluating the rules and processes for 2027…

…by which time we will have hoped the public will have forgotten about all this and moved on.

And why not? Is there any particular reason people will still need to care about this a year later?

Ribbons are splotchy and weird, and have designs that don't line up and stars that are misformed.

Are they going to use it as an official poster or something? It is it just a side competition? Feels like they might come to regret spreading it. Both the first and the second smell rather strongly of AI, though the winner seems the most egregious.

It’s good and things aren’t that blatantly wrong but I can tell it’s AI. It’s not the mistakes you pointed out, but there’s something about the overall image and I can’t put my finger on it.

The zipline? That's not a zipline.

Ironic.

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