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Comment by viraptor | Hacker News Reader

> Why should I get excited about the village fete if the organizers put in the barest minimum of effort?

Because there's no correlation between the ability to organise a village event and the graphic design skills. (Apart from "it's been so successful we can splash money on a design agency") Maybe someone actually liked it and thought it's enough. I've seen groups overthinking posters and it felt similar to groups at uni overthinking funny names instead of doing the work that actually mattered.

To be clear, I'm not saying those designs are good, just that most of the time the design is not the point and minimum effort above "Times New Roman 12pt" is what many people always wanted to do.

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It feels particularly bad for a local arts faire. Like maybe ask one of the local artists if they could design a poster instead of defaulting to the plagiarism machine? If I saw this ai poster for a local crafts faire I’d immediately dismiss it.

Do you offer to pay them in exposure? Or do you offer them actually money commensurate with the work and skill they provide?

Because if it’s the latter we’re back to money being the barrier. And if it’s the former you should go and check with your local artists how much they love working for exposure.

Yes, running an event has work and expenses involved in it. An AI slop poster is a sign the event is not serious and has other more major issues under the surface.

It’s a local craft fair. By every reasonable definition of the word, it’s not serious.

I assume you haven’t lived in a village before? These fairs have absolutely no money, and often not even much time as it’s fully volunteer led

Making a poster is free and easy. Literal children do it in school.

I’ve made posters for events. Affinity is free now, it takes you like an hour to learn it from scratch and make your poster. If you couldn’t be bothered doing that, then that’s a signal the event itself is low effort slop. I'm not sure why people are acting like it's impossible to run an event without AI tools that literally didn't exist until right now.

Graphic design skills don’t correlate with effort. I’ve seen terribly designed posters that the makers clearly put a lot of effort and love into because they loved whatever it was they were promoting.

I’ve also seen people put a lot of effort and love into poster and stuff because that interests them (doesn’t mean they’re good at it either), then the event is utter crap because they didn’t spend much time on the actual event.

> Apart from "it's been so successful we can splash money on a design agency"

Which could be an important signal for you to decide if that's the kind of event you want to go to. Maybe the comic sans fayre is preferrable to some.

It's a village fete, what kind of signals do you want from the poster?

That's why the "Look here's a 100 identical village fete posters" memes are kind of missing the point, it's actually not a bad thing that I can tell from a glance what it is, I don't actually have to read any of the details to know it'll have a tombola, because it's a given.

My bigger issue is all the posters calling it Fayre, not Fete, which is the weird part, particularly the "Craft Fayre" which should definitely be "Craft Fair", but misspellings and greengrocers apostrophe's are part and parcel of a good hand-made poster too.

Spring/Summer/Christmas "Fayres" are just a British thing. I'm not sure whether it's emerged as a spelling in recent years, or whether it's always been the case. But churches, village halls, schools, they've been doing it for ages.

That's not something AI has invented.

its an antique (english) spelling for "fair", it's basically the event equivalent of "ye olde shoppe" which is just "the old shop" in a very antiquated phrasing

Except "ye olde" was always "the olde", but for a time printing machines were produced outside of England and lacked the thorn "þ" character, so the y was used as a substitute.

The last paragraph in GP’s comment is the key. Nobody would care about a low effort poster, what they care about is the deception of pretending you put a lot of effort into the poster. It’s dishonest, and it would make me subconsciously question what else they’re being dishonest about.

Tech people seem to have a really difficult time grasping that the average person is not a utilitarian.

People are really bothered by perceived inauthenticity and injustice. And care about more things than the utility of the end product.

On top of that, we have a very out of touch political system that has continually ignored the will of the electorate. So then the tech people will say “see, the masses voted with their feet, they love the utility of AI generated art!”. Completely ignoring the perverse incentivizes and regulatory capture that led to that outcome.

If you were to poll 100 people on the street, they would be very against replacing human artists with AI.

Not always correlated, but often. I don't want to go to an event (or restaurant) organized by people with bad taste.

The thing though with deferring to AI slop though is that it signals to me a sort of negative effort now being put in. I mean don't these people also recoil at this stuff? No? They have some screw loose I guess. I don't need to give them my money.

So I saw a public poster exposition called "Hihlights of moder design in industry" in the middle of a busy square, with high quality panels that must have been pretty expensive with sponsor logos plastered all over. It was mostly photos, most of them quite interesting - cool machines, research project, factories.

But that's where the good stuff ended - all the text was total cheesy AI slop, expanding what should have been just "masive steam turbine fan calibration table" into a wall of text - the same for all the nice photos.

And worst of all was the title poster introducing the exposition - a horrendous AI slop image of a high tech motorcycle, whit a chan fused together with the body, asymmetrical wheels fused to the frame.

I find this really insane, someone with enough money, representing a serious project just decided to use an AI instead of doing their job & the garbage they produced was not stopped by anyone sane until it was presented to people as an achievement...

1000% agree.

If I’m looking for a handyman on (the Dutch equivalent to) Craigslist, either very short text with spelling errors or something obviously AI are both a positive signal. These are people too busy doing actual jobs, to fret over smoothly copywritten ads.

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