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Comment by wiether | Hacker News Reader

  > I'm old enough to remember that people also complained about WordArt and Clipart and too many fonts etc.

We basically had two kinds of posters:

  - those made by someone skilled/savvy (not necessarily a professional)
  - those made by someone without skills/knowledge

The later were awful, in the sense that I would never display them in my home as a reminder of a an event I took part in.

But still, they were nice because you knew someone took the time to create them to promote an event and share the important information about it, and each person was producing their own awful posters.

Now with gen AI we have something filled with trash, everything looks the same, the important information is hard to find...

Sure, the variations offered in the article are a bit better and more opinionated, but they still reek AI conformity and I feel sick looking at them.

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> they still reek AI conformity and I feel sick looking at them

I bet you would not feel sick if you didn't know ahead of time they were AI-generated. Some really are quite good.

> if you didn't know ahead of time they were AI-generated

You can't be serious... Are we looking at the same posters?

Yes. That's the issue: we are looking at the same posters.

It's just that "seeing this poster for the first time, unaware of the workings behind it" is a very different experience from "seeing this poster after you already saw dozens of other AI generated posters that used a similar style and had similar issues, got canny at spotting both the style and the issues in it, and came to associate them with cheap low quality work".

The former impression is "wow that's a good poster". The latter impression is "ew, it's posterslop". The poster, in the meanwhile, remains the same.

AI can often win in art contests - images, short stories, design. But that requires either sharp prompting, or an audience that's not familiar with "AI cliches". The quality is, if removed from the context, fairly good. If embedded in context, it's utter slop. The work is the same. Funny how that works.

Yes, context matters. The greatest painting in the world is just crushed materials smeared on a canvas, it's nothing too special without the context.

A computer (not even an LLM, just something generating random pixels) could randomly generate the exact same pixel pattern as the greatest painting in the world, and it would not be the greatest painting in the world, because context matters.

Because of what?

Context.

Is it the lack of hate? I could put all the hate I have into a person or group I hate while composing an AI art piece for instance.

No you couldn't, because you can't compose AI art. The AI composes it, and it can't feel hate.

I don't paint physically with paint when I use photoshop either. Photoshop doesn't feel hate.

The sentience of AI is also an open question.

> The quality is, if removed from the context, fairly good.

IMO that doesn't fully explain AI hate, triggered by simple exposure to AI generated images, unless you'd include all standard educational programs until introduction of AI - which is arguably a part of the context, but if so, IMO, "fairly good" is part of context and is devoid of meaning in absence of context and cannot be said.

The activities being perfectly aligned and normalized is the big tell here to me

Idk how to express it exactly, but I don't see how a human would have come to something like this

If you think about whether it is AI, are good at recognising those tells, an thinking about whether it is AI, then its probable you will spot things like that.

Most people are not that good at spotting those tells, and when looking at a poster they will not be thinking about whether its is AI or not. If its not obviously AI they are not going to even think about it.

At least in this case I can't pretend I have some kind of super power since I knew beforehand that it was gen AI.

And also it's not like I'm saying I love all the man-made posters. Or that I never been "fooled" by gen AI content.

It's just that as soon as I start seeing some gen AI tells on an image, I can't unsee them and I feel disgusted by it.

If there's nothing to think about they may well not think.

That's the problem.

Like how if you bought a box of chocolates, and it was actually filled with rocks, you wouldn't dislike it until you found out.

Immediate glamor followed by gradual disappointment is AI output all over.

Chocolates and rocks are different things.

Pictures and pictures are the same thing.

If they were the same thing nobody would complain about it, would they?

Haven't yet seen anyone here claiming to be a customer or visitor to this fair so we cannot say that.

No, it's like if you bought a box of chocolates, and you couldn't distinguish if they were handmade or factory-made, even after you ate them.

And it took them telling you before you knew.

And then you decided you didn't like the ones made by the factory as much anymore.

It's saturation.

If I saw an Images 2.0 flyer in year 2020? In a world where Images 2.0 didn't exist? I'd be impressed. But if I see it now, today? I'm not impressed at all.

It's the same image, produced by the same AI and seen by the same person. So, what's the difference? What changed over time?

Saturation. "I've seen it all before." AI made that specific flyer style plentiful and omnipresent, and that made it "derivative" and "cheap". What used to invoke "cool" and "wow" was turned into a dreary cliche by repetition. Flaws that were easy to overlook when overshadowed by novelty stand out like a sore thumb now that you've seen them before in the same patterns many times over.

The image is the same - it has the same strengths and the same flaws. But your focus is shifted by familiarity.

It's the same mechanism that drives trends and fashion. AI just supercharges it.

Naturally, you can avoid a lot of it by using careful prompting and steering to guide an AI away from the "cliche" style-space. You can get something with both good quality and good identity that way.

But that requires: being aware of the problem, being really good at prompting, and putting in a considerable effort. It's hard to steer a model away from "AI cliches" if you don't have the eye to spot them in the first place.

Most AI-generated content doesn't have that kind of skill and effort applied to it - it simply uses the "model defaults", and gets the "model defaults". For all the good and bad that comes with those.

If you read the article at all, the "everything looks the same" is easily fixed with just a tiny bit of effort.

It's not AI causing the sameyness and hard-to-read nature of these posters, it's people being lazy. I personally think there's a few nice looking ones in there (the punk fanzine style for one).

Sure it's not some 9/10 hand made poster, but considering these take 30 seconds to make, it's impressive.

> Sure it's not some 9/10 hand made poster, but considering these take 30 seconds to make, it's impressive.

It's not impressive. It would be impressive if a human did it, but a human did not do it. Is it impressive when a printer prints out 10 perfect copies of the same flyer, because it would be impressive if a human could do that? No, of course not. It's similarly not impressive when the copying machine makes a plausible copy of something a human once made.

> But still, they were nice because you knew someone took the time to create them to promote an event

Unlike a gift, "it's the thought that counts" doesn't fly with me here. I don't care how much effort the secretary took to cobble some shitty poster together - it still looked terrible. I'd rather look at something clean and polished produced by AI (no matter how "generic" people here claim the OP's posters look).

Prompt1: generate random poster

Polish: make it nicer

Some level of uniformity is fine and indeed the norm. It was uniform back when posters were hand painted, eg 19th century world fairs or zoo openings or theater posters. They look pretty similar. Carneval posters looked similar.

The expectation of some kaleidoscope of styles is not really grounded in how things used to be ever.

Also, it's just nostalgia, just like how some young people now think audio cassettes and discmans are "cool" and have some revival, some are nostalgic for the back-in-the-day Word posters because "at least back then", but "these days" it's decline etc. Pretty sure in a few years people will be nostalgic for crappy AI slop of 2025-26 because their shittiness will feel like some charm compared to whatever the AI will be able to do.

  > Also, it's just nostalgia

I'm not sure about that. I, myself, am not skilled enough to make a nice poster, so when I needed one, I used to asked my skilled friends to do them for me.

But sometimes I also purposefully made myself some Comic Sans stuff, exaggerating them in every possible way, as a joke. And it was well received because people knew it was my own work and understood the joke.

If I made this today, it would not be seen the same. People would thought I'm trying to fight gen AI trash or I'm nostalgic of the past. While I'm just trying to make a joke by making something awful on purpose.

And I couldn't do the same joke using gen AI. The "on purpose" cannot be conveyed. People would just see gen AI trash.

Making stuff that's bad on purpose is annoying, like acting retarded ironically. Make good stuff or just spend little effort. Putting in effort to look low effort is just trying to be special when you're not.

I was one of those "skilled friends" that people go to, to make those posters in times of need back in school. And this was many years ago. Didn't enjoy it, but just did it as part of volunteering, or help the student community or a school club out.

Some people enjoy doing that work, but most people did not, and I was often the last resort because a random club or activity could not find suitable help in time. So had to step up when a friend or acquaintance asked.

I think there is some misguided view where in "the good old days" people designed everything by hand. From the perspective of someone who had to make 10-20 of those a year as a volunteer, I can say it came at personal cost, often caused distractions from the actual event, and there was not enough people who stepped up to get it done. If it was so enjoyable we would have no problems finding people doing the work and that was not the case.

The posters and designs were often rushed out late night by the closest person you can find who had a copy of photoshop on their computer. If we had AI back then, I would bet you 100% it would be the preferable solution and no one would bat an eye. It wasn't the type of work a lot of people wanted to do, could do properly and is willing to do for free, at their spare time, rushed for a deadline.

I'm sorry you keep bad memories of those times.

I could be mistaken but in my case I never forced anyone to use their artistic skills, it was actually more often voluntary from them.

Basically everyone was doing their part using their skills if they had some useful for the project, or just their time/sweat.

The relationship we had (still have, actually) was healthy enough so they could just tell us to piss off if they didn't want to do it. I particularly remember one such instance, because I ended up doing an ugly poster but when asked, I said it was the work of our skilled friend.

On the other hand I've been spending at least an hour per week doing sysadmin work for various groups/clubs, it's not the funniest thing in the world, particularly in the evening when I already spent the whole day doing it at work, but it's just me doing my part for the greater good!

Sorry, but Walkmans and Discmans were considered cool... At the time.

Personally I like simple designs. I always remind people who make posters that whoever looks at them will only do so for a matter of seconds. If you want extensive detail, put it in smaller print. Put the main hook in large letters and a brief description.

But they became uncool when the iPod and mp3 players came out. Nobody felt sentimental about VHS artifacts either, and now it's a genz aesthetic or something. These things cycle, like I'm sure some old folks miss the radio hiss and listening to football matches with just audio.

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