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Comment by wiether | Hacker News Reader

  > 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.

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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!

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.

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