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I have to agree. This is especially noticeable in software; it’s impossible to distinguish manual work from the generated kind. There’s no point in appealing to the human element here, the buyer simply doesn’t see the difference. But fortunately, for now, we still have work.

Did you watch the video? Her point is to use AI's productivity gains to iterate faster on the creative aspects.

That's my point. When you use AI tools in a "responsible" way in your creative process, you lose the ability to (honestly) differentiate your work as AI-free, but you can't possibly win the competition with AI on speed or price unless you give up more control than you want. And in terms of customer preferences, most people are content with low-effort AI art.

As a SWE and also an art director;

firstly, great post and you're spot on. On the art side, it was already that way before AI art, just that the smallest of customers didn't know how to access it.

Coding is just as much like woodworking as art and design are. The core of the matter is intent, or what people call intentionality in the architecture.

What I tell clients is: You want your code to be consistent and maintanable, so someone fully understands the edge cases. Or you want the design to be consistent across the company. You could easily hire someone to do one art piece that was 90% on point, and then haphazardly hire someone else to do one that was 90% okay based on that... and very quickly the overall structure will decohere.

So, I'm not talking about someone selling socks on Etsy, but if you've already invested a few million in branding and/or code architecture, that is an asset you own and control. Do you really want to inject potential AI slop into that in a process that's going to degrade it further in each subsequent step, just to save a few bucks?

I also like how people are becoming more aware of the difference... this thread is enlightening[0]... but I believe that what a few people are conscious of, 90% of people are subconsciously aware of, and knowing how to manipulate subconscious associations with imagery has always been the true art and magic of graphic design. Design in particular is widely misunderstood, even by people who call themselves designers. It has almost nothing to do with making something look subjectively decent (the bare minimum), and everything to do with knowing more references than your audience knows they know. So when AI becomes a recognizable visual trope, we've won.

>> it's going to be a tough market for artisans because fewer and fewer people are forced to buy the fruits of your intellectual labor.

Once everyone has a WordPress site, who needs a web designer? It turns out a lot of people. And I've begun getting random queries from people who have vibe-coded apps asking me to "fix" them. When everyone has a bike, people dream of owning a car. When everyone has a car, people dream of owning a plane. What makes them tick isn't the velocity, it's the cachet.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Portland/comments/1wwyqiw/the_made_...

> For the vast majority of paying customers or social media appreciators, that low-effort slop is sufficient. It's cheap, fast, and gets better with every passing month. So if your overriding goal is to scale to win in that marketplace, then you can only scale by giving up on quality and artistry. It's a race to the bottom

I've arrived at the conclusion, that we can probably do without software developers rather than graphic designers. The slopocalypse is oozing into the real-world, where more and more businesses advertise their services with AI-generated art, if we want to call it even art at all. It's either overloaded and nonsensical advertisements, horrendous and lovecraftian depictions of food, or corporate designs that just scream that everything the business does is just cheap and low-quality. My bet is on graphic designers having a small renaissance, because obviously AI-generated art will become a signal for cheap, lazy, and low-quality business practices.

I find it amusing how there are two completely opposite but similarly defeatist points as the top comments. I think if the market is saturated with low-effort slop then the only way to stand out is to produce something that is noticeably different. I don't think boasting that you did it without AI is the best way to do that (it's quite possible to be very skilled and yet make something utterly generic): the best way is to be different, however you did it.

Don’t see how scaling mediocre content is a winning strategy. Quality will go up and we all win.

That's a very one-dimensional view. Two things I'd encourage you to consider:

1. What is quality, exactly? An average person on Facebook prefers AI-generated images to real photos or human art. Is their preference a signal of quality, or is this actually optimizing for orthogonal metrics - agreeability, engagement, etc?

2. Do increases in quality always translate to "everyone winning"? For example, is it a net win if a marketing flyer for your local grocery store has 10% higher "quality" if it means that your next-door neighbor who used to design these is no longer employed? Even if you disregard the feelings of the neighbor, is it good for you? You stand to lose more than you're gaining (e.g., reduction in property values if they can no longer afford upkeep).

I don't want to paint AI as a net negative, but these dynamics are pretty complex. There's plenty of situations where AI is not upleveling quality, or where quality is comparatively unimportant.

Year after year, I keep seeing people talk about various races to the bottom.

And yet all the things (in particular the technology things) just keep getting better and better?

"Cheap-to-generate" mediocre content forces the floor expectation to rise, becoming the "minimum", which raises expectations of "current mediocre" further. Its largely invisible, slow process, where you can't gauge past "floor-level" expectation for content, because it implicitly assumed the 'current year' standard is the norm(while its evolution of expectations). In a few years, expectation for "mediocre slop" would likely include stuff that considered top-level today, but has some minor deficiencies and the "slop of years past" would be relegated to unusable/useless junk, like\ e.g. Stable Diffusion 1.5 images and GPT2 texts.

all the things keep getting better and better? Many people seem to feel all the things are getting worse. If your life is getting better, that's nice, but I would expect you're aware enough of the rest of humanity to know most people feel it isn't getting better for them?

https://inytimes.pressreader.com/article/281758453715975