ereiamjh

This is very true and after rendering 100 prompts twice for https://john.hartnup.uk/poster-prompts/ I realised that the prompts could be improved by asking for much less clutter. The best examples on there pick out one main visual subject, but many of them are too fussy.

I may do a V2 one of these days.

Clutter comes with the territory to some extent though. I was recently asked to do a real world PTA fayre poster, and the client (my wife) very firmly wanted 12+ attractions mentioned on the poster. Tombola, hook a duck, bar, BBQ, blah, blah, blah as well as date, location, sponsor, ...

To get a really clean design, you need to edit it down to the essentials. I don't know what pro designers do - convince the client to say less?

Unless the prompt says otherwise, AI will try to get a visual element in for every single word too.

Author here.

Well of course Spring + Japan = Sakura. In a way the model would be faulty if it didn't reach for that cliché. That's what it's meant to do.

If you want originality, you need to supply it. AI fills the vacuum with the obvious thing.

And in a way that's a feature. If I was creating a poster myself I'd think "nah, can't use sakura it's too obvious". AI gets you past that hurdle. "Yeah, we used the cliché, it looks nice, let's move on".

This is if it's for a school fayre, village fête, etc. - brilliant originality isn't the goal. But it's nice when your poster doesn't look the same as three other posters on the same noticeboard (I have seen this).

If brilliant originality is needed, a human has to bring it. Although an LLM with the temperature turned up can offer some nice seeds.

I've done a lot of experimenting, and with the GPT image AI, it's quite hard to prevent the piss filter, though you can reduce it.

It's easy to colour balance it in post though - if you have the aesthetics and the knowledge to do that.

Author here.

That post has been lying around for a while, and got very little interest when I shared it on BlueSky and Reddit. So I'm absolutely delighted it's prompted a healthy discussion on HN.

Some of the comments I've had rebuttals for, but people have beaten me to making the same point I would have.

Everyone's sick of seeing the same default ChatGPT style on posters for everything from village fetes to coffee shops to school plays.

But I'm convinced that just vetoing AI is to throw away the baby with the bathwater. So I set out to prove it.

I think this is HN fodder for two reasons - it's about how facts are so fragile in a world where AI is misconstruing reality without any real guardrails, and people are using AI-generated sources to populate human-curated sources, turning a hallucination into a supposedly genuine source. The first three parts of the story are absolutely true, and I think the rest is not entirely implausible.

The other reason is that this is AI-assisted fiction, with "workings" according to a manifesto I've invented.