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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

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"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Is this really that distracting to you that you cannot appreciate the content of the article? Just ignore it. Why are you in charge of how people express themselves on the internet.

We are in the goofy geo-cities days of AI. The art is strange and often illegal. The chatbots are vulnerable to "Grandma attacks". Enjoy the madness before the corpos kill the fun

I agree on an emotional level, but now I’m starting to wonder exactly why. Something similar from an illustrator would not be provoking to me.

Still working it out, but here’s a theory: when I’m sifting through stuff I’m looking for things that people spent time on. I have a pretty decent radar for effort, and effort is a good proxy for interesting. Even if I find it wrong or insightless, I still respect that people spend the time to express themselves.

However, these AI images are tricking my effort-heuristic and I’m annoyed that my attention has been temporarily hijacked someone spent 2 seconds on. This isn’t a new phenomenon, I’ve always been like this when I stumble across eg ads and low effort content marketing.

I think this cringe/cheesy feeling might be more a reaction to how it was made than the content itself.

I, for myself, loved the illustrations.

I’ve come to see a lot of ai generated images as a proxy for effort, or care, and whenever I see them, my first thought is mostly “the author doesn’t care enough to make an effort about the presentation of their post”.

Same reason I stopped using GitHub copilot to write PR bodies, I had a teammate say “I know you didn’t put any effort or thought into writing it,so why should I bother reading it?” Which I resonate with.

I'm reminded of the way expensive restaurants use very simple descriptions, while less expensive ones load them up with superlatives and (uninformative) adjectives. The high end is confident enough that you assume it will be good.

The AI art assumes you need art to think that they've put in effort. More confidence would allow for simplicity.

But I cannot say if that confidence would be well placed. For all I know people really do think the art adds class.

Your comparison is indeed thoughtful. I would note a counterexample, though: an expensive restaurant with a very simple description gives no guarantee that you will be delighted, while some inexpensive places (possibly with basic ads) might offer something very delightful.

I would suggest looking at it from another perspective. Writing a text that precicely describes the image you want might require a lot of effort. Crafting this text to get as close as possible to the imagined picture also requires effort. Also, consider that some people can't draw (I also can't sing), but can write. AI gives a nice opportunity to add some color and visual humor, which is, in my humble opinion, great. But no doubt there are many examples of AI misusage (or overusage), which match your description.

I agree with your second point. But in this case, the AI art is a pure decoration.

Unless the author has some actual artistic talent, to me it feels like waste of time to spend more than a few minutes coming up with this. Some philosophers drinking Java coffee and playing with the PostgreSQL elefant. It doesn't even illustrate anything specific about the issue at hand.

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