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Comment by FridgeSeal | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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