Hacker News Reader

Comment by nospice | Hacker News Reader

Four things that give me a pause:

1) The maze on the carton can't be solved.

2) Two of the maze walls appear to be smudged, but nothing else in the image is.

3) The floral pattern on the plate is messed up - it repeats, but berries randomly change positions and the leaves change shape.

4) The milk carton has a splotchy texture that's really common in ChatGPT-generated illustrations.

I suspect it's not 100% gen AI - for example, the sharp outline around an out-of-focus xmas tree feels like a human-made artistic choice - but I'd bet it's at least partly composed from AI-generated elements.

And for what it's worth, the image pretty consistently trips gen AI image detectors (e.g., https://hivemoderation.com/ai-generated-content-detection).

View on HN

I hadn't even looked at the floral pattern. It's awful.

I wonder how pissed Apple was when they realized they had paid him a few thousand (going by his posted rates) for "art" that used gen AI to a significant enough degree to have nonsensical components.

>for example, the sharp outline around an out-of-focus xmas tree feels like a human-made artistic choice

If I had to guess, it looks like he did the components of it separately and then just pasted them all in together. For example, you'd expect the light on the plate to brighten the milk carton near it. And the shadow on the plate doesn't line up with the bright light shining on the carton's side. These are just classic sloppy bad artwork mistake.

> And for what it's worth, the image pretty consistently trips gen AI image detectors (e.g., https://hivemoderation.com/ai-generated-content-detection).

Notwithstanding your previous points, these sorts of AI detectors flag many false positives, they're not worth relying on. The only one that could actually work is specific watermarking in the images themselves, such as what Google does with SynthID in their generated images.

SynthID can be easily circumvented. One of the top posts in a certain subreddit today relates to the topic for those willing to look.

Well there you go, anything can be circumvented because you can ask an AI to just recreate the image but by itself, and you've removed the watermark.

The structure of the carton is off. The spout. The opposite end of it.

Being a trained artist myself I don’t think many artists would deliberately make that kind of design choice considering given the overall style of the artwork.

Thing is, from a commercial standpoint, who cares? It's an image used to promote a TV show on a social media account. There will be a tiny, loud community of AI haters who make a stink on social media, but the vast majority of people will be oblivious, and the quality issues with the image will have zero bearing on whether anyone watches the show; whereas the fact that the post exists probably WILL drive a few to watch who wouldn't have otherwise.

The fact is we're in a world where algorithms consume more attention than ever. There's more content than ever. We're more sedentary and glued to useless shit on a screen than ever. We consume content like we're pigs, and what do you feed pigs? Slop. I don't like this, and I try to keep my diet as healthy as I can, but it's probably still worse than it was 20 years ago, and most people don't care at all. It's all consumption for the sake of mindless distraction. The slop exists because the demand exists. People will watch the show anyway.

> There will be a tiny, loud community of AI haters who make a stink on social media, but the vast majority of people will be oblivious

Not only oblivious but actively for it; I know many people who even watch fully AI generated content on TikTok or Instagram Reels. In fact, they know it's AI yet still like it, probably because some can look pretty cool or funny.

I actually started listening to AI music unknowingly, and was merely impressed when I later realised it was AI. However, I don't think AI videos have reached that point yet.

What's worth mentioning is that there has always been large quantities of "slop" even with human-generated art; the good stuff has always been a minority.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx1UGA_T1nI

Breathtakingly beautiful AI-generated videos, with undeniable artistic merit. (Images generated with Midjourney, music generated with Suno).

> 1) The maze on the carton can't be solved.

It can if you just go around the maze.

Now you're working with cow tools!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com