AI is ruining haunted houses
plagiarismtoday.com
plagiarismtoday.com
This is the main reason I heavily dislike the obviously AI generated Flyers, posters and menus you see so often nowadays. When i look at your menu, flyer or poster, the main thing I want to know is "What is this and what can i expect from it?". Real photos of your actual food, embedded in an AI generated layout/design? Good! Great even! "Chatgpt, please make me a flyer for my burger joint"? might as well have a no pictures plaintext flyer/menu.
Many if not most restaurants weren't using real photos of their actual food long before gen AI was a thing, especially in promotional materials.
I really, really wish I were making this up.
Is abstract art "not real art" if it doesn't generate any emotions at all?
Maybe I'm just uncultured.
It's not abstract, but Jeff Koons, probably.
> AI art has also seeped into the actual haunted houses themselves. AtmosFX, one of the largest providers of digital projections to the haunt industry, has admitted to using AI to create some of their characters.
Big TV and projectors are very cheap now.
For the vast, vast majority of people, this will make either little difference, or improve the experience.
Modern image generation has fixed most of the obvious tell-tales like mangled hands, square pupils, etc. And the few that remain end up looking like spooky things, which are pretty good for scary art anyhow.
The usual counterargument is “well I would gladly pay more for man-made art!” which is a fair personal preference, but judging by the market most people clearly disagree, and businesses aren't obligated to cater to your niche.
I know the AI ultras get mad when you point out that AI slop is bad quality, looks bad, and results in a worse aesthetic experience, but it's reasonable to have taste and to rebel against all design and illustration being brought down to the level of obvious low-effort content. Just because you have no taste, does not mean that other people must have no taste, or that having taste is somehow elitist.
The tradeoff you gotta contend with is that by making AI-style art effectively zero-cost and everywhere, not only does it immediately signal zero effort/taste on the part of the people using it, it also makes everything look the same. Composition, color choices, and style of AI-generated art is so samey, and people respond to that sameness negatively, for good reason.
As an art teacher of mine often quipped, it does not matter if it took you five minutes to make it, it just can't look like it took you five minutes to make it. Art tickles the brain when the viewer perceives aesthetic choices being made -- interesting, sometimes surprising, or skillful ones -- and the choice of AI-generated art signals to the viewer that no such choices were made.
(If AI is used is actually ultimately irrelevant, it's whether something is crap and lazy people can tell it's crap and lazy.)
1. You can no longer judge what an event will be like by its materials
2. Everything starts to look the same, and you feel like you've seen it all before
Maybe these effect will attenuate as people start getting more adept with AI. But I think we're in for a least a few years of this.
This is a major complaint people have had with the TV and movie industry for most of the last two decades.
> So, imagine my disappointment when I walked up to my first haunted attraction of the year and was immediately greeted by low‑quality AI art. One of the images was so bad that it even included the Gemini diamond in the lower‑right corner of the page.
The image in question is a sign or menu, the sort of thing that's usually neither good nor bad. Here it's exceptionally bad because it "included the Gemini diamond." In other words, it's exceptionally bad because it's AI, and for no other reason.
At this point, I don't know if it has much to do with quality...
Since this is primarily still a programming site, consider mediocre code that looks like it works but clearly nobody actually made an effort to make sure.
I'm not sure why you're concerned that people might complain about it though. If customer feedback isn't a useful signal to the market, a lot of people have been misled about that for a very long time.
Most people in this thread probably use AI all day to do their job for them. But god forbid a haunted house not hand-craft their flyers.
How about we let this part time business focus on entertaining it's visitors rather than wasting time virtue signaling to hypocrites.
With code, that doesn't matter so much. We are using it to achieve real-world objectives. The creativity of the programmer is rarely at issue -- from the user's perspective, a programmer is more akin to a plumber or an electrician. What matters is the result, not the creativity of the code.
But it does matter when part of the point of an in-person event is to see and appreciate someone else's creativity and skill. There is a real difference when that creativity and artisanship is replaced with AI output.
If I want to see AI art, I can prompt a model all day long and see whatever art I want, customized to my preferences. It's freely available and easy to get, so it doesn't have a lot of value.
What do you think "virtue signaling" means?
Did you read the article and understand the author's dislike, or did you just come here to whine that if I think AI is a bad choice in one context, I can never complain about it in any context? I assume you're aware that is a trivially silly and childish position.
And yes, I read it and I stand by what I said. From TFA:
When I go to a new restaurant and see an AI-generated menu, I’m disappointed. When I see an AI-generated flyer for an event, I’m annoyed and much less likely to go.
To me this is silly. The event is the draw, not the way the flyer was created or the amount of effort that went in to it.
I see this thread as a manifesting of fear that AI will inevitably own software engineering. We'll hang on to some of the peripheral areas for a few years but it's over. Seeing reminders of this in the AI images generated for decoration must be hard for some.
Second, and more importantly, graphic design (like programming, game development, video production and everything else AI enjoyers claim to be "liberating" from "the gatekeepers") was already available to the masses. Often the only gatekeepers are imagination and effort, and if AI enjoyers don't want to put in either, it isn't surprising the results are so often ugly and mediocre.
These events(amateur ones anyway) usually have a comic sans flyer made in word with some clip art pumpkins, let's be realistic. The art and the flyers shown in the article look great.
No they don't. I've seen fliers and billboards for haunted houses for years, not a single one has had comic sans fliers made in word with some clip art pumpkins.
>The art and the flyers shown in the article look great.
No they don't. They look exactly like every other piece of AI generated "art," which is to say, aggressively mediocre.
It is certainly something that an amateur could have come up with, but I strongly suspect that had a human being done so, you wouldn't be calling it "great."
Yes, by observing the quality of the output and means of production. If it's the standard "AI house style" one gets when prompting image models, by which I am immediately and viscerally repelled, then I am confident assuming it's a low effort "typed in a prompt, got a thing, called it a day" result, rather than actually applying some taste and judgement and trying a bunch of different things in different styles and adjusting things until it's something nice.
The art you posted is like the first example. See, someone even made a blog all about it, they enjoy picking that stuff apart. Repetitive AI art created by typing out four words or pasting a Facebook post into the prompt text box is the second. People don't even entertain themselves by looking at how bad it is, they just plain hate it.
Which would be good?
And if the work is an ad, a flyer, etc., the quality of the output used to signal something about the event or product. Not so much any more.
There is nothing to be done about it, but it's still a real tradeoff.
Why. I literally don't understand it. Is the menu clear? Is the food good? Why would you be disappointed over a _menu_ of all things? I could maybe understand it if I went to a Michelin star restaurant for a £400/head tasting menu and they had an AI generated menu - purely because I'd feel like if I'm spending this much money, I expect you to actually have a silk wrapped menu written by hand, ideally. But at a local pizza place? Who cares?(I mean obviously you do, but I don't see why)
Even in a strange place and where I don't understand the language, I have Google Lens.
An in-house menu is usually lovingly crafted by the marketing minds, and the glowing description of the food they're serving is at least... accurate, in terms of ingredients and presentation.
For a recent example, a Chinese menu listing egg rolls. The LLM summary says they "sometimes include meat". Well, what kind? And wouldn't it be a good idea to commit to a "yes" or "no" before I order the thing?
If does, then: The menu is an important part of the experience. It's the first part of the experience that involves the food itself, and it leaves an impression just as every other aspect does.
When McDonald's uses 10s cooked patties with plastic and craft materials to make their fotos it isn't exactly any different then when a restaurant AI generates pictures of their menu's. The Burger at McDonald's has never looked like the pictures nor will it ever.
It's a choice the owner has and if they oversell expectations it's on them to deal with the consequences. At some point it also becomes fraud.
This kind of anti-AI sentiment really is baffling to me, as baffling as anti-trans sentiment.
The two really have a lot in common if you look beneath the surface: both are instances of aggressive intolerance as a response to other people failing to live up to an arbitrary moral standard the aggressor has decided they have the right to impose on other people, whether or not those other people have any interest in the aggressor's arbitrary moral standard.
The response to the aggressor is the same in both circumstances: "but how does that affect you in any way?", with the honest answer being that it doesn't, and the more likely answer being some goofy rationalization invoking the rest of society's collective well-being, as the aggressor fantasizes everyone else as better off if they all also adhered to the aggressor's choice of arbitrary moral framework.
I am very sorry but these are not related at all.
P.S. No need to apologize for politely expressing ideological disagreement :)
Only in the most abstract sense where virtually all criticism would fit. What you describe is not some unique similarity.
And the example here is how AI use harms the experience of a customer. This is distinct from "just trying to live their lives." If somebody is using AI at home to do whatever, fine. If somebody is using AI to produce low quality children's books to read to my child at day care, that matters to me.
That is what is happening here. TFA is upset that AI-generated content is making a thing they love less enjoyable.
In comparison, transphobes are banning things that do not affect them at all (trans healthcare for minors, drag shows) and are enacting policies in public spaces like schools, universities, and libraries.