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Comment by charcircuit | Hacker News Reader

AI art has made attractive graphic design available to the masses. I don't get the hatred for them since they both look good and wouldn't exist without AI.

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First, most AI generated art and graphic design isn't attractive. It certainly isn't more attractive than what amateurs have always come up with. I know AI enjoyers don't want to admit it, or don't care, but where aesthetics are concerned it does actually matter what people think and most people don't like it.

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.

>>It certainly isn't more attractive than what amateurs have always come up with.

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.

>These events(amateur ones anyway) usually have a comic sans flyer made in word with some clip art pumpkins, let's be realistic.

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."

Nothing is attractive about AI art like shown in the article

Is it worse than the usual fairground airbrushed abominations, though? Because that’s essentially what it’s competing with.

The "usual fairground airbrushed abominations" at least have a distinctive style and mean that someone cares enough to do more than type into a computer a few times and say "eh, good enough."

Why imagine the mental state of the person using the tool? You have no idea one way or the other how much a hypothetical person cared. Also, what does it mean to "care enough"? Can we measure and quantify caring? What if it turns out the AI user cared more under whatever metric you provide, would that change your mind about the quality of the output?

> Can we measure and quantify caring?

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.

Yes, easily.

http://badfairgroundart.blogspot.com/2009/10/?m=1

really?

You know how there are movies that are so bad that they become entertaining to watch just so you can see how much of a trainwreck they are and how many rules they manage to break - and then are movies that are bad in the sense of sub-mediocrity that is drawn out, repetitive and completely uninteresting to anyone?

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.

Like, it is definitely bad, but I'd still prefer that to AI generated images in most contexts

...how? The art in the article looks great.

> wouldn't exist without AI.

Which would be good?

No, it means the promotion would suck and I wouldn't be interested in events that I would be interested in if marketed to me correctly.

I would be more interested in a flyer that was in rainbow comic sans, than one that just made up what it will look like because it can't see the actual event

People provide other images for the AI to integrate into the flyer. It doesn't make up everything.

You mean you've seen events than only caught your interest once they started using AI for promotion? Cause that wasn't my experience at all

For example if a shop is having an Independence Day sale, just saying that it's happening with text is not very attractive.

Like, less attractive than a slop image with stars and stripes and eagles and trucks loaded full or whatever?

I much preferred the fake photos—as in not photos of food served at that restaurant—than the AI generated images of food that doesn't exist at all on menus, as an example. I also hate that Etsy is now mostly an AI-image gallery.

A big part of the problem, in my view, is that the process of creating the art/graphic design/writing was to think and be creative. Having to do the work itself led to a wide variety of outputs that were interesting. Now that's often gone.

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.

Attractive? Have you ever seen one of these obnoxious food cart menus? Anything meat looks like a ton of puree'd maggots. Utterly revolting.

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