‹ BackHN Continuity

Thread

AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible

1902 points · 962 comments · ereiamjh

  1. petetnt · · focus · HN ↗
    The author claims that the AI posters don’t have to be horrible, but fail to see that the dozen variations generated are not distinctive - they might have somewhat different typography or imaginary, but still have the same AI uniformity and smell as the crappy restaurant poster you see on the street. The core issue is not only technical, but also the lack of vision and imagination when creating art or even infographics.
    1. bonoboTP · · focus · HN ↗
      The alternative is WordArt, or just black on white Comic Sans with some bolding and font size variations with bad ClipArt. These small scale events would never hire a professional.

      I'm old enough to remember that people also complained about WordArt and Clipart and too many fonts etc.

      I see the chatgpt poster style on many small-scale local village events also. But again, what they replace wasn't any better. It's not replacing some beautiful craft that existed before.

      1. wiether · · focus · HN ↗

          > I'm old enough to remember that people also complained about WordArt and Clipart and too many fonts etc.
        
        We basically had two kinds of posters:

          - those made by someone skilled/savvy (not necessarily a professional)
          - those made by someone without skills/knowledge
        
        The later were awful, in the sense that I would never display them in my home as a reminder of a an event I took part in.

        But still, they were nice because you knew someone took the time to create them to promote an event and share the important information about it, and each person was producing their own awful posters.

        Now with gen AI we have something filled with trash, everything looks the same, the important information is hard to find...

        Sure, the variations offered in the article are a bit better and more opinionated, but they still reek AI conformity and I feel sick looking at them.

        1. jwr · · focus · HN ↗
          > they still reek AI conformity and I feel sick looking at them

          I bet you would not feel sick if you didn't know ahead of time they were AI-generated. Some really are quite good.

          1. wiether · · focus · HN ↗
            The activities being perfectly aligned and normalized is the big tell here to me

            Idk how to express it exactly, but I don't see how a human would have come to something like this

            1. graemep · · focus · HN ↗
              If you think about whether it is AI, are good at recognising those tells, an thinking about whether it is AI, then its probable you will spot things like that.

              Most people are not that good at spotting those tells, and when looking at a poster they will not be thinking about whether its is AI or not. If its not obviously AI they are not going to even think about it.

              1. wiether · · focus · HN ↗
                At least in this case I can't pretend I have some kind of super power since I knew beforehand that it was gen AI.

                And also it's not like I'm saying I love all the man-made posters. Or that I never been "fooled" by gen AI content.

                It's just that as soon as I start seeing some gen AI tells on an image, I can't unsee them and I feel disgusted by it.

Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.