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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. elxr · · focus · HN ↗
          If you read the article at all, the "everything looks the same" is easily fixed with just a tiny bit of effort.

          It's not AI causing the sameyness and hard-to-read nature of these posters, it's people being lazy. I personally think there's a few nice looking ones in there (the punk fanzine style for one).

          Sure it's not some 9/10 hand made poster, but considering these take 30 seconds to make, it's impressive.

          1. miyoji · · focus · HN ↗
            > Sure it's not some 9/10 hand made poster, but considering these take 30 seconds to make, it's impressive.

            It's not impressive. It would be impressive if a human did it, but a human did not do it. Is it impressive when a printer prints out 10 perfect copies of the same flyer, because it would be impressive if a human could do that? No, of course not. It's similarly not impressive when the copying machine makes a plausible copy of something a human once made.

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