A lot of people in the comments say that the supposedly better examples in the article are still “horrible” because they can tell they’re AI and point to things that the AI did “wrong” and a human artist would do better.
That may be true if you’re working with a top of the line artist, but in my experience the average freelance designer online is significantly worse than AI. I’ve worked with dozens of budget friendly designers on Fiverr and consistently get way worse results than I’ve gotten from AI models. Will a great human designer produce better output than an AI? Maybe, but a small local event or business probably won’t have the budget to hire them or know where to find them. It’s cheaper, faster and easier to use AI to generate something that’s good enough for their purposes.
People also point out all the little flaws in the “good” examples and cite them as obvious tells that they were AI generated. I think it would be interesting to see if people could reliably distinguish between AI generated flyers and human made flyers. Sure, sometimes it’s obvious like when the AI adds those weird, cartoony people. But if the model is told not to create designs like that and stick to the styles used in the second half of the article, I expect people would have a much harder time distinguishing the human designs from the AI designs.
There's an amazing viral twitter thread where someone claimed a real Monet painting was an AI generated imitation, and it got an avalanche of comments from people who claimed it was an obvious fake and a poor imitation at that.
It's not tracking a real thing as much as people would like to think.
This is exactly the problem. Most of the time when people criticise the output of genAI, what they’re actually commenting on is the ethics of AI rather than the output of it. And they then attempt to use the demonstration as a proof of their point rather than forming an unbiased opinion of the output based on its own merit.
Now I’m not saying there isn’t legitimate criticisms that can be made about the ethics of AI, I’m highly concerned about the problems that AI brings too. But that’s a separate argument entirely.
It’s a little like people who are pompous about expensive wine, whisky’s, etc and then fail blind taste tests (plenty of studies there too).
In my world view, the phrase "People are stupid" explains almost everything. Very few people are actually able to think for themselves. The vast majority are basically just sheep, they think whatever the media, their colleagues, friends etc tell them to think. They don't fact check, they don't think critically, they can't understand a well reasoned argument, they basically just believe things based on how much they like whoever said it. They won't accept evidence that disproves those beliefs.
They don't care about the truth, it's all just about being part of the right herd.
Yeah, it is extremely sad. It's why we're currently in the process of going extinct. We, as a species, know what we should be doing. But what we should be doing is not what we are doing, because what we are doing depends on the popularity contest that is politics, and politics has absolutely nothing to do with what we know we should be doing.
> Yeah, it is extremely sad. It's why we're currently in the process of going extinct.
We're not going extinct, LOL. We're more resilient than cockroaches. As a species we will survive nuclear apocalypse, climate changes short of turning the planet into Venus and even the collapsing fertility rate.
Such a world view will justify any belief, because the internet will give you ample supply of the dumbest, most ill-considered opposition to any belief you hold.
Doesn't guarantee there isn't a steel version of their straw out there that you're deliberately ignoring.
This just sounds like an im14andthisisdeep rant. Everyone is stupid, except you, of course, who are enlightened and detached from "the herd."
The problem with this is that it isn’t very useful or actionable, regardless of how true it is.
You are painting with an overly broad brush.
Maybe try differentiating a bit and seeing if there certain scenarios that leave room for a better outcome for both you and the less intelligent person?
P.S. Have you done any soul searching to see if this is largely a comforting thought that helps assuage the frustrations of dealing with the BS of life?
Yeah, it's not actionable. I can't fix the fact that most people are stupid. But it does provide some minor amount of comfort. It explains why the world is as it is. It explains why the most powerful nation in the world is currently lead by the world's biggest fucking clown. It explains why we can't deal with climate change - the people who make money from it simply use their puppet media to tell all the idiots what they want them to think, and here we are.
It explains why religion is so prevalent - anyone with any amount of critical thinking ability can see that religion is a bunch of bullshit. Yet most people in the world are religious, because all it takes is someone with a little authority to tell people something and they'll just believe it and that's that, you can't reason them out of it because they didn't reason themselves into it. They were just born into this herd and that's where they intend to stay.
It explains why big "green" organizations are and have been against nuclear energy - even though nuclear energy has been the obvious answer to climate change the people who want the world to take climate change seriously have been against nuclear, despite the fact that nuclear was the obvious answer to climate change. They simply don't/didn't know that nuclear was clean energy, and they never took a few minutes to learn some stuff to realize that in fact nuclear energy is clean energy. Obviously it doesn't solve the entire problem but it would have been a huge improvement over all the coal we've been burning. But they didn't know, because they're a bunch of idiots who don't know anything about anything, they just parrot whatever they've been told and that's that and here we are.
And that's the explanation for everything. Politics is just a popularity contest. Whoever says the shit the hordes of sheep have been conditioned to want to hear, get elected. If you grab a random person off the street they most likely couldn't even tell you how bracket tax works but you can be sure as shit they'd have strong opinions about taxes. And those opinions will most likely be straight up factually wrong, based on an incorrect view of how taxes work.
Everyone's just wrong about everything, nobody knows anything about anything. A few people have a decent understanding of how things work but nobody listens.
And again yeah, it's not actionable. There's nothing to be done about this, it's just the way it is. I can't stop the entire human population from being a bunch of religious cultist morons. That's just what they are. But at least knowing that and accepting it helps me keep my sanity in a world where everyone makes the wrong decisions at every turn and everything is clearly going to shit while everyone's acting like everything's fine. Except of course all the inconsequential bullshit the sheep bicker about like immigration and taxes windmills and data centers and whatever else the media has them bickering about to distract them from the shit that actually matters.
> Yet most people in the world are religious, because all it takes is someone with a little authority to tell people something and they'll just believe it and that's that, you can't reason them out of it because they didn't reason themselves into it.
Yeah, we simply should not forget that there is very different types of religions. Some religions, for example has it main belief that climate change is a big problem for the Earth and Humanity.
> It explains why big "green" organizations are and have been against nuclear energy - even though nuclear energy has been the obvious answer to climate change
Exactly. I mean my model explain that, not yours. Like in any other religion generally churches exists not to solve the MAIN PROBLEM, even if the religion says otherwise. Because churches are hierarchical structures, and on the top will end up pretty SMART people, who mainly focus on solving their personal problems, and not the MAIN PROBLEM of their religion. Often they even does not believe in existence of the problem at all.
> Whoever says the shit the hordes of sheep have been conditioned to want to hear, get elected.
I don't know. If we look at the elections of the "world's biggest fucking clown", it was more describing of his opponents. But he still got elected, twice.
Nobody has time to fact check every single fact we need to act on.
Have you read every single study about the last vaccine you took and what the positives and negatives are and where potential problems are and so on? Of course not, we trust that the experts have done enough. Same with learning physics or driving over a bridge and so many other things.
Yeah, exactly. But many people vehemently believe vaccines are dangerous and so on. Similarly, a common talking point right now are data centers and their power and water usage. Just yesterday I was told that AI data centers pollute more than anything else. Yet when I took 10 seconds to Google it I found that data centers represented about 0,5% of power consumption and I know that electricity in general is less than half of all pollution so clearly data centers don't pollute that much. But people will parrot these types of "facts" without even taking 10 seconds to double check.
I don't think this is true. There are people who claim everything is AI – maybe even to bolster their ego.
But for a lot of things I can with high probability discern between AI and human in every day appearance and I know many other people can as well. One of the things I look for is specifically certain types of extreme... not just flaws... just overall atrocity. When I read posts submitted to HN I often realize that something is bad writing before I can specify this to AI text. Pangram almost always agrees with me. Here is a recent example: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49715657">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49715657
I don't doubt that there are certain scoped tasks that certain models are quite good at. But in my every day life I constantly encounter AI slop that is so bad that I take it as a personal insult that someone thought it would be okay to subject me to it; to presume that I am so tasteless and numb and have no quality standard whatsoever.
I mean just look at the example posters at the beginning of the article. "The problem with these is not so much that they’re bad." Yes, yes it is. They are horrible. I cannot understand how anyone can describe them as anything but that.
They are pretty shit, but the main problem is that they are the generic style of the model. So that’s what everyone gets by default. If they were a one off they’d still be bad, but at least unique.
How do you know you can discern AI vs human with high probability? You need some external source of truth to judge that, otherwise all you know is that you can discern bad, obvious AI. See also <a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/toupee_fallacy" rel="nofollow">https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/toupee_fallacy
I’d expect false positives to be low. Bad AI has a distinctive style and is easy to pick up on. Just like bad toupees are easily recognized. The false negative rate would be far more interesting.
The false negative rate would be interesting but is irrelevant in this context. I was replying to a comment claiming that most people take issue with the ethics of GenAI rather than the quality and that people have a high false positive rate. I raise myself and my experience with people I know as a counter example.
There might be AI generated things in my every day life that I do not recognize as AI, but that's not what's being discussed.
It's not irrelevant in the context, you're just saying it doesn't interest you. Just because you chose to focus on one side of it, doesn't change the fact that you replied to a broader question of "How do you know you can discern AI vs human with high probability?"
And even if you were right that the entire thread's context had been limited to just caring about false positives and not false negatives, it wouldn't be a problem for wat10000 to expand the discussion by talking about false negatives, too... they don't have a duty to only reply about the parts of a subject you chose to care about! You could either just ignore the comment, or reply explaining why that side doesn't matter to you without trying to shut them down as if they did something wrong :)
How did you check? What was your oracle when you thought something was AI and when you did not?
I mean, this situation is a textbook case of ground for a lot of common fallacies, starting with confirmation bias. We need to remember that our brain wants to be tricked. If you think you are special, you are not. You’re just not aware of it and even more prone to falling into these traps.
> One of the things I look for is specifically certain types of extreme... not just flaws... just overall atrocity.
So, please forgive me, but this means that you are good at finding out some patterns in AI output. There are always a lot of false positive and negatives, and I haven’t found a convincing study showing that people are good at finding AI in general.
What helps is that the market is very concentrated so if you know GPT-isms and Claude-isms that’s basically the current situation covered. It does not mean that you can reliably identify AI in general.
> But for a lot of things I can with high probability discern between AI and human in every day appearance and I know many other people can as well.
It’s easy to say that when you already know the answer. But my point is people frequently misattribute stuff as being AI generated when it wasn’t. The GPs Twitter example is proof of this. And you only have to look at the number of times people accuse someone of being AI on HN because they happen to use em dash or an Oxford comma (or any other writing style that was part of the corpus models were trained on), and it’s pretty clear that “obvious tells” are just guesswork.
I've generally been very impressed with genAI artwork in "impressionist" styles. But thinking about how the diffusion models work, that seems like exactly what you'd expect them to be good at. Things that call for perfectly straight lines and constrained patterns (and explicitly symbolic elements, like text) seem to be considerably harder but apparently very doable now.
There is still obvious genAI slop being put out there all the time, and you can tell it's genAI slop because it's slop: even doing something at that level by hand would be more time and effort than anyone would bother putting in unless it's paid work that then justifies getting it right and doing it professionally. But now that the sloption exists, there's a flood of people taking it.
Prose, on the other hand, is another story. It became possible to produce "grammatically correct, academic-sounding and generally using words to mean what they actually mean" very quickly, but years later it's still rarely if ever good, it just goes through varying different quirks. Maybe part of this is that the training data can't properly reflect what the target audience was for various pieces of text. A lot of it, surely, is that many people are easily impressed by "grammatically correct, academic-sounding and generally using words to mean what they actually mean", and don't themselves have much of a sense for actually good writing.
ajjenkins · · focus · HN ↗
That may be true if you’re working with a top of the line artist, but in my experience the average freelance designer online is significantly worse than AI. I’ve worked with dozens of budget friendly designers on Fiverr and consistently get way worse results than I’ve gotten from AI models. Will a great human designer produce better output than an AI? Maybe, but a small local event or business probably won’t have the budget to hire them or know where to find them. It’s cheaper, faster and easier to use AI to generate something that’s good enough for their purposes.
People also point out all the little flaws in the “good” examples and cite them as obvious tells that they were AI generated. I think it would be interesting to see if people could reliably distinguish between AI generated flyers and human made flyers. Sure, sometimes it’s obvious like when the AI adds those weird, cartoony people. But if the model is told not to create designs like that and stick to the styles used in the second half of the article, I expect people would have a much harder time distinguishing the human designs from the AI designs.
glenstein · · focus · HN ↗
It's not tracking a real thing as much as people would like to think.
hnlmorg · · focus · HN ↗
Now I’m not saying there isn’t legitimate criticisms that can be made about the ethics of AI, I’m highly concerned about the problems that AI brings too. But that’s a separate argument entirely.
It’s a little like people who are pompous about expensive wine, whisky’s, etc and then fail blind taste tests (plenty of studies there too).
sfn42 · · focus · HN ↗
They don't care about the truth, it's all just about being part of the right herd.
oblio · · focus · HN ↗
kwarcode · · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
vakk · · focus · HN ↗
oblio · · focus · HN ↗
hiccuphippo · · focus · HN ↗
oblio · · focus · HN ↗
sfn42 · · focus · HN ↗
oblio · · focus · HN ↗
We're not going extinct, LOL. We're more resilient than cockroaches. As a species we will survive nuclear apocalypse, climate changes short of turning the planet into Venus and even the collapsing fertility rate.
blargey · · focus · HN ↗
Doesn't guarantee there isn't a steel version of their straw out there that you're deliberately ignoring.
sfn42 · · focus · HN ↗
ryandrake · · focus · HN ↗
hyperhello · · focus · HN ↗
its_ethan · · focus · HN ↗
this thread looks like it's folding in on itself
hyperhello · · focus · HN ↗
wizzwizz4 · · focus · HN ↗
hyperhello · · focus · HN ↗
wizzwizz4 · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted]
wredcoll · · focus · HN ↗
sfn42 · · focus · HN ↗
But if you grab an average person off the street they're overwhelmingly likely to be pretty daft and not know much about anything.
Just look at how many people in the US vote for that orange clown even after the complete farce of his previous term.
dwaltrip · · focus · HN ↗
You are painting with an overly broad brush.
Maybe try differentiating a bit and seeing if there certain scenarios that leave room for a better outcome for both you and the less intelligent person?
P.S. Have you done any soul searching to see if this is largely a comforting thought that helps assuage the frustrations of dealing with the BS of life?
sfn42 · · focus · HN ↗
It explains why religion is so prevalent - anyone with any amount of critical thinking ability can see that religion is a bunch of bullshit. Yet most people in the world are religious, because all it takes is someone with a little authority to tell people something and they'll just believe it and that's that, you can't reason them out of it because they didn't reason themselves into it. They were just born into this herd and that's where they intend to stay.
It explains why big "green" organizations are and have been against nuclear energy - even though nuclear energy has been the obvious answer to climate change the people who want the world to take climate change seriously have been against nuclear, despite the fact that nuclear was the obvious answer to climate change. They simply don't/didn't know that nuclear was clean energy, and they never took a few minutes to learn some stuff to realize that in fact nuclear energy is clean energy. Obviously it doesn't solve the entire problem but it would have been a huge improvement over all the coal we've been burning. But they didn't know, because they're a bunch of idiots who don't know anything about anything, they just parrot whatever they've been told and that's that and here we are.
And that's the explanation for everything. Politics is just a popularity contest. Whoever says the shit the hordes of sheep have been conditioned to want to hear, get elected. If you grab a random person off the street they most likely couldn't even tell you how bracket tax works but you can be sure as shit they'd have strong opinions about taxes. And those opinions will most likely be straight up factually wrong, based on an incorrect view of how taxes work.
Everyone's just wrong about everything, nobody knows anything about anything. A few people have a decent understanding of how things work but nobody listens.
And again yeah, it's not actionable. There's nothing to be done about this, it's just the way it is. I can't stop the entire human population from being a bunch of religious cultist morons. That's just what they are. But at least knowing that and accepting it helps me keep my sanity in a world where everyone makes the wrong decisions at every turn and everything is clearly going to shit while everyone's acting like everything's fine. Except of course all the inconsequential bullshit the sheep bicker about like immigration and taxes windmills and data centers and whatever else the media has them bickering about to distract them from the shit that actually matters.
MentalM · · focus · HN ↗
Yeah, we simply should not forget that there is very different types of religions. Some religions, for example has it main belief that climate change is a big problem for the Earth and Humanity.
> It explains why big "green" organizations are and have been against nuclear energy - even though nuclear energy has been the obvious answer to climate change
Exactly. I mean my model explain that, not yours. Like in any other religion generally churches exists not to solve the MAIN PROBLEM, even if the religion says otherwise. Because churches are hierarchical structures, and on the top will end up pretty SMART people, who mainly focus on solving their personal problems, and not the MAIN PROBLEM of their religion. Often they even does not believe in existence of the problem at all.
> Whoever says the shit the hordes of sheep have been conditioned to want to hear, get elected.
I don't know. If we look at the elections of the "world's biggest fucking clown", it was more describing of his opponents. But he still got elected, twice.
wredcoll · · focus · HN ↗
Have you read every single study about the last vaccine you took and what the positives and negatives are and where potential problems are and so on? Of course not, we trust that the experts have done enough. Same with learning physics or driving over a bridge and so many other things.
sfn42 · · focus · HN ↗
basilikum · · focus · HN ↗
But for a lot of things I can with high probability discern between AI and human in every day appearance and I know many other people can as well. One of the things I look for is specifically certain types of extreme... not just flaws... just overall atrocity. When I read posts submitted to HN I often realize that something is bad writing before I can specify this to AI text. Pangram almost always agrees with me. Here is a recent example: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49715657">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49715657
I don't doubt that there are certain scoped tasks that certain models are quite good at. But in my every day life I constantly encounter AI slop that is so bad that I take it as a personal insult that someone thought it would be okay to subject me to it; to presume that I am so tasteless and numb and have no quality standard whatsoever.
I mean just look at the example posters at the beginning of the article. "The problem with these is not so much that they’re bad." Yes, yes it is. They are horrible. I cannot understand how anyone can describe them as anything but that.
phoghed · · focus · HN ↗
wat10000 · · focus · HN ↗
basilikum · · focus · HN ↗
mbrameld · · focus · HN ↗
basilikum · · focus · HN ↗
alienbaby · · focus · HN ↗
basilikum · · focus · HN ↗
dpark · · focus · HN ↗
wat10000 · · focus · HN ↗
basilikum · · focus · HN ↗
There might be AI generated things in my every day life that I do not recognize as AI, but that's not what's being discussed.
swores · · focus · HN ↗
And even if you were right that the entire thread's context had been limited to just caring about false positives and not false negatives, it wouldn't be a problem for wat10000 to expand the discussion by talking about false negatives, too... they don't have a duty to only reply about the parts of a subject you chose to care about! You could either just ignore the comment, or reply explaining why that side doesn't matter to you without trying to shut them down as if they did something wrong :)
kergonath · · focus · HN ↗
I mean, this situation is a textbook case of ground for a lot of common fallacies, starting with confirmation bias. We need to remember that our brain wants to be tricked. If you think you are special, you are not. You’re just not aware of it and even more prone to falling into these traps.
kergonath · · focus · HN ↗
So, please forgive me, but this means that you are good at finding out some patterns in AI output. There are always a lot of false positive and negatives, and I haven’t found a convincing study showing that people are good at finding AI in general.
What helps is that the market is very concentrated so if you know GPT-isms and Claude-isms that’s basically the current situation covered. It does not mean that you can reliably identify AI in general.
hnlmorg · · focus · HN ↗
It’s easy to say that when you already know the answer. But my point is people frequently misattribute stuff as being AI generated when it wasn’t. The GPs Twitter example is proof of this. And you only have to look at the number of times people accuse someone of being AI on HN because they happen to use em dash or an Oxford comma (or any other writing style that was part of the corpus models were trained on), and it’s pretty clear that “obvious tells” are just guesswork.
zahlman · · focus · HN ↗
There is still obvious genAI slop being put out there all the time, and you can tell it's genAI slop because it's slop: even doing something at that level by hand would be more time and effort than anyone would bother putting in unless it's paid work that then justifies getting it right and doing it professionally. But now that the sloption exists, there's a flood of people taking it.
Prose, on the other hand, is another story. It became possible to produce "grammatically correct, academic-sounding and generally using words to mean what they actually mean" very quickly, but years later it's still rarely if ever good, it just goes through varying different quirks. Maybe part of this is that the training data can't properly reflect what the target audience was for various pieces of text. A lot of it, surely, is that many people are easily impressed by "grammatically correct, academic-sounding and generally using words to mean what they actually mean", and don't themselves have much of a sense for actually good writing.