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.
Not to mention that I can also tell when a poster has been generated using Photoshop and not real artist tools, like brushes and pens. I've seen a lot of these Photoshop-generated posters, and they are in no way comparable to something DaVinci or Picasso would create.
This bullshit disingenuous false equivalency again.
In both photoshop and painting, the human using the tool decides what strokes to use. That isn't true with AI art. It's not "just another tool" for doing the activity when it does the entire activity for you.
> In both photoshop and painting, the human using the tool decides what strokes to use.
except for the million posters and album covers unironically made with a real photo passed into one of photoshop's "Artistic" filters to make it look like some impressionist painting
The analogy holds perfectly well. We can "no true Scotsman" this all day long.
Any "real" artist could dunk on PS: "Oh, you didn't have to go out and buy a canvas and paint and brushes. Hell, you probably don't even know how to properly mix paint on a palette! Not only do you not to clean your brushes, you don't even have brushes!"
And the right response is: "Who gives a shit?" The answer is "Some folks, but their opinion decreasingly matters." And the same exact logic applies to AI. You might as well be complaining that Google doesn't pay cartographers to hand draw Google Maps.
> when it does the entire activity for you.
This is total fiction, and has spawned an entire cult of "just give me the prompt" folks that think using AI requires no skill, and anyone using AI is just a "meat proxy". But that's not true, at all, as evidenced by years of commentary on this site with people getting radically different outcomes using AI. We've gone from "stochastic parrots" to "gonna destroy humanity" in 2 years.
AI will do jobs that we used to go to Fiverr for -- it'll eat the bottom of the market, just like automation does elsewhere. The bottom of the market is blog art, clip art, menus, commercial signage, event posters, and the like. That's completely natural, and hating it is shouting into the wind. The local cafe owner was never particularly incentived to have their menus crafted by some local artist.
Not to mention the local cafe owner probably paid some money (not much, but some) to a random designer to get a menu, which is often 10x worst than the AI generated version.
It is exactly “another tool”. Just like Abelton with an automated drum machine is another tool for creating music. As the posting shows the tool isn’t doing the entire activity for you. The author is reprompting the tool to generate a result more inline with their vision.
It's not "creative" in the sense of incorporating a drum track or photograph into a composition you're developing, it's "creative" in the sense of asking for a style and been given it, which is pretty much exactly the tool doing the entire activity. The author goes to great pains to point out that it's not their vision, its just a list of styles returned when asked for a list of styles, and they don't actually know what the Memphis Group even is...
Would you consider me to have "created" Billie Jean if I type "eighties music" into a music search engine and type "play" after it suggests Michael Jackson....
You can do that exact thing with Ableton if you want. If you want to put in low effort you can do that. You can find beats labeled “1980’s pop” and use presets from other people. You can put in high effort using AI tools and fine tune every aspect of the result if you want. It’s just another tool. You are conflating effort with the tool.
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.
vrypan · · focus · HN ↗
miyoji · · focus · HN ↗
In both photoshop and painting, the human using the tool decides what strokes to use. That isn't true with AI art. It's not "just another tool" for doing the activity when it does the entire activity for you.
jcelerier · · focus · HN ↗
except for the million posters and album covers unironically made with a real photo passed into one of photoshop's "Artistic" filters to make it look like some impressionist painting
qarl · · focus · HN ↗
rpdillon · · focus · HN ↗
Any "real" artist could dunk on PS: "Oh, you didn't have to go out and buy a canvas and paint and brushes. Hell, you probably don't even know how to properly mix paint on a palette! Not only do you not to clean your brushes, you don't even have brushes!"
And the right response is: "Who gives a shit?" The answer is "Some folks, but their opinion decreasingly matters." And the same exact logic applies to AI. You might as well be complaining that Google doesn't pay cartographers to hand draw Google Maps.
> when it does the entire activity for you.
This is total fiction, and has spawned an entire cult of "just give me the prompt" folks that think using AI requires no skill, and anyone using AI is just a "meat proxy". But that's not true, at all, as evidenced by years of commentary on this site with people getting radically different outcomes using AI. We've gone from "stochastic parrots" to "gonna destroy humanity" in 2 years.
AI will do jobs that we used to go to Fiverr for -- it'll eat the bottom of the market, just like automation does elsewhere. The bottom of the market is blog art, clip art, menus, commercial signage, event posters, and the like. That's completely natural, and hating it is shouting into the wind. The local cafe owner was never particularly incentived to have their menus crafted by some local artist.
vrypan · · focus · HN ↗
doug_durham · · focus · HN ↗
notahacker · · focus · HN ↗
Would you consider me to have "created" Billie Jean if I type "eighties music" into a music search engine and type "play" after it suggests Michael Jackson....
doug_durham · · focus · HN ↗