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AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible

1902 points · 962 comments · ereiamjh

  1. ajjenkins · · focus · HN ↗
    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.

    1. CuriouslyC · · focus · HN ↗
      AI thumbnails outperform human thumbnails on YouTube by a lot, I've seen click-through rate spreads of 4%+ (~5% -> ~9% in AB tests). Yet people will do drive by comments trying to excoriate creators for using AI thumbnails. It's really quite ridiculous.
      1. ks2048 · · focus · HN ↗
        "Since I've added gambling and pornography to my old niche hobby website, my profits are up 4% - how can anyone criticize me?"

        Not a perfect analogy, but adding some bait that does indeed work for grabbing attention can of course be criticized.

        1. daveidol · · focus · HN ↗
          And of course those criticisms can and should be dismissed if the creators goals are purely to maximize engagement
          1. Forgeties79 · · focus · HN ↗
            Lying, grifting, and promoting conspiracies online also maximizes engagement and drives revenue. I guess we should go ahead and do that too.

            This whole conversation makes me want to throw up

            1. johnnyanmac · · focus · HN ↗
              This does make me wonder if I'm being disillusioned or if the community has genuinely shifted in the past 2–3 years or so. Or of this merely a greater societal shift as "history culture" takes off. You'd think sentiments like "clickbait is bad" would be a common sentiment here, but now I'm not so sure anymore.
              1. Forgeties79 · · focus · HN ↗
                I feel very similarly. I would’ve assumed we all obviously don’t want all this chaff in our lives
              2. account42 · · focus · HN ↗
                I don't think its specific to the community here. Seems the whole world has decided that everyone should be a grifter.
                1. Forgeties79 · · focus · HN ↗
                  No no they’re entrepreneurs
              3. alphager · · focus · HN ↗
                You are on a site that's part of the SV culture. The culture that approves if everything not explicitly lillegal done to increase the ROI on startups. The culture that celebrates negative externalities as "disruption".
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