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).
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).
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.