My workplace did a sweepstakes for the world cup and there were bonus prizes for decorating your desk. All three winners had simply uploaded photos of their desks to an AI image generator and had it add flags etc to decorate and submitted that. One person used AI to make it look like he was wearing the jersey of his assigned team.

The person running the contest wrote up something about how impressed she was with the creative use of AI.

The whole thing makes me sad - wouldn't the idea of this sort of thing be to scrounge up flags of obscure countries or make them out of paper and do a bit of arts and crafts to decorate your desk for the month? Instead people were just throwing 50 words into an AI system a few times and getting out a photo to submit.

For whatever reason, the photo is point. People are only doing it for the photo and only doing the photo for the competition. I agree that we lost something, I just also think a majority of people don’t know what’s missing: they just put effort to make the photo, rather than to make the desk

Theres a strange element of shamelessness to it, though I also think theres (sometimes) another of adoption/novelty. To you or I, steeped in the internet and hacker news culture, its pretty clear that sharing AI work as your own is a transgression; an inherently rude act. Its even impolite to share ai output in general, unless the discussion calls for it. I think some people I see out in the world doing it are still encountering this stuff and thinking through the consequences and ideas and experimenting for themselves and having moments of joy and wanting to share. I've seen this with "poems" people I know have gotten it to make, shared with me with genuine happiness on their faces.

But after a bit more time spent using it, and working with the culture, right-thinking and socially aware people really ought to develop a sense that what was superficially impressive is the same each time. The first poem is the same as the hundredth, the pictures all look the same. And they start to think about the lack of effort, the fact that anyone can "make" them, and that everyone has the same ideas, and they quieten down.

The only people left using it are the next generation of clueless/naive, and those who are shameless - trying to use it to grift the remaining clueless. Unfortunately the inherent speed of the technology makes these shameless few able to be VERY loud across the internet. I have yet to meet one in person

It's the same with the tokenmaxxing phenomenon with the leaderboards, of course people will game any system, and I'm also impressed by how well people can do so, sometimes it's honestly shocking.

Were the bonus prizes good? Anything worth putting a ton of effort into?

i think over time, the bar will rise, you’d have to imagine how low quality the submissions prior to AI would’ve been since most people aren’t that good at decorating nor have the time

i think as the novelty wears off on the average person, it’ll probably be seen akin to stick figure drawings in the future