> they still reek AI conformity and I feel sick looking at them

I bet you would not feel sick if you didn't know ahead of time they were AI-generated. Some really are quite good.

ACCount39 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's saturation.

If I saw an Images 2.0 flyer in year 2020? In a world where Images 2.0 didn't exist? I'd be impressed. But if I see it now, today? I'm not impressed at all.

It's the same image, produced by the same AI and seen by the same person. So, what's the difference? What changed over time?

Saturation. "I've seen it all before." AI made that specific flyer style plentiful and omnipresent, and that made it "derivative" and "cheap". What used to invoke "cool" and "wow" was turned into a dreary cliche by repetition. Flaws that were easy to overlook when overshadowed by novelty stand out like a sore thumb now that you've seen them before in the same patterns many times over.

The image is the same - it has the same strengths and the same flaws. But your focus is shifted by familiarity.

It's the same mechanism that drives trends and fashion. AI just supercharges it.

Naturally, you can avoid a lot of it by using careful prompting and steering to guide an AI away from the "cliche" style-space. You can get something with both good quality and good identity that way.

But that requires: being aware of the problem, being really good at prompting, and putting in a considerable effort. It's hard to steer a model away from "AI cliches" if you don't have the eye to spot them in the first place.

Most AI-generated content doesn't have that kind of skill and effort applied to it - it simply uses the "model defaults", and gets the "model defaults". For all the good and bad that comes with those.

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wiether 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The activities being perfectly aligned and normalized is the big tell here to me

Idk how to express it exactly, but I don't see how a human would have come to something like this

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graemep 5 hours ago | parent [-]

If you think about whether it is AI, are good at recognising those tells, an thinking about whether it is AI, then its probable you will spot things like that.

Most people are not that good at spotting those tells, and when looking at a poster they will not be thinking about whether its is AI or not. If its not obviously AI they are not going to even think about it.

	▲	wiether 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		At least in this case I can't pretend I have some kind of super power since I knew beforehand that it was gen AI. And also it's not like I'm saying I love all the man-made posters. Or that I never been "fooled" by gen AI content. It's just that as soon as I start seeing some gen AI tells on an image, I can't unsee them and I feel disgusted by it.
	▲	Applejinx 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		If there's nothing to think about they may well not think. That's the problem.

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card_zero 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Like how if you bought a box of chocolates, and it was actually filled with rocks, you wouldn't dislike it until you found out.

Immediate glamor followed by gradual disappointment is AI output all over.

	▲	sejje an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		No, it's like if you bought a box of chocolates, and you couldn't distinguish if they were handmade or factory-made, even after you ate them. And it took them telling you before you knew. And then you decided you didn't like the ones made by the factory as much anymore.
	▲	hardbass 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Chocolates and rocks are different things. Pictures and pictures are the same thing.

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phoronixrly 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> if you didn't know ahead of time they were AI-generated

You can't be serious... Are we looking at the same posters?

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ACCount39 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes. That's the issue: we are looking at the same posters.

It's just that "seeing this poster for the first time, unaware of the workings behind it" is a very different experience from "seeing this poster after you already saw dozens of other AI generated posters that used a similar style and had similar issues, got canny at spotting both the style and the issues in it, and came to associate them with cheap low quality work".

The former impression is "wow that's a good poster". The latter impression is "ew, it's posterslop". The poster, in the meanwhile, remains the same.

AI can often win in art contests - images, short stories, design. But that requires either sharp prompting, or an audience that's not familiar with "AI cliches". The quality is, if removed from the context, fairly good. If embedded in context, it's utter slop. The work is the same. Funny how that works.

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miyoji 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes, context matters. The greatest painting in the world is just crushed materials smeared on a canvas, it's nothing too special without the context.

A computer (not even an LLM, just something generating random pixels) could randomly generate the exact same pixel pattern as the greatest painting in the world, and it would not be the greatest painting in the world, because context matters.

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hardbass 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Because of what?

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miyoji 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Context.

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hardbass 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Is it the lack of hate? I could put all the hate I have into a person or group I hate while composing an AI art piece for instance.

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miyoji 2 hours ago | parent [-]

No you couldn't, because you can't compose AI art. The AI composes it, and it can't feel hate.

	▲	hardbass 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I don't paint physically with paint when I use photoshop either. Photoshop doesn't feel hate.
	▲	hardbass 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The sentience of AI is also an open question.