This is very true and after rendering 100 prompts twice for https://john.hartnup.uk/poster-prompts/ I realised that the prompts could be improved by asking for much less clutter. The best examples on there pick out one main visual subject, but many of them are too fussy.

I may do a V2 one of these days.

Clutter comes with the territory to some extent though. I was recently asked to do a real world PTA fayre poster, and the client (my wife) very firmly wanted 12+ attractions mentioned on the poster. Tombola, hook a duck, bar, BBQ, blah, blah, blah as well as date, location, sponsor, ...

To get a really clean design, you need to edit it down to the essentials. I don't know what pro designers do - convince the client to say less?

Unless the prompt says otherwise, AI will try to get a visual element in for every single word too.

Well what's better ? I have so many pictures of posters of old events or storefronts saved on my phone because they were so astronomically bad it'd have been better to not have any poster at all. Today's AI makes it look even worse but I'm hopeful that in five years we'll all live in a world generally more agreeable to look at and not "concrete with pink and yellow fluo paper smashed on top of it" like https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/music-poster-wall.html or https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/france-poster-wall.html?ps... because the cost of making things enjoyable with more colour and detail will have come down. Maybe we can finally go back to Art Nouveau if the cost of making it comes down!

Yes, I think this is exactly right. The labelling of a thing as “AI Generated” or “AI Assisted” makes the viewer perceive it as worse in quality. And they really do think it’s worse.

It’s similar to a well known finding about price: people value things that are more expensive more, and tend to think they are of higher quality. You can give people the same thing for a high price or for free and they’ll say the high priced one is amazing the free one is lacklustre.

It’s like an optical illusion driven by labelling.

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).

Earlier HN discussions about it (both got flagged):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48158110

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48134400

In fact it’s only tracking the quality of the produced image

Every single person I’ve asked, and I’ve asked hundreds, say that knowing it was AI irrespective of anything else was enough to think it was bad.

There’s millions of genai images that people aren’t commenting on because they don’t know it’s AI.

> Code was nosediving before AI badly.

What? What are you comparing this pre-AI 2020s code to? 90s and 00s code for sure was worse.

can you please list some of the people you worked with? I really appreciate good design and am always looking for great artists that I don’t know about yet, thanks.

I think the issue there is that, in the absence of the AI poster, people will still dislike the "worse" poster.

Since this is idealogical, a business owner's choices are: * use AI and some people hate it on principle, don't use AI and don't pay enough and some people hate it because it looks cheap, don't use Ai and pay a bunch more and people don't hate it...maybe, depending on style and skill of the artist.

As a business owner, it's not an encouraging situation.

It's not everyone though.

You should try typing "American flag clipart" into Google and see non-AI images with the wrong number of stars.

True. But an organizer who doesn't care, will also not be willing to pay for good artwork. AI haters should put money where their mouths are and fund human top artwork.

AI generated visuals are becoming a signal of A) low-effort, B) and/or unwillingness or inability to spend resources to genuinely present your product or brand.

Both of these communicate that I will probably not get a good value for my money when buying your product or service.

Because there is a big anti-AI movement and some people will think you're destroying the planet and putting people out of a job if you make one prompt to a chatbot.

> Why would someone want it to be unrecognizable as AI? What is the reason people want to hide it

Because a lot of “everyday” folks really strongly dislike AI. I’ve lost count of the number of AI generated Instagram ads I’ve seen where the comments are filled with “AI slop!”.

It’s not a positive signal for anyone who wants to persuade someone of the value of whatever they’re advertising because it’s associated with being cheap and lazy.

"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.

A lot of any real gain will be due to novelty, and that will wane once you've been doing it a short time (or once other people in your field are doing it so you all go back to looking the same).

I suspect a lot of the gain isn't even that useful to the channel: it being people clicking to complain. You might not see that mean actual complaints because many will see the existing ones and either just upvote them or move on without doing anything (their chance to repeat their regular comment to get a few upvotes having been taken by someone already having said it).

> Yet people will do drive by comments trying to excoriate creators for using AI thumbnails. It's really quite ridiculous.

That's just a loud minority. Most people really don't care about using AI in what you do as long as it is entertaining. The real world ain't Reddit.

Maximizing click-through rates leads to garbage clickbait and often misleading thumbnails, it is not a good metric. Those kinds of thumbnail, and channels built on low effort but high engagement content, were widely derided before AI came along.

Do those rates hold across multiple videos over a period of time? I've seen at least one case where someone did an A/B test of an AI thumbnail and the reason his engagement went up because everyone hated it and was commenting to say as much.

Maybe.

I don't think clickrate on Youtube is a meaningful metric if all you want is for the right people to show up at your event.

Novelty is a significant driving factor here. Gen Thumbnails are eye catching because they are new and viewers haven’t adapted to skimming over them like they do with everything else.

Thumbnails, same as everything that is supposed to attract attention, have styles that change over time due to saturation and fatigue.

I watch a lot og gaming videos on youtube, often of new indie games to see if I want to play them. Some creators will use AI-generated thumbnails that look nothing like the actual game, and before I recognize them and ignore that creator, they'll get clickthroughs. And then I'll see that I was bamboozled and exit the video.

I don't care if someone uses AI to "style" their thumbnails, but if you use it to completely misrepresent what the video is about I'll leave in protest. That has nothing to do with AI, and everything to do with the fact that it's clickbait. I don't like human-generated clickbait either.

What's ridiculous about that?

The Spring Fair is a lorem ipsum, here.

They asked the AI for a list of different styles.

The author then picked them out, not the AI. For curiosity I assume.

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.

> not real artist tools

Nice no true Scotsman fallacy. PS is a "real" artist tool.

You forgot the /s.

Sadly, if it hadn’t gone on to DaVinci, I wouldn’t be sure.

> To me if you ask to a 10 years old kid and give him a PC with Microsoft Paint on it it will you will have a much better result than any AI-generated option in the post.

FWIW, statements like this are so patently ridiculous that it actually hurts your cause.

> To me if you ask to a 10 years old kid and give him a PC with Microsoft Paint on it it will you will have a much better result than any AI-generated option in the post.

Sorry, if it's a joke it doesn't land very well.

Before AI, if a 10yo did these posters for a school project, people would just tell their parents to not do the homework for their kid. These are far above what 99.9% 10yo can do.

> a 10 years old kid and give him a PC with Microsoft Paint

You'd run afoul of child labor protestors. I'd just prompt the AI to generate a poster in the style of a 10-year-old with Microsoft Paint.

Sure but why?

Outside of a small joy of the organizing committee, is an incrementally "better" (which is almost entirely subjective anyway) worth the trouvle?

This is provably false. AI YouTube thumbnails trounce human thumbnails (often nearly doubling the click-through rate according to A/B testing), and people rate AI art more highly than human art on average when they don't know that it's AI.

Just admit that you are scared of the future that's coming and it's eliciting irrational hatred, and that's causing you to lash out. At least that'd be honest and we'd understand where your coming from even if we didn't share your views.

This technology is super new and I've only seen AI posters really proliferate in the past few months and suddenly... people don't know how to live without it?

Damn, how did businesses survive decades without being able to pay some intern or someone in the office to quickly put up a poster? Like come on, claiming 'budget' is the issue here when I can see indie bands operating with twigs and some chewing gum figure out how to put together a poster for their band is embarassing.

> we just don't have the money!

You don't have ANY money? Plenty of students would do a great job for a little money and a professional reference. Now you just helped the workforce, helped the local economy and cost you little.

Creativity does not have to be expensive to be good. Yall just dont want to bother dealing with it.

You have the money, you just don't have the contacts or skills to find a good designer which charges you a fair price. Big design firms will rip you off. Their job is to get corruption contracts from the public sector or big enterprises, and then reward their insider later with a nice fake job.

Saying you don't have the money for a designer is a bit like saying you can't go on business trip because the company can't afford to purchase a jet airplane right now.

Yea these look bad you don't need to be a pro designer to see that.

That'll be a real debate at the moment in Japan, I'll bet. Because the law is pretty strict when it comes to accurate advertising.

Given that any advertisement with AI generated food would be illegal there I don't imagine you have to avoid very many!

I just got back from a month there and recall perhaps 2 posters that may have been AI. I actually ran into several public art exhibits as well.

I was in Japan in Spring, I didn't notice any AI-generated ads/menus (not implying you're lying, just curious if it's become a trend since then, or if it's a particular area).

But I recall this simple looking promotion: https://imgur.com/a/fbM8Akb . The photo looks professionally done, and not AI. Then again, maybe they googled for "cheesecake photo".

I just image searched for "cheesecake", I didn't find this photo in the results, but there are a few results where I now have to wonder "Is that AI?"

News flash: nobody cares about whiny political karens. Business owners are doing it en mass because it converts better.