[tptacek]

Corrected: a certain type of very loud and very online person in your audience hates AI art and thinks less of you for using it.

But that doesn't matter, because the game theory they outlined is directionally right. The cohort of people who hate AI art is relatively small. But the cohort of people who love it is even smaller. People can generally spot it, and most people are indifferent to it.

Having said that: I think it's also true that people are generally indifferent to any of the "casual" art in online writing and publications. It's overused and a crutch.

A hero image at the top of a post: good, can be great, do it, make sure it's not AI. But like, a random dinosaur giving a thumbs up in the middle of the post? Don't do that at all.

[nicbou]

I only speak for myself, but an AI-generated hero image is an indicator that the rest of the article might also be AI-generated.

[tptacek]

I agree.

[pibaker]

I wish people stop using generic hero images that do not relate to the article, AI or not. It's not that I have trouble scrolling past yet another stock photo of Scandinavian forests on a tech blog. It's that they make the entire deal feel like a corporate marketing blog optimized for marketing rather than information and I don't like that.

[the_af]

> Corrected: a certain type of very loud and very online person in your audience hates AI art and thinks less of you for using it.

Correcting your correction: a lot of people have terrible taste. It's not polite to say it, because it's condescending and presumptuous, but it's true nonetheless.

People with good taste will agree with TFA. Your Uncle who sends you cheesy postcards that make you groan; your grandma who watches reality TV; your coworker who always used to forward the whole company chain letters about poor Jessica who's 4 years old and dying of cancer; they will all clap enthusiastically at the GenAI T-rex. That's because they have bad taste and don't know better.

In other words, TFA is right. "Socially illiterate" is a very apt definition.

[vunderba]

An even bigger issue to me is that people who most frequently tend to avail themselves of AI art also tend to be the least observant. So even when the AI-generated image could have been good or at least serviceable, they somehow still manage to bungle the whole process.

I actually wrote a blog post about this, with concrete examples (and my manual fixes) taken from OpenAI when they demoed gpt-image-2 and from Karpathy of all people. It’s not a great look when the biggest proponents and ostensible experts still manage to make such a royal botch job of things.

https://mordenstar.com/blog/gen-failures

[apsurd]

> A hero image at the top of a post: good, can be great, do it, make sure it's not AI. But like, a random dinosaur giving a thumbs up in the middle of the post? Don't do that at all.

That's a weird intentional example to make: spam-adjacent marketing content needs a stock art hero image, but a random dinosaur randomly inserted into a random post shouldn't be done at all?

[emccue]

In this case the random dinosaur is plot relevant albeit just a placeholder, but maybe i'm not following what they are complaining about?

[roenxi]

We seem to be disregarding the cohort of people who like articles with some visuals more than a text-only article. They exist. Probably not HN readers though, if we're being honest. Adding some images quickly and easily would make them and the writer of the article happy.

[dvfjsdhgfv]

Anecdata, but among real people I know and touched the subject, nobody has anything positive to say about GenAI "art".

And in online communities, most often people just call it "AI slop" and express fatigue. It's very different form a brief period when people were excited by midjourney-generated images. I believe it just faded off just like any novelty.

[HDThoreaun]

My anecdata is very different. I know many people who enjoy AI art. Most of my friends have made some songs they enjoy on suno, we enjoy creating and sharing funny slop

[zapataband1]

chillll dude it's ok to like bad "art"

[add-sub-mul-div]

> Corrected: a certain type of very loud and very online person in your audience hates AI art

The language evolved "slop" for AI art. There's no corresponding new term for good AI art. Pretending it's a minority that hates it is transparent cope.

[krater23]

Good AI art isn't remarkable enough to give it a name. It's much bad AI shit out there, so the people have give it a name.

[loeg]

I use the "slop" moniker for good LLM output as well as bad.

[veeti]

Euphoric reddit dwellers like the OP could step outside and immediately observe how ChatGPT slop art is already everywhere, and no one gives a damn. Actually, I would pay good money to see this kind of """socially literate""" internet dweller chastising the hard working guys of my local sushi buffet for daring to generate a sign with AI or something.