Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by wffurr 14 days ago
>> The results are nice and I use them.

I haven't seen your presentations, so I can't speak to them. But I do know at work there's a lot more illustrations in docs and presentations and such, and they almost all have an AI art "tell". I find them grating and distracting from the actual content. Very rarely do they add anything useful to the doc other than the knowledge that the owner burned some GPU time and tokens for a distracting, low value illustration.

I can only imagine how an actual artist or graphic designer feels about it.

Actually I don't have to imagine; there's some serious vitriol over on some of my favorite webcomics about it.
1 comments
10000truths 14 days ago
That's because of people who treat AI like a magical "give me a finished product" button. Someone whipping up PowerPoint slides tends to care more about saving time than maintaining quality - the (usually watermarked) stock photos of yore weren't exactly the zenith of artistic presentation either.

Like any other tool, the quality of output is proportional to the quality of input. You'll get much better results if you provide specifics (detailed description of what you want, reference pictures, iterative clarifications etc.) and have it work on bite-sized pieces of the process (outlining, shading etc.), with manual verification and touch-ups in between. But all that still requires time, taste and experience, which deflates the "AI will replace skilled labor" hype.

link
wffurr 14 days ago
>> the (usually watermarked) stock photos

I didn't care for those either but they didn't have the signature AI art "look" and they're usually real things that an actual artist or photographer made for or sold to the stock imagery company, which curated their collection.

link
WalterBright 14 days ago
I'm pretty sure my "D-Man" cartoons are not in some stock image collection. Ironically, I've received complaints that my hand-drawn and laboriously edited cartoons were derided as "unprofessional".

Having an on-topic cartoon goes well with the slides, rather than some random stock photo.

link
WalterBright 14 days ago
An example. The upper right drawing replaced the hand-drawn much cruder version I did 20 years go.

https://dlang.org/spec/iasm.html

I was quite pleased with the improvement.

link