[dev0p]

The loss of personality is real. The most heartbreaking ones I've seen are in schools, or anywhere that children are involved.

For example, at my local preschool there was a wall flyer with information about what to bring the swimming pool. It had the most crudely drawn fishes and crabs and seahorses that I had ever seen. It was clear that whoever drew that had no prior experience with anything even remotely resembling a pencil, and by no metric one would define those drawings as "good". Maybe it was drawn by a janitor, or a teacher with too little time to waste on a drawing? Regardless, and I cannot emphasize it enough, I VASTLY preferred it to the new AI generated one they put up, with its generic AI generated marine life that one would get if they just typed "sea life" in the prompt. I can't tell you why myself, if you were to look at both versions side by side, the AI one is undoubtably miles better. But... it just feels wrong. Off. Out of place. I know I sound like a luddite, but it just doesn't look right. It's uncanny, and I really can't explain the reason. It's like seeing a perfectly drawn, realistic, anatomically accurate human being in an otherwise cute and cuddly children's cartoon. It just doesn't fit in with everything else. It's a preschool, it's supposed to be filled with "bad" drawings, you know?

And don't get me started with the time they put up AI filtered group photos. I almost had a meltdown, and I'm (mostly) pro AI.

[joeguilmette]

The reason is that AI art is now commodified.

Beauty standards, for example, track directly alongside what a body looks like when the owner has free time to spend on leisure. For example, a tan in some cultures used to be ugly and pale skin more beautiful because a tan meant you worked outside in the sun and pale skin meant you could be inside, doing a higher status job or not working. Now, pale means stuck inside working and tan means going outside for leisure. This is suddenly changing, because “being healthy” means you have time to do this.

In the media and art we consume, the amount of human effort involved drives how much we subconsciously value it. Subtle indicators of human involvement in writing, for example, will make us like the writing more. A video clearly made by a real human will be more entertaining. Just like a meal cooked at home by some with passion for the art will always taste better than a chain restaurant meal, even if the restaurant meal is technically more complicated or uses better ingredients.

As AI takes over more and more, its direct output and stuff that smells like its direct output is going to be less and less desirable.

There is a TON of market opportunity in business for people who truly understand this.

[dspillett]

> The most heartbreaking ones I've seen are in schools, or anywhere that children are involved.

Not heartbreaking, but the ones that get my goat up most are flyers from craft fairs and worse places promising to teach crafts/arts. How is that not a sign to walk very quickly in the other direction? Or maybe it is intentional, like some bad spam text apparently being intentional to weed out the people who are less likely to fall from the scam anyway…

[moron4hire]

My wife and I just doesn't a weekend at a craft show (she has a hobby writing sci fi books and we go to street fests to sell them). There were at least TWO vendors selling "hand made" paintings that I could tell were AI generated pictures pasted onto a piece of wood and then had a few coats of clear coat slapped on thick to give it a paint brush effect. Also, their banners were AI generated. Disgustingly dishonest.

[mathw]

Also why do they have sea life in it at all, surely that's not something that's meant to be in the pool.

[sillyfluke]

This helped my nostalgic craving for those pedantic old school HN comments which I seem to see less of nowadays...But frankly as a kid playing in the pool often revolved around pretending to be some kind of sea creature.

[toilet]

Reminds me of the scene in The Social Network (2010) where Mark Zuckerberg points out the absurdity of playing a looping video of the Niagara falls in the background during a Caribbean themed party: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9R8uYUXLUc

[pessimizer]

The obvious answer is because the old, crudely drawn sign did (and to go deeper, you'd have to ask the janitor who drew it.) Now it's become completely detached from its origin and pointless.

The only reason this question is answerable is because the poster saw the old sign. When everybody is gone who saw the old sign, they'll just continue doing it for no reason. When somebody asks about it, some creep will babble about Chesterton's Fence.

[human305893]

As someone who laps in a pool with fish in it occasionally. It could be true. (google Sydney ocean pools to see what I'm talking about)

[hluska]

Preschools decorate lists with little pictures on the sides. In most preschools that I’m aware of the person who makes that list makes minimum wage and has 4-8 children to keep alive while she’s making that list.

This is such a weird thing to get worked up over.

[mablopoule]

Because the AI one are soul-less, and the badly drawn ones are not, simple as that.

[dev0p]

I'm aware of that, and it becomes extremely obvious in an inherently soulful context such as a preschool.

Still, while "it's AI generated crap" and variations thereof are all perfectly valid reasons by themselves, they are way, WAY too shallow for the average guy who looks at both versions and prefers the AI one because it looks "better". I would probably sound crazy and/or pretentious trying to explain to him why I prefer the badly drawn one to the perfect AI generated one, I do not know exactly why myself.

[hluska]

Bud, you went on a rant about art in a preschool. You wrote paragraphs about a list that someone who quite likely makes minimum wage put together while keeping 4-8 children alive.

You already sound pretentious - that ship sailed a long time ago. This is one of these moments in life that doesn’t matter one bit.

[akomtu]

I think AI pictures have this soulless vibe because they are creations of Frankenstein: many pieces of other pictures stitched together in a sloppy manner. A human-made picture, even a bad one, is made by outlining an idea and the presence if this idea behind a picture is what gives it a soul, figuratively speaking.

[Mountain_Skies]

Felt the same way back in the Broderbund 'The Print Shop' days. Once my school purchased a copy, all the signs around the school looked nearly identical, just with variations in symbols and fonts. I was a huge computer nerd and that was one of my first times thinking that maybe computers weren't always the best solution.

[zwischenzug]

It felt much the same when posters went from hand-drawn to created by computers. Personality went from handwriting or eccentric, dynamically-created fonts to Comic Sans. To me this feels like the next level.

TBH, most of those menus just looked like pre-AI menus to me...

[dfxm12]

To me, it feels somewhat anti-social. Going from working with the community on the flyer (assuming, like you said, it was hand drawn by a janitor or teacher or maybe even a student) to working with no one. Why can't we invite the community to work on things like this? If we don't have time, we should make time for it, like a little bit of class time for the students to draw a flyer. Children, schools and community 3rd places like pools are worth it!

[Breza]

I totally agree with you! I love seeing a flyer at my daughter's school that was obviously made by a student. It shows that they care enough about the thing to put real work into promoting it. Heck yes I'll buy a donut from coffee cart so you can go to some camp, fifth graders!

[xnx]

I can only hope the novelty quickly wears off for everyone and they too realize there's no value in such filler "art".

[rconti]

> The loss of personality is real.

Is this... irony?

[ajsnigrutin]

Back in the days, you made the title with WordArt and then add clipart images below

[ModernMech]

Yes, AI art is the 2026 equivalent of clip and stock art, and I don't know why so many people are threatened by that.

[ewhanley]

Exactly. In a few short years no one will feel the slop content is unusual - just in time for thr next jarring iteration to come along. It's not good or bad. It just is. Time marches on.

[moron4hire]

It's the corporatization of all aspects of life. It's so bad of a problem that many people voluntarily adopt the style of neutered corporate branding in even their own things. Listen to how people talk: we used to laugh and call people names when they used the word "synergy" in a personal setting and now it's used unironically.

Humans are social creatures. We crave a personal touch in things. That's why we idealize the small shop. But we're also risk averse. It's easier to eat at a big chain restaurant than to take a chance at a local place.

Just look at the country music industry. It's practically an assembly line for "small town nostalgia" slop. And yet small towns are the worst for defecting to Walmart or Dollar General.

[cadamsdotcom]

If you dislike it you could speak to whoever did it and tell them "it's ok to use AI for this, just don't settle for your first draft!"

[moregrist]

Preferring badly handled-drawn art to AI slop does not mean “use better AI slop.”

[cadamsdotcom]

After a few more rounds, it's no longer slop.

[codemog]

People have posted prolific artists, called it AI, and had everyone hating them until the big reveal. So to be frank, it probably is in your head.

[YurgenJurgensen]

Who are these “everyone”? I suspect that you actually mean “many random social media users”, which only proves that getting negative reactions out of the average social media is trivial; not exactly a groundbreaking discovery.

[unleaded]

Art has never been about the objective quality of the work

[ben_w]

Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't.

If it was never about objective quality, Plan 9 from Outer Space and The Eye of Argon would be highly regarded, not the butt of jokes and drinking games.

And those are the examples so infamous that they get to have the honour of being laughed at, there are many more which simply fade into obscurity from their ineptness.

[inigyou]

William McGonagall produced some brilliant art - just not in the way he thought.