[simonw]

What's weird here is that I should be in total agreement with you.

I love it when AI tools are used to give people the ability to solve problems that previously they could not solve well.

For the fliers I'm talking about here (think a hardware store promoting their summer sale) I don't think the impact on the local poster design community is meaningful.

And yet... the resulting posters put me off. I'm trying to figure out why that is. I think the best explanation I have is the lack of intention behind them - knowing that none of the visual details - the illustrations, the typographic flair - had anyone thinking about them while they were constructed.

[ryandrake]

> And yet... the resulting posters put me off. I'm trying to figure out why that is. I think the best explanation I have is the lack of intention behind them - knowing that none of the visual details - the illustrations, the typographic flair - had anyone thinking about them while they were constructed.

I think that's exactly it, and it's not really hard to articulate. You are simply noticing the lack of effort, lack of care, and lack of craftsmanship that is inherent in AI-produced slop. This isn't mysticism and it doesn't take a sixth sense to detect. When someone puts no effort into creating something, that lack of effort carries through the entire work, and is (or should be) obvious and easy to spot.

Ask a schoolteacher. They can spot when someone half-asses a term paper, and, at least I hope, they can spot AI slop term papers.

[steveklabnik]

Okay I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and here's my "I'm currently drinking my coffee" take on this. I'm willing to be significantly wrong here, but for the sake of discussion, here's where I think I'm at.

I also agree with

> I love it when AI tools are used to give people the ability to solve problems that previously they could not solve well.

But I also really hate these menus, I see them all the time as well. I think that my conclusion is slightly different than yours: in my opinion, just not a lot of people have taste. That's sort of like, true by the definition of taste, but what I mean is something more specific: it's not because of AI that I dislike these signs. It's because of what you said above:

> producing something that genuinely looks like a huge improvement to them.

While it looks like a huge improvement to them, it does not to me. Our tastes differ.

Here's a version of this that doesn't involve AI at all: last night I ate sushi at a place I'd never been before. Their menu was a bit chaotic, and had a bunch of annotations, along with a guide to those annotations. One section had both "2" and "2 pieces" listed under the options, and so I was confused: what was the difference here? Turns out it's basically just a typo, both mean that. Combine that with some spelling mistakes, and yeah, I had a pretty bad impression of the menu. The sushi was fine though, I'd go back. But this wasn't a super low-end place, so the attention to detail being off made me a bit worried before I actually ate the food.

Same problem, same issue, AI is really the only variable here. And it is the natural downside of "democratization" or "helping more people do more things", naturally, there will be a lot more low-quality stuff out there than before. That's not actually inherently a bad thing. But it can feel weird.

[joshstrange]

I guess I see very little "soul" in most marketing/advertising in the first place. It was slop well before LLMs entered the scene. If my local hardware store wants to put up a poster for their summer sale I don't care if it's black comic sans on white paper or if it's a AI-generated advertisement. Either way I'm not looking that closely at it and neither version were going to show up in an art museum or recieve design accolades.

There is so little intention in anything (again, even before LLMs) so I don't begrudge places for using LLMs to try and produce similar quality to what larger chains/corps are able to commision.

I see this as similar to things like people wanting "clean ingredients" or "sustainable packaging" or "healthy food" in restaurants/bakeries/etc. They _say_ they want that but they are not at all willing to _pay_ for it. To be clear, I do wish those things were the baseline, but they are not and unfortunately it is near-impossible to compete with other businesses that don't care about those things. At the end of the day consumers see "$15 hamburger" vs "$10 hamburger", the better/fewer ingredients, the better-paid labor, the recyclable packaging, etc simple don't matter. This is _not_ an argument to underpay workers, kill the environment, and fill your hamburgers with sawdust, it's simply a statement on how hard it is to compete when consumers very rarely reward companies for doing things "right" no matter how much lip-service they pay to it.

I've watched a close relative have people say "you should do X thing!" where X is something like "fewer ingredients" or "low calorie" or "healthy"-type things, only to see sales crater after an initial boost. People try it, they feel good about themselves, then they go right back to buying the thing packed with sugar.

There is a wide gulf between "what people say that want" and "how they actually behave". LLMs are currently in a category where people can have visceral reaction and claim "I'd never buy something from a company that does that" but I can tell you right now that won't last. Be anti-bad-design, be anti-bad-code but don't be anti-LLM because that opinion isn't going to age well (and yes, I know _you_ simonw, aren't anti-LLM, I'm speaking generally).

[customguy]

> LLMs are currently in a category where people can have visceral reaction and claim "I'd never buy something from a company that does that" but I can tell you right now that won't last.

Because people are struggling to make ends meet as wealth gets more and more concentrated. It reminds me of that really disgusting joke: why do sheep farmers like to fuck their sheep just at the edge of a cliff? Because they push back.

So yeah, people often make choices they'd rather not make. Doesn't mean anything, just like that sheep doesn't love the farmer and is grinding up against him, it doesn't want to fall of a cliff and die.

And these companies take a few cherry picked snapshots, never show the video, never show the aftermath, and brag about acceptance. Fuck all of that, so much.

People don't want all of humanity to be stolen from by companies who then turn around and sue you if you violate their copyright. That settles all of it, already. All this stuff about quality and economics is irrelevant. We hate people who steal from the little man to enrich the wealthy, always did, always will. Where there is a "we" that isn't just isolated people playing pretend, you will find this as the bedrock, maybe a layer above hating child abuse. And making the "accept child abuse or robber barons" option 10%, 20%, 50000% cheaper doesn't change that in the slightest.

I'll go you one further: the very few ones who do, or don't care, don't matter, because when it comes to ethics and society they already checked out, and can stay checked out. They got old, they lost what they were supposed to hold on to if they ever had it, and that's tragic, but mostly their problem which they want to extend onto the people who don't have it.