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  • This is not surprising. Would you rather have handmade Italian shoes or factory made shoes sewn by a robot. Humans assign quality relative to themselves.

    A chess game between to bots is boring, no matter how strong the bots are. Humans generally compare themselves to other humans and that's part of how they value.

  • I dunno which I’d rather have, but I do know the only kind I’ve ever bought is the factory-made kind. So if the aim is appealing to a wide audience, you’re arguing involving robots in the production process is key?
  • > A chess game between to bots is boring, no matter how ...

    I'm thinking quite a few chess nerds could be interested - depending on how the game develops.

  • > Would you rather have handmade Italian shoes or factory made shoes sewn by a robot.

    The latter, of course, which is why that's what I own. Aside from that, this is an absurd and grossly dishonest analogy -- that's not at all the choice here.

    Some of the most fascinating games are between Stockfish and Leela. (e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_84B_VwayU -- this is narrated by National Master "Jerry", one of the most respected chess narrators on YouTube.) People who don't know this know nothing about chess. (And only immature clueless fish respond by challenging someone to a game. Lack of knowledge of chess was already established by their ridiculous claim. BTW, he has radically changed his response , which is now very different from his original claim. It's not my misunderstanding, it's his bad faith.)

    Some of the most stupid things I have ever read are from those suffering from radical anti-AI hysteria, and it is becoming a primary means by which I judge people's intelligence. ("radical" is a key word here -- there are numerous legitimate reasons to be critical of numerous aspects of the AI boom.)

    I won't respond further.

  • The same goes for your business. Your AI “art” isn’t eye catching, at first glance it’s lazy. A longer glance it’s unsettling. We’re heading for a really boring period in graphic design.
  • For over a decade, people have been dropshipping slop on Etsy and apparently making money.
  • It’s not like stock photos of infeasibly attractive people eating ludicrously overstuffed burgers were ever interesting or believable.
  • Part of the problem is many bloggers think an image is required for every post. This is reinforced by algorithms which favor such posts, and drives bloggers to the easiest/fastest sources of free images.

    The "featured image" in Wordpress is what gets shown on the index page, in shared social posts, and other contexts. And certainly, the algorithms favor such posts over pure text posts, even if the text content in the spartan post is far better.

    There are other factors at play, too. Many bloggers are lazy, some are severely time constrained, a few are fearful of legal repercussions associated with copying images off the Internet, and a majority are creatively or technically incapable of making their own images to include on a personal blog post.

  • Same, I tend to assume it is a sign that AI is used across the board.

    But please keep it coming. I need to spend less time idly browsing and the growing preponderance of AI is helping push me in the direction I want to go. My time spent on “social media” has dropped significantly over recent months.

  • This hasn’t been my wife’s experience at all. She manually writes all her content, but uses AI images as sizzlers for the scenes (fan fic for popular shows). Short of getting the actors together for a million bucks, she’d be hard pressed to make these scenes a reality. It’s also supposed to be aspirational, like “what if the tv cast got back together for another season hey?” I think the average person just doesn’t really notice.

    She’s had to figure out where the line is though. She tried using ElevenLabs to dictate her scripts, thinking it’d make things more convenient for her fans, and that lost her subscribers because they seemingly disliked the more obvious use of AI.

  • TFA is not about fanfic, which seems like a natural fit for illustration, but about technical blogs that really don't need it and are instead stuffed with distractingly fancy slop images.
  • AI generic blogspam "art" - as off-putting or worse than clipart or those weird flat characters that took over everything "corporate" a few years ago.

    Actually using AI to make a shitpost image relevant to the text? Amusing, fun, worthwhile.

  • > I think the average person just doesn’t really notice.

    Yes, this is what's insulting about it, the assumption that it won't be noticed.

  • Manually written content with an AI teaser image is perfectly acceptable to most people, including technical audiences who dislike AI writing.

    The teaser image isn’t the content. Most people consider it part of the web design or setting the tone for the article.

    There’s a very vocal minority who will get turned off by AI anything right now, even when it’s not part of the main content. Some times a good blog post will land on the HN front page and it will collect complaints that the layout or web design looked too AI generated so those people didn’t read it. I don’t think it’s a big loss. Blogs have attracted a peanut gallery of picky critics forever.

    > She’s had to figure out where the line is though. She tried using ElevenLabs to dictate her scripts, thinking it’d make things more convenient for her fans, and that lost her subscribers because they seemingly disliked the more obvious use of AI.

    Using AI for the main content is a no-no. The actual content that they came for has to show signs of authenticity.

  • Public shaming and rejection are probably the best way to teach people it's wasting people's time and disrespectful. If you couldn't otherwise write it yourself for whatever reason it's best not to until you can.
  • > Public shaming...

    People already tried to cancel others because they didn't agree with them. Eventually the most of people came to a conclusion that it is no good. I think at least that the most did just that. So I'm proposing another solution, just ignore what you don't like. No one is forcing you to read a blog that uses AI generated images or uses a wrong color for its background.

    by ordu
  • > Public shaming and rejection are probably the best way to teach people it's wasting people's time and disrespectful

    Public shaming is disrespectful. As is the self-righteous "teaching" of something that is ultimately a personal preference. You aren't being forced to read someone's personal blog.

  • Are you saying nobody should ever do anything with any tool if they cannot reasonably do it without the tool?

    I mean personal blogs I agree the writing portion should be personal but does that go for everything? Maybe the author should take the emoji off his page(??!!)

  • > Public shaming and rejection are probably the best way to teach people

    Sigh

  • >Public shaming and rejection are probably the best way to teach

    That's a wild stance. If you don't like what someone else made - AI assisted or not - you can just move on and not purposefully set out to publicly ruin them...

  • >Public shaming and rejection are probably the best way to teach people

    For me it's a reverse filter, the people I see doing the shaming, those the loudest most seemingly unhinged anti-AI folks - they get blocked / ignored and looked at as if they were the equiv of PETA activists.

  • I recently complained to the marketing team about an AI generated image used on our website main dashboard. I described everything that was wrong with the image the more you stared at it. That if I was a customer, I would feel that if they are ok to show a low quality image there, what does it means to the products I'm buying.

    Their first reaction was to say they didn't see any problem with the image, then they changed it for an abstract image that I couldn't tell if it was AI or not, which is a huge improvement.

    I thought I was alone in feeling this way, but turns out people from the sales team told me privately that they were happy I had spoken up.

  • I’m inclined to agree, but not as much because the image was generated with AI but rather because it’s rare for such images to exhibit taste. They feel like the visual equivalent of gilded twinkies, which is offputting.

    Selecting a stock image doesn’t have this effect, even if it’s not related to the post. Even the most unremarkable stock image has the fingerprints of its artist, and the choice itself can reveal things about the author. They don’t have that hyper-polished unintentioniality and subtle uncanny hollow “wrongness” that generated images do.

  • I haven't done research on this but I feel like a lot of stock image companies are using AI now
  • If an LLM has any taste, it comes from its training data.
  • I just sat through my first fully AI-generated presentation. The content was as bland and straight down the middle as possible. The slides were all generated by a standard design - a mix of text blocks, bullets, fonts, colors.

    The whole thing was packed with information and completely worthless. I’m 100% convinced that before too long we’re all going to be allergic to this low effort crap, and craving actual people with an actual point of view.

  • same here. our org just hired a new guy and he just did his first presentation, blatantly AI-generated. he said everything that had to be said on the first slid, then wasted 20 minutes going in circles.

    llm writing style sounds so wrong once you say it out loud.

  • Yeah, I have told people that I’m fully capable of typing things into ChatGPT or Claude myself. What I need from people are their own warty ideas. Sometimes real ideas are blurry or incomplete. Or have open questions. Making your own presentation can be a personal exercise in clarifying your thoughts. And sometimes the fact that ideas are half-baked or tricky is exactly why you’re having the meeting in the first place…

    I guess if you’re in an environment where the emphasis is put on busy-work and formalities, then you’re going to get this sort of shit. Deeper organizational problem at that point, though…

  • I used AI to make a presentation that animated around (html). It had the look of the storyboard and the postcards had tweakable controls on them for the data I wanted to show. It was pretty slick, something that would take me forever (and I'd never get the time approval to do).
  • this is what I've observed as well, it's supposedly impressive and packed with "information" and .. stuff but it's just kind of noise to me

    it's fatiguing to read that stuff as well