1 pointby ereiamjh2 hours ago2 comments
  • ereiamjh2 hours ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49764791#49767382 had a lot of healthy discussion, and many people pointed out what I already knew, the posters were too cluttered.

    Claude steered me into improving the prompts with actual evaluations... which cost me actual money...

    • ben_w2 hours ago
      Thanks!

      Good to see a huge range of the same thing in so many styles. I've done similar at a smaller (free) scale to explore art styles and avoid the clichés that the image models prefer, with some success.

      My feelings, when presented with this big grid, is that if it looks simple[0], or that what complexity it contains is the sort of thing I expect in either a clip art[1] or stock photo[2] library, I prefer it.

      Where it appears complex[3], that's where my gut says ~"nobody would put this much effort in, they must have asked an AI to do it for them".

      [0] e.g. CoBrA, Vorticism, Minimalism

      [1] e.g. Memphis / 80s Postmodern, Wayfinding / Signage

      [2] e.g. Streamline Moderne, Constructivist, Dada Collage

      [3] e.g. Woodcut, Mexican Calavera, Victorian Broadside

      • ereiamjhan hour ago
        Yeah, and I have opinions about [3].

        I think pretending you didn't use AI, when you did, is unworthy. So I'm not trying to make posters that fool you into thinking it's handmade. I'm trying to make AI posters that aren't crappy.

        I've got some AI writing too, and I don't try to remove all the clues that tip you off it came out of an LLM. I only try to remove the tics that make it read badly. And I present the work upfront as being AI-assisted.

        The only problem there is, in the real world, there's a cohort of people who don't think "that looks crappy because it's AI" so much as "I don't care if it looks great; I object to AI on principle; I now hate the thing that poster is advertising". If you cared about that cohort, I guess you'd either lie about using AI, or simply not use AI. But I kinda wonder how long they'll still be around.

        Mexican Calavera, you picked up on - might be one of the weakest, as it seems to apply a Day of the Dead layer on top of "default ChatGPT crappy cartoons".

      • mtmailan hour ago
        I'd argue nobody in Great Britain would have a Mexican Calavera themed event at a cricket field, never mind the clearly USA-style building in the image.
        • ereiamjhan hour ago
          From the site:

          "I recognise that almost all of the styles are entirely inappropriate for a village fête. The point is to demonstrate what you can do for any event, and to show that you can ask for whatever style you want."

          Village fete is just lorem ipsum for the prompts.

          • ereiamjhan hour ago
            BTW one of my fondest memories of poster-making in my 90s student days, was when we recreated the packaging design of Asda tortilla chips, for a Mexican night at the student bar.

            Tequila slammers £1 :)

  • colesantiago2 hours ago
    Sorry, this still looks like slop.