When I noticed the article header image was generated with AI my interest in reading the article itself dropped to zero.

Can you point out what made you think the images were AI generates? I suspected they were (before reading in this thread everything is AI generated), but I couldn't find any of the usual signs.

I thought they were AI because I suspected nobody would pay an illustrator/actually spend time making those illustrations for a story like this.

The fact that the whole text was AI came as a surprise. I did notice that weird inconsistency about feed pricing mentioned in another comment but just thought the author made an error or I misunderstood something.

It seemed to be a common AI style, so I was suspicious. Zoomed in on the laundromat window sign and it says “vioice”, so yea.

Looking at it again now, things like the electrical wires not being aligned, or going nowhere are always obvious tells. The outlines on the A in “laundromat” are okay but for some reason the vertical line on the R isn’t open.

It’s impressive that this can be generated with AI. I just wish it would come with a “generated with llm-name” label.

The main building's roof doesn't make any sense (we should be able to see the top). The font choices are odd. Some straight lines look like digital line tool, and others look free hand. The perspective of the signs are wrong in a strange way.

The combination of a "hand-drawn" art style, with text that is obviously not hand-lettered, is a dead giveaway. It would be very weird for a human to do that.

If you have an eye for fonts, the text itself stands out too, at least to me. The font style of "HARTMANN SOFTWARE MECHANICS" is a particular combination of clean, bland shapes and rounded corners that you rarely see in human-designed fonts, but it's super common in AI-synthesized text. I guess it's sort of an average middle ground in the abstract space of letter forms, and the lack of distinguishing features is what creates the impression.

Thanks. That's interesting. I haven't paid particular attention to the fonts. I do draw quite a lot these days but I don't have a particular eye for fonts.

I personally have on occasion added software rendered fonts into hand-drawn images. Sometimes instead of directly adding it with a text tool I would add it on a temporary layer and then trace it over by hand. This results in similar looking text with clean shapes and rough lines that fit better with the other parts of the drawing.

To me the only thing that stands out in the image is the view through the laundry shop windows. The line of laundry machines doesn't look aligned at a right angle to the window - given that the tiles in front of the window clearly establish perspective lines it's a mistake that seems hard to make and would be pretty apparent in early stages when drawing this.

In fact looking closely, the perspective of the building itself doesn't match the perspective of the fields behind it, but I can see myself doing something like this if it's not that noticeable and gives me better composition.

You might like /r/antiai.