The blog also mentions, several times, that it wasn't the goal to be indistinguishable.
I think it's actually a feature when people can recognize it as AI.
Why would someone want it to be unrecognizable as AI? What is the reason people want to hide AI usage ? (other than when "cheating" in studies or examns or such, obv)
AI generated visuals are becoming a signal of A) low-effort, B) and/or unwillingness or inability to spend resources to genuinely present your product or brand.
Both of these communicate that I will probably not get a good value for my money when buying your product or service.
> Both of these communicate that I will probably not get a good value for my money when buying your product or service.
This is where I stop following. Businesses should focus on where they differentiate, and I really don't care how they generate signage if I can read it. I don't get anything by them paying Banksy to make their menu instead of having Gemini generate it. And if there is any connection to getting good value, it's the inverse: I'm more likely to get good value when I'm not paying for fancy advertising. See: every drugstore that puts generics alongside brand names for cheaper.
Yes, generics are better value, but at least from the big drugstores and pharmacies they still have clean design - they just make it clear what their active ingredient is in what dosage, mention the branded equivalent, and then put the standard drug label on it, and that's about it.
The worst generative AI posters and restaurant menus I'm seeing from newer small businesses do not instill the same feeling that I'm getting generic-like value. To keep with the drug analogy, they feel like the combo pills you find somewhere in the back of a gas station which combine 10+ random supplements to help with 20+ different symptoms. Especially for new restaurants where real reviews are limited, menus with terrible AI generated food drawings really give me the same ick - that they might not be providing any good value at all.
However, i do admit that part of this is also that i live in an area where there is tons of competition for most cuisines I'm interested in, so I can use menu quality as a differientiating factor in the first place. If enough places around me were using sloppy AI menus i would probably ignore it.
You're free to ignore signals of cheapness if you want, as well as not care about quality. If you want generic restuarant food I guess you can go to McDonalds instead of a burger place; it's all the same value to you I guess.
You're using rhetoric to try and change the subject -- you're making a jump from "good value" to "lack of quality", and painting them with the same brush.
I'm saying I don't particularly value businesses that focus on things that are low impact for me. I'd rather my barista focus on sourcing good beans and making good coffee than paying someone to do a fancy custom menu for them. We see this all the time when we visit new areas. It's considered naive to follow whatever looks most glitzy -- every seasoned traveler will tell stories about all the tourist traps, and how the real quality is the hole-in-the-wall place all the locals gather.
What I'm saying is we shouldn't conflate quality with marketing and advertising, which is what posters are. You seem dead set on doing so anyway, and I'm not sure why.
There’s some level of irony around the fact that McDonalds spends quite a lot on branding and design.
You are conflating the use of AI with effort. It does not need to imply low effort or low care. I’m hoping this tired narrative dies out soon.
"AI = low effort" is becoming a heuristic regardless of the assertion's absolute accuracy. It's probably not going to die soon as long as it keeps appearing in scammy or low-margin business places.
AI-generated visuals aren't the first to go through this. I'd say the early-to-mid 90's "desktop publishing" went through this too - as soon as everyone could make ads and flyers cheaply with Word, everyone did.
> "AI = low effort" is becoming a heuristic regardless of the assertion's absolute accuracy.
If you can tell that it's AI, that's probably because it is low effort. Higher-effort attempts pass more easily.
(Of course, that also requires an understanding that there are ways to apply effort to making a short request; and believing that it would make a difference; and noticing for yourself that the first output is bad; and trying. Quite a lot of people seem to lack at least one of these.)
>I’m hoping this tired narrative dies out soon.
It won't die off until AI stops being used with low effort. Which it is the majority the time used for.
The AI art is also a class/status marker.
If a business markets itself with these AIgen posters, you get wildly different responses from different groups.
boomers that spend all their time on Facebook will think “this is such a nice pretty poster” and be oblivious to the fact it is even ai. Even if they knew it was ai they don’t care.
Young people will think it is low class/trashy. Some hate it because it’s ai, others hate it because the poster is ugly/busy/confusing.
Because there is a big anti-AI movement and some people will think you're destroying the planet and putting people out of a job if you make one prompt to a chatbot.
Maybe if there were fewer people foaming at the mouth to enrich themselves while destroying the planet, and putting people out of work, there would be less pushback.
So it isn't really about art?
It's also about art. AI is a multi-faceted problem.
If we're being frank: we've been in a low trust society for a good while now. Grifting is rampant and blatant, all the way up to the federal government.
Among many other things, it's about "am I getting scammed". So my mind needs to develop called ID in some sense. Not a perfect indicator, but enough to protect me. That can open me up to criticism as being overly cynical. And my response is: yes, that's what a low trust society does to people. That's the point.
While this is a side comment on a somewhat frivolous topic, it did make me reframe a lot of my justice, transparency and reason (as in being reasonable) complacency I am seeing around me.
Yes, the fact that we are in a low trust society makes us behave we do. Can we change this? Should we even try?
I've seen societies band together in the face of (acute) natural disasters (floods, wildfires...) or big disasters like wars, but how do we get to — if not high trust — not-low trust society when all is good and is it even worth pursuing?
> Can we change this? Should we even try?... and is it even worth pursuing?
It's perfectly possible. Another aspect of humanity pointed out to me from others is that we are surprisingly sensitive not to the current "quality of life", but to the rate of change in that QoL. So we don't necessarily need to fix all of humanities woes to restore trust, we need to get on a trajectory where people believe a better future is coming. That optimism and morale makes all the difference in building momentum towards restoring trust.
But whether we should ultimately comes down to your own personal paradigm. Do you feel you succeed when you reach your goals and lifestyle you desire, or do you get more satisfaction helping others succeed and survive where you can? Would you rather feel more secure wandering around your neighborhood, or are you fine paying for extra protection (directly or indirectly) to get by your day-to-day? Do you prefer a variety of public places to take your family to or would you rather have a nicer dwellings to invite friends over to? There's no correct answer to such questions, but they affect the trust of your community.
>how do we get to — if not high trust — not-low trust society when all is good
Not to sound snide, but: you increase trust by doing actions that make people more trustful. There's no magic to building trust, but it's also not complicated. You simply perform genuine, intentional actions made primarily to help others. I won't say altruistic, but the more altruistic the better the effect.
To break it down a bit more, I'd say there's 3 main layers of trust to build: local, institutional, and societal. Unless you have outsized influence already and a passion to lead the charge, you generally need the lower layer's trust improved before it expands to the next layer.
1. in your local community, with people you interact with in your day-to-day. Simply being more available to meeting up with people and doing small actions to assist helps to build up trust. As well as in what kinds of activities and groups you join to meet such people. It's the layer you most likely have the most power over
2. in the institutional level, to influence structures you directly interact with. The school your kids goes to, the emergency services, the platforms you consume media on, the businesses you go to regularly, your local town initiatives. Having trust that these systems (at the bare minimum) aren't actively trying to make you or your family worse off builds trust that the structures around your immediate community will improve and benefit everyone. Many of these are influenced by local policy, either through coalitions to get such proposals to leadership or getting leaders in who care about such factors. They can't do something like giving people a 4-day workweek, but it can make a park cleaner or create more/better public transportation.
3. Then on the societal level, to influence wider culture well beyond your sphere. This is all the larger level thinking concerning economy, technology, environment, this topic here on the trustworthiness of AI generated posters, etc. that the internet often talks about (which make sense, as a medium well beyond your sphere), so I won't need to expand on this much. This is pretty much exclusively larger policy issues to enact in laws, so influencing wider state/federal law requires larger populism movements.
It's all of the above. The unreliable empty garbage they barf out, threats to destroy jobs for oligarch asshat profit, and the resource hungry pillaging of neighborhoods. Oh, yeah, and also the crappy mush up of stolen art.
Hyperbole much? When I see this type of low-effort, low-care response I ignore it. Perhaps take more time to express your thoughts.
> Perhaps take more time to express your thoughts.
bit of a problematic argument in this context given that the entire usage of generative AI rests on people's unwillingness to do just that
Seems these things about genAI are fairly well established at this point. Hence the vast majority disapproval of genAI being forced on users and broad rejection of AI data centers. Did you have a substantive response for any of the three major negatives, or just your own low-effort, low-care dismissal?
I believe rejection of AI Data Centres is nothing but "local" protectiveness (a bit like NIMBY); like lithium mining, nuclear plants, and any other "dirty", destructive activity.
I want the products of it (how many phones with lithium batteries in those protests), but not the side effects.
Which is not to say these are wrong perspectives to hold, but it's important to understand where the root of the complaint is before you try to come up with generic solutions.
Your comment gives strong "temporarily embarrassed oligarch asshat" vibes. Is that intentional?
> Why would someone want it to be unrecognizable as AI?
If we operate under the assumption that the AI generated posters are bad (which this HN thread is), then making them not look like AI generated posters would be directionally toward making them not bad. That doesn't necessarily mean it's good though, it could be average and fulfill that constraint.
> Why would someone want it to be unrecognizable as AI?
Because the reason for any given AI work being "recognizable as AI" is considered inherently a quality issue. For the suspicion to arise, there has to be something that someone considers "wrong" about the work, in order to point at that thing and say "this must be the work of an enemy 「ＭＯＤＥＬ」".
> Why would someone want it to be unrecognizable as AI? What is the reason people want to hide it
Because a lot of “everyday” folks really strongly dislike AI. I’ve lost count of the number of AI generated Instagram ads I’ve seen where the comments are filled with “AI slop!”.
It’s not a positive signal for anyone who wants to persuade someone of the value of whatever they’re advertising because it’s associated with being cheap and lazy.
I think "a lot" is very subjective. I can also say "a lot of people really like AI-generated arts" and that would be true as well. HN is a place where a lot of normally objective, informed, and probably very nice folks in the real life come to engage in endless of debates that go nowhere.
> Half of U.S. adults say the increased use of AI in daily life makes them feel more concerned than excited, according to a June 2025 survey. Just 10% say they are more excited than concerned. Another 38% say they are equally concerned and excited.
> About half of Americans said in the June survey that AI will worsen people’s ability to think creatively and form meaningful relationships with others. Far fewer said AI will make these things better.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/03/12/key-findi...
“about half” surely objectively qualifies as “a lot”.
> I can also say "a lot of people really like AI-generated arts" and that would be true as well.
Yes but without the corresponding negative. If someone who likes AI generated art sees some human created art they don’t think “gross, why didn’t they use AI to do that?”. So for something like advertising using AI will alienate some potential customers. Not using AI will alienate no one.
People aren’t feeling the benefits of AI. Where there are any benefits, they aren’t causing prices to decrease or supply to go up, instead the excess value is being absorbed by profit taking.
If most people aren’t shareholders but instead workers whose jobs are threatened by AI, we should expect this response.
It has nothing to do with artists, it has everything to do with trying to mount a collective response to the apparent threat, poorly expressed as crowds tend to do.
I bet those poll respondents are worried about their jobs, not seeing some random AI art on a bus.
Why not both? I didn’t lose my job in 2008 but watching people all around me lose theirs made it clear that my own economic situation was not a safe one.
Maybe they see the random AI art on the bus and they realize that meant a real human artist probably didn't get paid to make it so society is worse off. Maybe those poll respondents have empathy, in that they are worried about their jobs and feel bad for other people who have lost work to AI too
they realize that meant a real human artist probably didn't get paid to make it so society is worse off
This is a form of the broken window fallacy. Society is not worse off when production requires less labor, any more than it's worse off when someone uses an open source library rather than paying someone to reimplement it.
> This is a form of the broken window fallacy.
I’m not sure I see it, can you elaborate?
The broken window fallacy is the idea that it's good when your window gets broken because you have to pay someone to fix it and it increases their income. If that were true, then it would be bad if you could easily repair windows without spending time or money. It's false because we're better off if we can spend our resources on things we actually want rather than constantly maintaining our windows, even if that means some window repairmen need to find other jobs.
What do we do when former window repairman can't find other jobs? Just fuck em, right?
The narrative we're seeing around AI and current automation isn't "we're going to automate one category of jobs". If it were then sure, we could be relatively confident that the excess labor from that industry would be absorbed by other segments
But that's not what the future looks like to me. The future to me looks like "we want to automate a large majority of labor"
So what then? If tons of labour is displaced then the Broken Window Fallacy doesn't really apply, because it is based on the assumption that there will always be something for displaced labour to do.
Call it the Excess Labor Corollary. If there's no way to absorb excess labor in other segments, then what.
When there really aren't any jobs for the former window repair man to do, we are in a "post scarcity economy", which could be a utopia where everyone lives in comfort and has more leisure time.
Or of course, a few billionaires could hoard the wealth.
There's a Wikipedia page about it.
We could be in a post scarcity economy now, except that generally instead of realising we all have enough of we share, we raise the threshold of what we consider to be enough comfort and stuff.
>could be a utopia where everyone lives in comfort and has more leisure time.
It definitely could be. With current trajectory as of now, do you think it will be?
>except that generally instead of realising we all have enough of we share, we raise the threshold of what we consider to be enough comfort and stuff.
I see the opposite sentiment. I see previous basic necessities further out or reach then they were last generation. People aren't raising their standards, they are sinking towards poverty.
But then their worries are dismissed because they can get a flatscreen TV for 200 dollars. A TV that is likely feeding your data back to corporate to make thousands off you.
You're going back one generation, and I'm thinking further back.
Like, if we all settled for a 1950s British living standard, using current manufacturing technology, we could achieve that while everyone works a little bit less.
But, we'd prefer to keep labouring and have nicer things.
The supposed goal of "Make America Great again" is to invoke that 50s era of American exceptionalism. So surely there's something there people miss.
And your theoretical implies we have choice in the matter. I'm sure many would in fact take a smaller home with less amenities over a modern home with cheap appliances. Not that I'd actually be given that choice given my family lineage, but the general living standard of the 50's was quite high. I doubt the act of AC and the lack of knowledge of abestos are the things that made housing skyrocket over the decades.
Sure, but if we run AI all the way to its endpoint, it’s not just about window repairmen anymore. Our current notions about economics assume there’s always another job class for people to move to, here eventually there won’t be.
So here you never have to pay anyone to fix your windows, because they fix themselves, but conversely nobody will give you money to fix their windows! And then you have to pay your self-fixing windows a rent in tokens without an income.
> here eventually there won’t be.
That's a pretty big leap.
I don’t think so, even if the whole “AI exponential” idea is wrong, that’s just the shape of the curve. There still is a curve. Even if these things take 50 years to happen instead of 5 (which would be better and which I doubt will be the case) it still happens eventually. I think the current capabilities of AI are enough of a heuristic for us to assume this is going to happen.
It is a stated goal of several prominent AI business leaders. Altman, Amodei, and Musk at the very least have had mask-off moments where they said as much.
> Society is not worse off when production requires less labor
Society is definitely worse off when people who exchange their labor for capital have no opportunities to do so
>Society is not worse off when production requires less labor,
Not objectively in every situation. But that does seem to be the case and objective here.
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They really don’t. A tiny minority of cranks dislike vaccines. AI dislike is far, far more widespread.
Not to mention, there’s a reason why AI is seen as cheap and lazy… because it is! There’s no good parallel to vaccines here.