Notably, the zipline is all wacky, and two piggies are #1, probably more things I didn't notice at a skim?
I guess they didn't explicitly forbid AI, and it wasn't noticed until after the winner was selected, and now you can't "roll back"? It seems this was later added to the page:
> [...] we recognize that the use of AI has changed greatly over the last few years in ways we didn’t anticipate, and will be reevaluating the rules and processes for 2027, which will include prohibiting the use of AI [...]
Yes they did; the contestants must be at least 18 years old and residents of Ohio.
AI is neither.
Would it be within contest rules if an 19-year-old resident of Ohio served as an artistic director, giving suggestions to a 12-year-old from Kentucky who does the actual work?
When the poster contest was originally formed in 2024, the use of AI was permitted if explained as a part of the application process.
Since current US legal decisions indicate that genAI works are not copyrightable, this is troublesome for any organization that wants exclusive licensing for publicity. The State Fair would expect to incorporate their art winners into marketing, posters, and expect to strike down derivative works and other commercial uses.
Not to mention that any Ai-entrant piece could be duplicated by any other entrant.
Whether is not copyrightable is not relevant to this. The parent poster's point is just as salient. The creator, not the sumbitter needs to meet the criteria in question. A clanker isn't a resident of Ohio.
I'm largely in the not fond of AI artwork camp and the weird rigging on the chair lifts in the winning entry bug me no end (first thing that caught my eye), however ...
Is Jeff Koons (and others in the "massive installation" artwork game) the creator of his works or does that honour go to the minions that instantiate his wishes?
We're talking "grand vision" description here .. now you 30 people go and flesh out the details.
Not really, AI is a tool and so it's assumed that the submitter is the creator. The Ohio judges will not be as pedantic as you and then other comment above try to make it seem.
And photography is something where the image determines whether or not it’s art. If you are constructing an image using form, shape, light, subjects, tool selection, and all sorts of other factors to translate a 3D scene into a 2D image, revealing your particular perspective, then that is art, and pretty difficult at that. If you take a flat, objective, documentary picture of a painting, that’s not art. If you take a picture of something at the store you’d like to research later, that’s not art. If you’re telling someone, with your words, maybe some sketches and marked-up iterations what you want the picture to look like but they actually take it and finish it, you’re not the artist. You’re commissioning art.
Nope. At best, they are like commissioning work from a computer. When you commission a piece, especially as an art director, you often have lengthy conversations, exchange sketches, do multiple iterations, and have pretty fine-grained control over much of the final outcome. Art direction is a fundamentally creative process. But an art director would never, ever take credit for the piece. Why? They understand that so much of that artist’s voice, granular artistic perspective, and so much more are the building blocks of the piece. Image generators could provide reference material, make images for mood boards, and all sorts of other things useful in the artistic process, but the prompter is absolutely not making art.
There's no creativity or skill in handing something off to a generative model. At best, it's analogous to commissioning a work (as another poster said). It's not remotely like using a tool to create art.
People who say this must not really know just how much work goes into crafting the image via something like ComfyUI workflows, which is where the actual skill and creativity is. Now I don't know if this poster was that or whether it was just a single ChatGPT prompt, but look on places like r/StableDiffusion where people share their workflows, it's not really much different than EDM production, they're not actually playing the instruments but organizing them together into a cohesive pipeline.
It immediately looks like AI slop because nearly every square inch is filled with with something, however meaningless and useless it might be to the overall composition.
AI is good at filling an image with shit, and bad at knowing when to leave space and what isn’t necessary.
Not criticizing this in particular, but I'm genuinely curious: why is everyone talking about how obvious or not the details of the poster are as AI, when they didn't take the 30 seconds in most good image editing software to remove the sepia/yellow/brown tint all over? You could put a 100px blur on the smallest thumbnail on that page of it, and I'd still recognize it as AI generated.
Yeah, my takeaway here is less about AI, and more that these judges have no sense of taste and just gave more points to whatever packed in the most pointless details.
There’s nothing fun about dipshit hucksters flooding the design world with low-quality, low-effort trash born from a multi-trillion dollar Silicon Valley initiative to have tech companies get paid for our work instead of us.
I’m already an industrial tradesman, toughguy. People in the software world are going to feel pretty stupid about being that smug to people who had to switch careers because cratering demand cratered wages.
Maybe it's just me, but that font and its layout feels extremely recognizable to me as the "AI image sign font" that I've already seen on posterboards for a bunch of restaurants in SF.
Not just you, it's immediately obvious as an AI image, it's got the piss filter and all kinds of telling details. Detecting AI images like this should be a basic skill at this point.
Ribbons are splotchy and weird, and have designs that don't line up and stars that are misformed.
Are they going to use it as an official poster or something? It is it just a side competition? Feels like they might come to regret spreading it. Both the first and the second smell rather strongly of AI, though the winner seems the most egregious.
Jebus, that image is dogshit. There is no way in a million years I would put my name on something like that. It truly is the age of the shameless. If you have no shame and no ethics, you really can go far.
It’s good and things aren’t that blatantly wrong but I can tell it’s AI. It’s not the mistakes you pointed out, but there’s something about the overall image and I can’t put my finger on it.
My workplace did a sweepstakes for the world cup and there were bonus prizes for decorating your desk. All three winners had simply uploaded photos of their desks to an AI image generator and had it add flags etc to decorate and submitted that. One person used AI to make it look like he was wearing the jersey of his assigned team.
The person running the contest wrote up something about how impressed she was with the creative use of AI.
The whole thing makes me sad - wouldn't the idea of this sort of thing be to scrounge up flags of obscure countries or make them out of paper and do a bit of arts and crafts to decorate your desk for the month? Instead people were just throwing 50 words into an AI system a few times and getting out a photo to submit.
It's the same with the tokenmaxxing phenomenon with the leaderboards, of course people will game any system, and I'm also impressed by how well people can do so, sometimes it's honestly shocking.
For whatever reason, the photo is point. People are only doing it for the photo and only doing the photo for the competition. I agree that we lost something, I just also think a majority of people don’t know what’s missing: they just put effort to make the photo, rather than to make the desk
I learned this lesson as a child, entering a painting competition handily to someone whose work was (in my opinion) not very good, but they had a much nicer camera, lighting, and a pleasant background.
Though its often much, much more effort to have judges who are also experts in the relevant field and give them the time to inspect in person the things to be judged. I don't think competitions will ever escape this "studying for the test" aspect fully. Its less actively harmful at least than the worst behaviors ive heard of (sabotage etc)
for a more programming related example, the sheer number of hackathons ive entered over the years where the winners had a relevant idea related to something in the news recently, and did basically nothing but a nonfunctional ui mockup of a crud app and won over teams that tried to make actually functional/fun things.
Theres a strange element of shamelessness to it, though I also think theres (sometimes) another of adoption/novelty. To you or I, steeped in the internet and hacker news culture, its pretty clear that sharing AI work as your own is a transgression; an inherently rude act. Its even impolite to share ai output in general, unless the discussion calls for it. I think some people I see out in the world doing it are still encountering this stuff and thinking through the consequences and ideas and experimenting for themselves and having moments of joy and wanting to share. I've seen this with "poems" people I know have gotten it to make, shared with me with genuine happiness on their faces.
But after a bit more time spent using it, and working with the culture, right-thinking and socially aware people really ought to develop a sense that what was superficially impressive is the same each time. The first poem is the same as the hundredth, the pictures all look the same. And they start to think about the lack of effort, the fact that anyone can "make" them, and that everyone has the same ideas, and they quieten down.
The only people left using it are the next generation of clueless/naive, and those who are shameless - trying to use it to grift the remaining clueless. Unfortunately the inherent speed of the technology makes these shameless few able to be VERY loud across the internet. I have yet to meet one in person
I'm aware that social trust in some places is lower than others (and that im lucky enough to live in a place with high social trust), but I really don't think this is true. Though ruthless optimisers do exist, my experience suggests the idea that most people do this is laughable. I'd guess 1% or thereabouts. I think most people are kinda bumbling along on autopilot trying to make people happy and avoid others getting too mad at them without expending too much effort(not the same as minimizing effort) + without deviating too much from their routine.
I met a few of the ruthless optimiser types back when I was in the startup world. They aren't too bad if you can keep them at arms length, predictable in their own way. But if they get some power over you or you have to spend a lot of time with them it can quickly become miserable.
Not really worth putting effort into, but if I'd been in charge of the contest I simply wouldn't have awarded the prize, let alone decided to award 3 of them (initially it was only supposed to be one prize) for AI generated content.
The woman in charge was probably happy she got that much engagement in the first place. Low effort, low reward, but look, we're having fun in the office. I wouldn't read too much into it or be sad about it.
Yeah she has different metrics entirely, maybe part of her job is to show engagement and hopefully show herself off to her bosses so of course she doesn't care whether it's AI or not.
i think over time, the bar will rise, you’d have to imagine how low quality the submissions prior to AI would’ve been since most people aren’t that good at decorating nor have the time
i think as the novelty wears off on the average person, it’ll probably be seen akin to stick figure drawings in the future
So it will be gauche for a while then when today's kids grow up, there will inevitably be AI-slop-nostalgia-core aesthetic the same way people now have a place in their hearts for shitty photoshops and ms-paint drawings?
If everyone was competing based on their AI submissions then I wouldn’t care. It can be fun to have a slop-off where everyone competes to see what they can coax out of the LLM.
When a contest is designed to get people to compete with each other, it’s just sad when the win goes to someone who did the least amount of work. In this case, the result isn’t even good.
If the people judging weren’t familiar with AI they probably mistook the details and textures as evidence of high effort and skill input. If you didn’t know better about AI, some of the quirks like the messed up lines might look like someone’s awkward attempts at a unique artistic style.
People don't care and will continue not to care. I don't say that lamenting or with resignation. It's just a fact that we will need to accept.
Think of all the poor typography around you. If you have a critical eye and care you can spot all sorts of bad choices: That's a preview of the future. AI-generated disposable art (posters, billboards, menus etc) that is orthogonal to the actual thing being sold will continue being the norm.
This.100%. As people often lucky enough to work in niche sectors where users care to about the tiniest details we forget sometimes the majority of "stuff" out there exists without a soul already. Think of boring document templates, shop signs, cheap clothing designs, etc. And to he honest AI will probably raise the bar for all that stuff by a lot. Ofc like you mentioned it'll sometimes lead to misleading content (eg made up food pictures in menus), but if that happens that'll just be a byproduct of the service provider and consumers not caring enough to make that have an impact on the underlying business.
> Ofc like you mentioned it'll sometimes lead to misleading content (eg made up food pictures in menus),
This does happen without AI already. My local shawarma joint has a deal of the day poster of a chicken shawarma that's obviously not theirs. Next to a bottle of coke.
The poster is sponsored by Coke and the restaurant just slapped on a price.
> if every poster were labeled “AI generated” with a black banner at the bottom, people wouldn’t care.
Do you have evidence that people would care?
The specific case of this poster it appears they are claiming it was disclosed by the submitter that it was AI and still picked. Maybe that's diffusing the situation after, but it seems most likely these people selected and asked to care about the poster knew it was AI and still selected it. Most people would care less than they did.
The nature of preference-ranking in LLM post training means that "slop" is something that the average person actually prefers. Maybe there's an argument that it's not intentional but just emerges as a form of reward-hacking (e.g. people like a little bit of slop or sycophancy but the model dials it to 11) but I imagine if the end result wasn't rewarded ultimately that would get penalized.
The fact that a clearly sloptacular image won first place seems to corroborate that indeed people do like it. Until people's tastes change and they learn to recognize and immunize themselves against slop, the models will continue to generate it.
They don't need to care, they just need to learn to tune it out, after which it becomes ineffective.
Characteristic of this style of AI art is pseudo-detail: the artwork looks busy but when you inspect the detail, it contains no informational value. How could it, you cannot extract more detail from a prompt than what was put in.
Contrast with a Where's Waldo picture, for example that is equally information dense but contains actually delightful jokes and variation that makes it interesting to look at.
Good design doesn't work because people notice the clear information hierarchy. Good design works because good information hierarchy means people don't have friction trying to interpret it.
or just look at the faceless and weirdly misshapen 'people' in the crowd. Genuinely who was judging this? Also I'm pretty sure Ohio isn't 250 years old, this is just crazy
extremely noticeably so, too. A shame that the judges arent equipped to notice this sort of thing: the winning entry is pretty clearly the sort of result you get with a first naive attempt of "make a poster" with no style guidelines at all.
I considered writing some more about this but couldn't quite put it into words. Its amazing from my own position as someone deep in technology and the like that there are people so remote that they couldn't recognize this (and seemingly didn't consider this as a possibility) are out there living life. I need to get off the internet more.
I just drove through rural Washington and Idaho and saw similar style flyers ok all the boards are grocery stores and local businesses. Saw some AI image stickers for sale at an espresso stand in Idaho. USA 250 AI stuff all over northern Idaho. AI flags. Funny stuff. Love it
In the 1990s there was a backlash against Photoshop. Traditional artists and designers viewed Photoshop as "cheating," "not real art," and a threat to hand-made craft. This story [1] from 17 years ago called for a ban on airbrushed photos. Today use of Photoshop and airbrushing is standard practice, and it is expected. In time we will come to accept AI art too.
I still see airbrushing, along with things like music quantization, auto-tune (and manual tuning), "perfect" design, etc etc, as hugely problematic (well, airbrushing is the worst with tangible social harms among the things I listed there). All of these things are possible to use artfully, but that they've become the norm is actually pretty gross, and many people haven't so much accepted them as they have been beaten into submission to stop complaining about them.
I think this is really lost on anyone making the argument that "we've seen this before and everyone will just succumb."
What is impossible not to notice is how much "booster" people say, "This is unlike anything that has ever happened before!" and yet somehow they think the general acceptance story is going to play out "like it always does." I'm getting "vibes" territory here because I have no data, but the AI-backlash does feel much stronger than before. I feels like there are a lot more non-artists getting not-so-trivially pissed off about this bullshit. We'll see, I guess.
There is a real lag between people who can leverage AI vs those who can't. People who code using AI have a real advantage of using AI in different contexts because they understand how powerful it is.
It's very similar to when the internet got big and those who knew how to use it had a significant advantage over those who didn't. AI hasn't really diffused to mass audience yet, at least not to the point of using it to the extent coders do like making custom and even one-off apps, using CC or Codex instead of ChatGPT directly since giving it terminal access makes in 100x more powerful than the web interface.
It's really important to define what "people who can leverage AI" means. I've found that using AI judiciously with close human supervision provides an advantage, but using the latest models with the latest harnesses can look like it's giving you a huge advantage superficially while actually costing you more time in the long run.
If you're already trending towards 10x developer status in a niche area of programming, sure, AI will secretly make you less productive (in that niche) while making you feel like you're going faster, for a little while.
For everyone and every other situation, hard disagree.
That's hard to define, but I measure it as how quickly people reach for AI for complex, tedious tasks. Let's say you're doing market research for a car to buy. A person who doesn't use AI, might just ask ChatGPT, but many websites block searches like that now. Someone who uses CC or Codex could ask it and it will use curl to get the live data and make a HTML you can browse.
Another is someone making a workout plan or a meal plan. Coders will ask AI to make a plan and add it to their calendar using GOG Cli. It's a fundamental shift in thinking and that hasn't diffused to the mass public yet. But just like the internet, it will get to them eventually. In the mean time, those who leverage AI like that will have an advantage.
The only advantage in using generative AI is that the market is engaged in a bunch of FOMO over it, so it looks good on your resume. That's it. It makes you far worse at doing your actual job, though. I have to deal with the slop that AI enthusiasts put out at work all the time, and they are going to get fired as soon as AI isn't trendy because their work sucks ass.
Totally agree, it was a simple bold design that looks to done by hand. What a low bar we are moving to.
On a positive note, I think I found her artistic portfolio online and it's absolutely beautiful. She can rest easy knowing she has 1000x the talent of the AI slop winner.
People were submitting ai photos last year in the local fair for physical photography. Fairs really need to re think how they do these awards like requiring the photo negative to be submitted or the actual digital art files or something.
I would say the AI post doesn't look bad. But I also think it defeats the purpose of the competition. The goal was to make something for your community, and the process and effort shows your dedication to said community.
Imagine everyone just prompts the same AI and and the judge uses the same AI to judge them all. Why make a competition in the first place? Just prompt and create the damn poster and leave the whole community thing behind.
Art is in the eye of the beholder and If someone likes something AI generated and it still came from someone who had the idea did it not? What if the artist is blind or disabled? AI is now giving them a chance to express themselves as they otherwise might not have been able to.
Looks like gpt-image-1 to me, from the piss filter to some of the mistakes. I mean, image-2 or nano banana also still would have been dogshit. But I find it curious that image-1 was used (if I'm correct), I guess it means it was generated over 2 months ago, or via API, since afaik it hasn't been available in chatgpt since 2 came out (I could also be wrong here I suppose.)
the judges graded it on how much stuff was crammed into the frame and gave it first place. turns out the one skill AI image generators are best at — filling every pixel with something — is also the one skill art judges can't tell apart from effort.
personally it's really interesting to see how older people just don't understand AI images, they seemingly can't spot it or understand what it is and how it all just looks like slop
I'm not trying to be ignorant but I just can't imagine how it'd be in their shoes, I can't understand how AI slop still just works so many of these people, like it's been 3 years now, how is it possible that you'd be impressed or satisfied by this?
What baffles me isn't even the AI part, it's that the judges showed absolutely no taste and just picked the thing with the most pointless pixel-filling detail in it.
I think this is the actual image: https://cdn.saffire.com/images.ashx?t=ig&rid=OhioStateFair&i...
Notably, the zipline is all wacky, and two piggies are #1, probably more things I didn't notice at a skim?
I guess they didn't explicitly forbid AI, and it wasn't noticed until after the winner was selected, and now you can't "roll back"? It seems this was later added to the page:
> [...] we recognize that the use of AI has changed greatly over the last few years in ways we didn’t anticipate, and will be reevaluating the rules and processes for 2027, which will include prohibiting the use of AI [...]
July 7 2026 mirror of the page without that updated notice: https://web.archive.org/web/20260707145158/https://www.ohios...
> I think this is the actual image: https://cdn.saffire.com/images.ashx?t=ig&rid=OhioStateFair&i...
"Celebrating Ohio's and America's 250th birthday"
Ohio is 223 years old, having officially joined the United States as the 17th state in 1803.
It actually says “celebrating Ohio and America’s 250th” (not Ohio’s) so this works ok
> https://cdn.saffire.com/images.ashx?t=ig&rid=OhioStateFair&i...
> "Celebrating Ohio's and America's 250th birthday"
> Ohio is 223 years old
You might have misread the text? I see something different in the “Celebrating Ohio and America’s 250th birthday”, which I read as celebrating:
1. Ohio overall 2. America’s 250th
Amusingly, there are 18 stars in the header banner of the poster. Missed opportunity!
Ohio, not Ohio's
> they didn't explicitly forbid AI
Yes they did; the contestants must be at least 18 years old and residents of Ohio.
AI is neither.
Would it be within contest rules if an 19-year-old resident of Ohio served as an artistic director, giving suggestions to a 12-year-old from Kentucky who does the actual work?
They only care who submitted it not who actually created it.
No they didn’t—from TFA:
Since current US legal decisions indicate that genAI works are not copyrightable, this is troublesome for any organization that wants exclusive licensing for publicity. The State Fair would expect to incorporate their art winners into marketing, posters, and expect to strike down derivative works and other commercial uses.Not to mention that any Ai-entrant piece could be duplicated by any other entrant.
Whether is not copyrightable is not relevant to this. The parent poster's point is just as salient. The creator, not the sumbitter needs to meet the criteria in question. A clanker isn't a resident of Ohio.
I'm largely in the not fond of AI artwork camp and the weird rigging on the chair lifts in the winning entry bug me no end (first thing that caught my eye), however ...
Is Jeff Koons (and others in the "massive installation" artwork game) the creator of his works or does that honour go to the minions that instantiate his wishes?
We're talking "grand vision" description here .. now you 30 people go and flesh out the details.
Not really, AI is a tool and so it's assumed that the submitter is the creator. The Ohio judges will not be as pedantic as you and then other comment above try to make it seem.
No AI is a tool. It’s like you saying they didn’t say you can’t use oil paint.
Exactly. This was ultimately the work of a human who used AI to create something.
Oil paint would be a bit more controversial if it painted the picture all by itself…
You're right, for example photography was controversial.
And photography is something where the image determines whether or not it’s art. If you are constructing an image using form, shape, light, subjects, tool selection, and all sorts of other factors to translate a 3D scene into a 2D image, revealing your particular perspective, then that is art, and pretty difficult at that. If you take a flat, objective, documentary picture of a painting, that’s not art. If you take a picture of something at the store you’d like to research later, that’s not art. If you’re telling someone, with your words, maybe some sketches and marked-up iterations what you want the picture to look like but they actually take it and finish it, you’re not the artist. You’re commissioning art.
Nope. At best, they are like commissioning work from a computer. When you commission a piece, especially as an art director, you often have lengthy conversations, exchange sketches, do multiple iterations, and have pretty fine-grained control over much of the final outcome. Art direction is a fundamentally creative process. But an art director would never, ever take credit for the piece. Why? They understand that so much of that artist’s voice, granular artistic perspective, and so much more are the building blocks of the piece. Image generators could provide reference material, make images for mood boards, and all sorts of other things useful in the artistic process, but the prompter is absolutely not making art.
There's no creativity or skill in handing something off to a generative model. At best, it's analogous to commissioning a work (as another poster said). It's not remotely like using a tool to create art.
People who say this must not really know just how much work goes into crafting the image via something like ComfyUI workflows, which is where the actual skill and creativity is. Now I don't know if this poster was that or whether it was just a single ChatGPT prompt, but look on places like r/StableDiffusion where people share their workflows, it's not really much different than EDM production, they're not actually playing the instruments but organizing them together into a cohesive pipeline.
It immediately looks like AI slop because nearly every square inch is filled with with something, however meaningless and useless it might be to the overall composition.
AI is good at filling an image with shit, and bad at knowing when to leave space and what isn’t necessary.
Not criticizing this in particular, but I'm genuinely curious: why is everyone talking about how obvious or not the details of the poster are as AI, when they didn't take the 30 seconds in most good image editing software to remove the sepia/yellow/brown tint all over? You could put a 100px blur on the smallest thumbnail on that page of it, and I'd still recognize it as AI generated.
Reporter to Kindergarten teacher: How is it that your students class paintings are so much better than all the other class paintings?
Teacher: You just have to know when to take their finger paintings away from them.
sure, but just look at that butter cow!
Yeah, my takeaway here is less about AI, and more that these judges have no sense of taste and just gave more points to whatever packed in the most pointless details.
I'd guess they're representative of the average person going to the Ohio state fair, so no damage done.
Huh, I thought I was reasonably good at this but didn't see them.
Rather than getting annoyed about it, maybe it could be a fun puzzle? Spot the AI glitches in this image.
Maybe do that contest before giving the award, though, among the finalists?
There’s nothing fun about dipshit hucksters flooding the design world with low-quality, low-effort trash born from a multi-trillion dollar Silicon Valley initiative to have tech companies get paid for our work instead of us.
You wanna get paid for your work become a sat diver or roughneck.
I’m already an industrial tradesman, toughguy. People in the software world are going to feel pretty stupid about being that smug to people who had to switch careers because cratering demand cratered wages.
Maybe it's just me, but that font and its layout feels extremely recognizable to me as the "AI image sign font" that I've already seen on posterboards for a bunch of restaurants in SF.
Not just you, it's immediately obvious as an AI image, it's got the piss filter and all kinds of telling details. Detecting AI images like this should be a basic skill at this point.
> extremely recognizable to me as the "AI image sign font"
Also seen in every FB post by small businesses as well as every garage sale post in my country
and packed into every thumbnail for slopiganda on youtube.
Ribbons are splotchy and weird, and have designs that don't line up and stars that are misformed.
Are they going to use it as an official poster or something? It is it just a side competition? Feels like they might come to regret spreading it. Both the first and the second smell rather strongly of AI, though the winner seems the most egregious.
Jebus, that image is dogshit. There is no way in a million years I would put my name on something like that. It truly is the age of the shameless. If you have no shame and no ethics, you really can go far.
It’s good and things aren’t that blatantly wrong but I can tell it’s AI. It’s not the mistakes you pointed out, but there’s something about the overall image and I can’t put my finger on it.
My workplace did a sweepstakes for the world cup and there were bonus prizes for decorating your desk. All three winners had simply uploaded photos of their desks to an AI image generator and had it add flags etc to decorate and submitted that. One person used AI to make it look like he was wearing the jersey of his assigned team.
The person running the contest wrote up something about how impressed she was with the creative use of AI.
The whole thing makes me sad - wouldn't the idea of this sort of thing be to scrounge up flags of obscure countries or make them out of paper and do a bit of arts and crafts to decorate your desk for the month? Instead people were just throwing 50 words into an AI system a few times and getting out a photo to submit.
It's the same with the tokenmaxxing phenomenon with the leaderboards, of course people will game any system, and I'm also impressed by how well people can do so, sometimes it's honestly shocking.
For whatever reason, the photo is point. People are only doing it for the photo and only doing the photo for the competition. I agree that we lost something, I just also think a majority of people don’t know what’s missing: they just put effort to make the photo, rather than to make the desk
I learned this lesson as a child, entering a painting competition handily to someone whose work was (in my opinion) not very good, but they had a much nicer camera, lighting, and a pleasant background.
Though its often much, much more effort to have judges who are also experts in the relevant field and give them the time to inspect in person the things to be judged. I don't think competitions will ever escape this "studying for the test" aspect fully. Its less actively harmful at least than the worst behaviors ive heard of (sabotage etc)
for a more programming related example, the sheer number of hackathons ive entered over the years where the winners had a relevant idea related to something in the news recently, and did basically nothing but a nonfunctional ui mockup of a crud app and won over teams that tried to make actually functional/fun things.
Theres a strange element of shamelessness to it, though I also think theres (sometimes) another of adoption/novelty. To you or I, steeped in the internet and hacker news culture, its pretty clear that sharing AI work as your own is a transgression; an inherently rude act. Its even impolite to share ai output in general, unless the discussion calls for it. I think some people I see out in the world doing it are still encountering this stuff and thinking through the consequences and ideas and experimenting for themselves and having moments of joy and wanting to share. I've seen this with "poems" people I know have gotten it to make, shared with me with genuine happiness on their faces.
But after a bit more time spent using it, and working with the culture, right-thinking and socially aware people really ought to develop a sense that what was superficially impressive is the same each time. The first poem is the same as the hundredth, the pictures all look the same. And they start to think about the lack of effort, the fact that anyone can "make" them, and that everyone has the same ideas, and they quieten down.
The only people left using it are the next generation of clueless/naive, and those who are shameless - trying to use it to grift the remaining clueless. Unfortunately the inherent speed of the technology makes these shameless few able to be VERY loud across the internet. I have yet to meet one in person
Mindset is:
1. Can I benefit from it?
A Yes -> Do it
B No -> Don't do it
Variable: What is the risk of getting caught and is it worth risking?
Many or most people operate on this programming, AI or no AI.
> most people
I'm aware that social trust in some places is lower than others (and that im lucky enough to live in a place with high social trust), but I really don't think this is true. Though ruthless optimisers do exist, my experience suggests the idea that most people do this is laughable. I'd guess 1% or thereabouts. I think most people are kinda bumbling along on autopilot trying to make people happy and avoid others getting too mad at them without expending too much effort(not the same as minimizing effort) + without deviating too much from their routine.
Meditate a while, if you will, on the results of this poll: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn0njd4e2evo
I met a few of the ruthless optimiser types back when I was in the startup world. They aren't too bad if you can keep them at arms length, predictable in their own way. But if they get some power over you or you have to spend a lot of time with them it can quickly become miserable.
Were the bonus prizes good? Anything worth putting a ton of effort into?
A $20 coffee gift card.
Not really worth putting effort into, but if I'd been in charge of the contest I simply wouldn't have awarded the prize, let alone decided to award 3 of them (initially it was only supposed to be one prize) for AI generated content.
The woman in charge was probably happy she got that much engagement in the first place. Low effort, low reward, but look, we're having fun in the office. I wouldn't read too much into it or be sad about it.
Yeah she has different metrics entirely, maybe part of her job is to show engagement and hopefully show herself off to her bosses so of course she doesn't care whether it's AI or not.
i think over time, the bar will rise, you’d have to imagine how low quality the submissions prior to AI would’ve been since most people aren’t that good at decorating nor have the time
i think as the novelty wears off on the average person, it’ll probably be seen akin to stick figure drawings in the future
So it will be gauche for a while then when today's kids grow up, there will inevitably be AI-slop-nostalgia-core aesthetic the same way people now have a place in their hearts for shitty photoshops and ms-paint drawings?
I quite like the 4th and 5th place posters.
4th: https://cdn.saffire.com/images.ashx?t=ig&rid=OhioStateFair&i...
5th: https://cdn.saffire.com/images.ashx?t=ig&rid=OhioStateFair&i...
This is where the AI submissions get really sad.
If everyone was competing based on their AI submissions then I wouldn’t care. It can be fun to have a slop-off where everyone competes to see what they can coax out of the LLM.
When a contest is designed to get people to compete with each other, it’s just sad when the win goes to someone who did the least amount of work. In this case, the result isn’t even good.
If the people judging weren’t familiar with AI they probably mistook the details and textures as evidence of high effort and skill input. If you didn’t know better about AI, some of the quirks like the messed up lines might look like someone’s awkward attempts at a unique artistic style.
Those look so much better. I’m not even saying those are definitely hand crafted but they certainly don’t have the “slop” aesthetic.
They look much better. I don't know if it's just my exposure to AI images but the first place one looks so obviously like AI slop.
People don't care and will continue not to care. I don't say that lamenting or with resignation. It's just a fact that we will need to accept.
Think of all the poor typography around you. If you have a critical eye and care you can spot all sorts of bad choices: That's a preview of the future. AI-generated disposable art (posters, billboards, menus etc) that is orthogonal to the actual thing being sold will continue being the norm.
Try not to tell people what they need to accept.
Acknowledge? Admit? Recognize? Fine.
Accept? Not bother caring about? Don't demand people do that.
I'm pretty sure they used "accept" as synonymous with those words, don't read too much into it.
This.100%. As people often lucky enough to work in niche sectors where users care to about the tiniest details we forget sometimes the majority of "stuff" out there exists without a soul already. Think of boring document templates, shop signs, cheap clothing designs, etc. And to he honest AI will probably raise the bar for all that stuff by a lot. Ofc like you mentioned it'll sometimes lead to misleading content (eg made up food pictures in menus), but if that happens that'll just be a byproduct of the service provider and consumers not caring enough to make that have an impact on the underlying business.
> Ofc like you mentioned it'll sometimes lead to misleading content (eg made up food pictures in menus),
This does happen without AI already. My local shawarma joint has a deal of the day poster of a chicken shawarma that's obviously not theirs. Next to a bottle of coke.
The poster is sponsored by Coke and the restaurant just slapped on a price.
People don’t care means if every poster were labeled “AI generated” with a black banner at the bottom, people wouldn’t care.
Most can’t _recognize_ GPT & Gemini posters.
Good point on preview of feature.
> if every poster were labeled “AI generated” with a black banner at the bottom, people wouldn’t care.
Do you have evidence that people would care?
The specific case of this poster it appears they are claiming it was disclosed by the submitter that it was AI and still picked. Maybe that's diffusing the situation after, but it seems most likely these people selected and asked to care about the poster knew it was AI and still selected it. Most people would care less than they did.
The nature of preference-ranking in LLM post training means that "slop" is something that the average person actually prefers. Maybe there's an argument that it's not intentional but just emerges as a form of reward-hacking (e.g. people like a little bit of slop or sycophancy but the model dials it to 11) but I imagine if the end result wasn't rewarded ultimately that would get penalized.
The fact that a clearly sloptacular image won first place seems to corroborate that indeed people do like it. Until people's tastes change and they learn to recognize and immunize themselves against slop, the models will continue to generate it.
A parallel I like to draw is Thomas Kinkade and HDR photography. This style has always been popular, even pre-AI.
Enough people cared that they decided to ban AI submissions in the future. Did you even click the link before commenting?
They don't need to care, they just need to learn to tune it out, after which it becomes ineffective.
Characteristic of this style of AI art is pseudo-detail: the artwork looks busy but when you inspect the detail, it contains no informational value. How could it, you cannot extract more detail from a prompt than what was put in.
Contrast with a Where's Waldo picture, for example that is equally information dense but contains actually delightful jokes and variation that makes it interesting to look at.
Good design doesn't work because people notice the clear information hierarchy. Good design works because good information hierarchy means people don't have friction trying to interpret it.
The poster: https://cdn.saffire.com/images.ashx?t=ig&rid=OhioStateFair&i...
Note the pigs are numbered 1, 2, 1. And the gondola with a floating cable and another that terminates at a tent top.
It looks like the sort of generic advertisement art that was common before AI.
However, I'll say that at least it's not Corporate Memphis.
or just look at the faceless and weirdly misshapen 'people' in the crowd. Genuinely who was judging this? Also I'm pretty sure Ohio isn't 250 years old, this is just crazy
> Ohio isn't 250 years old, this is just crazy
I read it as celebrating:
* Ohio as a state, and * America’s 250th
It is full of obvious AIgen artifacts
What’s more interesting is that whomever the judges were didn’t seem to notice or care.
It was only until afterward were they upset
What’s more interesting is that whomever the judges were didn’t seem to notice or care.
The implication is that all the other entries were even worse.
And probably only after members of the public vocally complained.
extremely noticeably so, too. A shame that the judges arent equipped to notice this sort of thing: the winning entry is pretty clearly the sort of result you get with a first naive attempt of "make a poster" with no style guidelines at all.
Nice the judges aren’t big users of image generators though? (Neutral they don’t read HN/Ars/etc. where they’d see examples as non-users.)
I considered writing some more about this but couldn't quite put it into words. Its amazing from my own position as someone deep in technology and the like that there are people so remote that they couldn't recognize this (and seemingly didn't consider this as a possibility) are out there living life. I need to get off the internet more.
It is very noticeable. Funny how it jumps right out when you've seen AI slop often enough. #5 is good and looks "real", whatever that means any more.
#5 was real winner of those shown. Rest weren’t as captivating as the sloppy grand prize poster.
There are two number "1" pigs, and two of them have malformed tails. Sloppy even for slop!
Not just malformed, they have MULTIPLE malformed tails!
I just drove through rural Washington and Idaho and saw similar style flyers ok all the boards are grocery stores and local businesses. Saw some AI image stickers for sale at an espresso stand in Idaho. USA 250 AI stuff all over northern Idaho. AI flags. Funny stuff. Love it
New storefronts with AI logos, food with AI caricatures of the chef, small taxi companies with GPT’s handiwork wrapped right over the doors…
The other four top entries are all obvious human efforts as well. Must be annoying for them to lose to a blatant AI entry.
> The other four top entries are all obvious human efforts
Creator of 2nd place said they used AI but then used photoshop etc for manual composition/paint over. https://www.reddit.com/r/Columbus/s/cJQqjC7C7q
#2 looks a little AI to me.
I think #3 was maybe the best entry.
What's crazy is that the winning poster looks like one-shot AI output and probably was given the mistakes in it.
That stood out to me too. This could have been a lot better with just a little actual work.
In the 1990s there was a backlash against Photoshop. Traditional artists and designers viewed Photoshop as "cheating," "not real art," and a threat to hand-made craft. This story [1] from 17 years ago called for a ban on airbrushed photos. Today use of Photoshop and airbrushing is standard practice, and it is expected. In time we will come to accept AI art too.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/sep/19/liberal-dem...
I'm hoping something of the opposite happens.
I still see airbrushing, along with things like music quantization, auto-tune (and manual tuning), "perfect" design, etc etc, as hugely problematic (well, airbrushing is the worst with tangible social harms among the things I listed there). All of these things are possible to use artfully, but that they've become the norm is actually pretty gross, and many people haven't so much accepted them as they have been beaten into submission to stop complaining about them.
I think this is really lost on anyone making the argument that "we've seen this before and everyone will just succumb."
What is impossible not to notice is how much "booster" people say, "This is unlike anything that has ever happened before!" and yet somehow they think the general acceptance story is going to play out "like it always does." I'm getting "vibes" territory here because I have no data, but the AI-backlash does feel much stronger than before. I feels like there are a lot more non-artists getting not-so-trivially pissed off about this bullshit. We'll see, I guess.
Yes, just like we accepted steroids in sports.
Wish I'd thought of this one, lol.
There is a real lag between people who can leverage AI vs those who can't. People who code using AI have a real advantage of using AI in different contexts because they understand how powerful it is.
It's very similar to when the internet got big and those who knew how to use it had a significant advantage over those who didn't. AI hasn't really diffused to mass audience yet, at least not to the point of using it to the extent coders do like making custom and even one-off apps, using CC or Codex instead of ChatGPT directly since giving it terminal access makes in 100x more powerful than the web interface.
It's really important to define what "people who can leverage AI" means. I've found that using AI judiciously with close human supervision provides an advantage, but using the latest models with the latest harnesses can look like it's giving you a huge advantage superficially while actually costing you more time in the long run.
If you're already trending towards 10x developer status in a niche area of programming, sure, AI will secretly make you less productive (in that niche) while making you feel like you're going faster, for a little while.
For everyone and every other situation, hard disagree.
That's hard to define, but I measure it as how quickly people reach for AI for complex, tedious tasks. Let's say you're doing market research for a car to buy. A person who doesn't use AI, might just ask ChatGPT, but many websites block searches like that now. Someone who uses CC or Codex could ask it and it will use curl to get the live data and make a HTML you can browse.
Another is someone making a workout plan or a meal plan. Coders will ask AI to make a plan and add it to their calendar using GOG Cli. It's a fundamental shift in thinking and that hasn't diffused to the mass public yet. But just like the internet, it will get to them eventually. In the mean time, those who leverage AI like that will have an advantage.
The only advantage in using generative AI is that the market is engaged in a bunch of FOMO over it, so it looks good on your resume. That's it. It makes you far worse at doing your actual job, though. I have to deal with the slop that AI enthusiasts put out at work all the time, and they are going to get fired as soon as AI isn't trendy because their work sucks ass.
Nikki Smetters got screwed. Clearly the best, imo.
Yes. A much better poster. Less busy, reads quickly. Funny and relevant. Here is her website: https://nikkismetters.com/
Totally agree, it was a simple bold design that looks to done by hand. What a low bar we are moving to.
On a positive note, I think I found her artistic portfolio online and it's absolutely beautiful. She can rest easy knowing she has 1000x the talent of the AI slop winner.
People were submitting ai photos last year in the local fair for physical photography. Fairs really need to re think how they do these awards like requiring the photo negative to be submitted or the actual digital art files or something.
Did they publish the prompt?
It looks AI-generated. All that detail. Short words in decorative fonts. AI doesn't know what "Midway" means in a fair context.
I think the biggest issue here is that the judges clearly have no taste.
I would say the AI post doesn't look bad. But I also think it defeats the purpose of the competition. The goal was to make something for your community, and the process and effort shows your dedication to said community.
Imagine everyone just prompts the same AI and and the judge uses the same AI to judge them all. Why make a competition in the first place? Just prompt and create the damn poster and leave the whole community thing behind.
I actively think the AI poster looks bad and RLHF reveals the poor taste of the general public.
I would prefer to celebrate human art at a fair. Same as I still watch humans play chess and sport. Kind of defeats the spirit of having a contest.
Art is in the eye of the beholder and If someone likes something AI generated and it still came from someone who had the idea did it not? What if the artist is blind or disabled? AI is now giving them a chance to express themselves as they otherwise might not have been able to.
I have a feeling the winner didn't think they were going to win or maybe even submitted the poster as a joke.
Looks like gpt-image-1 to me, from the piss filter to some of the mistakes. I mean, image-2 or nano banana also still would have been dogshit. But I find it curious that image-1 was used (if I'm correct), I guess it means it was generated over 2 months ago, or via API, since afaik it hasn't been available in chatgpt since 2 came out (I could also be wrong here I suppose.)
It's sad because the ai one is at least one of the worse of the set...
Maybe they were looking to generate publicity. There's no way they picked those over the 4th and 5th place.
not sure what everyone's up in arms about. lgtm :^)
the judges graded it on how much stuff was crammed into the frame and gave it first place. turns out the one skill AI image generators are best at — filling every pixel with something — is also the one skill art judges can't tell apart from effort.
That would be enough for me to skip the fair. Money talks; AI in the arts needs to walk.
Taste is not a moat, apparently.
This is just sad
personally it's really interesting to see how older people just don't understand AI images, they seemingly can't spot it or understand what it is and how it all just looks like slop
I'm not trying to be ignorant but I just can't imagine how it'd be in their shoes, I can't understand how AI slop still just works so many of these people, like it's been 3 years now, how is it possible that you'd be impressed or satisfied by this?
What baffles me isn't even the AI part, it's that the judges showed absolutely no taste and just picked the thing with the most pointless pixel-filling detail in it.