Live data from Hacker News

AI poster wins Ohio State Fair contest

ohiostatefair.com

81–90 of 193 posts

Re: AI poster wins Ohio State Fair contest

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

No AI is a tool. It’s like you saying they didn’t say you can’t use oil paint.

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.

Re: AI poster wins Ohio State Fair contest

#82

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…

> 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.

> 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

Re: AI poster wins Ohio State Fair contest

#83
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 slop…

A parallel I like to draw is Thomas Kinkade and HDR photography. This style has always been popular, even pre-AI.

Re: AI poster wins Ohio State Fair contest

#84
post #53

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…

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…

> 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.

Re: AI poster wins Ohio State Fair contest

#86
post #49

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...

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.

Re: AI poster wins Ohio State Fair contest

#88
post #48

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…

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.

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.

Re: AI poster wins Ohio State Fair contest

#89
post #50

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/lib…

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 I've noticed is how much "booster" types say that "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 into "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.

Re: AI poster wins Ohio State Fair contest

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.
Post reply on HN