Yeah, I've been mystified for years why they can't just train the "AI look" out of images. Is it, like, something undetectable by machine? But then how come we can often detect it so easily?

It's the opposite: the average person likes the AI look of images (the more "aesthetic" look) and RLHF keep converging toward that.

It is entirely possible to prompt engineer away from that style, but that requires effort and knowledge that said average person does not have, so it's stuck in a feedback loop.

I still can’t believe the amount of deepfakes and slop I see just everywhere including food menus and people don’t even seem to notice.

This kind of content is here to stay and we’re going to see more and more of it. Unfortunately…

> people don’t even seem to notice.

I've been seeing "AI slop" stickers posted on things

> I see just everywhere including food menus

The places I have seen it in use, are the places that would have a handwritten scribble that was misspelt and would be something mocked by people because it was written by ESOL (or vice versa, English speakers trying, but failing, to write in a different language)

Honestly, I think the AI slop is a step up - I can read the signs clearly, and they are only mildly offensive

People definitely seem to notice.

I see restaurants post AI flyers and ads to random local Facebook groups and most of the replies are about them being AI slop. I think it’s an uncanny valley problem: People don’t mind if you post a real photo of your food or a cartoon drawing of a pizza or a pig on a spit, but when it’s a weird fake photo with texture issues, it looks gross, especially when it’s food.

I think a lot of people who open restaurants probably aren’t extremely online, partly because it would be physically impossible with the amount of work they have to do, but they definitely pay attention -sometimes too much attention — to public online feedback.

I get why restaurants use the cartoon-looking slop. If you don't particularly care that it signals that you put no effort into your menu or ad or that your restaurant's menu has the same shitty aesthetic as all other slop, fine. It's a cartoon and I could understand someone thinking it looks ok.

I absolutely do not get the uncanny-valley images. Those all look gross. Besides not actually being representative of the dish, the images have all sorts of weird texture issues, look too glossy, and are just unappetizing. I cannot why a restaurant owner would want to put up an ad that has food that looks straight up gross.

Professional food photography is expensive. This is a case of the free mediocre offer crowding out the much better but expensive option. Same way that free mail with ads crowded out email without ads.

The thing with those "AI Slop" comments are generally from people whom are opinionated about the image. However it's abundantly clear that the target demographic which is the customers generally don't mind. If you think about it, We have been conditioned by the "for illustrative purposes only" label on most food images that at this point most people just want a reference so they can decide what to eat. I'd take an AI image over just words any day.

The saddest words of tongue or pen: “you’re not the target demographic”

Isn't this the sum of dating apps?

No, you are confusing a model with reality.

This is not true. Think of the problems AI has with creating appetizing food imagery, for example. Images that every human annotator marks as unappealing with a high degree of consensus.

The problem is in the rewards, but it's more how they average across domains and contexts, so AI misapplies them. Actually, in human preference evaluations, most of Gen Z in particular extremely adverse to the common look of AI images.

So it's not the annotators involved in RLHF, it's the models failing to map to human preferences at the task level. The failure rate is also uneven across domains.

Where there are challenges with human annotation, it's not the ability to gauge what's good but rather how to correct what's wrong. Most people can tell when something is off but struggle to articulate why. That's where more domain expertise is required.

> Think of the problems AI has with creating appetizing food imagery, for example.

The memetic ugly food can be controlled and mostly filtered out with prompt engineering. Here's a quick ad hoc test example which (hopefully) uses the new model: https://chatgpt.com/share/6aebf030-9d38-83e8-a103-3509883905...

First image is fine, but attempts to make it more wacky turn it to the AI food slop. So then followup prompts deslopify it, mostly successfully.

tbh it got worse every time, the first one is the best lol

Eh, looks like slop still in my opinion. The evenness and density of the teeth especially stands out to me as uncanny.

>This is not true. Think of the problems AI has with creating appetizing food imagery, for example. Images that every human annotator marks as unappealing with a high degree of consensus.

I think the way they'll solve it in the end is to create an ultra-high-fidelity simulation of the world including modelling taste and other senses on the level of physics, and then incorporate all of this into the training rewards.

I think this is how the machines know what tasty wheat tasted like.

I think this is fundamental. People will probably dislike whatever it is that AI images look like, because whatever they look like is going to be associated with cheap. They could have a totally different aesthetic and I think most people's conception of cheap would adapt to whatever that is.

Very true. My theory is that if AI was able to produce a diverse enough range of styles (not artistic style, more like "artist's touch/bias"), then it would be much better. Exactly like Claude, talking to it wouldn't be so grating if it had, say, a 1000 different "writing styles" instead of the single one we have to engage with.

The current models have a fundamental architectural flaw: Every pixel they output costs the model as much effort as every other one. When you see detail in a work a human produced, the fact that there is detail communicates something about what the artist was focussing on. It shows you what they cared about, and by extension what you, the viewer, should care about to understand the piece. The AI, as currently designed, can’t do that, because it’s outputting entire raster images at once (and multi-pass generations tend to degrade into melty nonsense), it emphasises everything, and so emphasises nothing.

The “AI look” is a manifestation of the architecture itself, and that’s why you can really train or prompt around it. At best, bigger models have been able to partially suppress the worst aspects of it by throwing more parameters at the problem, but put the models under even a tiny bit of stress and the same flaws reemerge.

for the same reason they can't train llmisms out of text.

Some of it has to do with Classifier Free Guidance (CFG), a math thing that makes it more likely for a diffusion model to follow what you ask for in the prompt. However, turning up CFG inevitably causes high contrast and certain other artifacts.

With that being said, my understanding of that issue is a few years old, people have always said CFG is a havk until models get better at following prompts on their own. So thee “look” that tools like Nano Banana ends up with could be something else. It may or may not be a necessary artifact of some part of the process.

The problem isn't the classifier free guidance itself, but the choice of parameters. When a parameter above 1 is chosen you get images which very stronger conform to theme, but which there's not a good mathematical justification for.

Yeah, it must be some algorithmic thing like CFG, or some other technique, that causes the unrealistic AI look. Because Dall-E 2 didn't have it, but Dall-E 3 did to an extreme degree. Google's Imagen <= 3 also didn't have it, but Imagen 4 (and Nano Banana, which seems to use Imagen 4 in the background) suddenly had significant AI look, apart from much better prompt following and fewer visual mistakes (like too many fingers).

Yeah. I just read a bit about it and looked at some examples, and it seems CFG>1 is a hack to get sharper images from a given model, at the cost of giving them the "AI look". As models get better, we'll be able to use CFG=1 and much of the problem will go away.

You are actually a very skilled pattern recognizing machine. There's likely always going to be some bias and purple are going to be able to detect it and the human style will move away from it.

It does look terrible. But keep in mind these decisions aren't made to please you or me on HN. The numbers clearly show the average user does not care about the AI look because they can't really tell the difference between human-gen and AI-gen. Whatever saves them money is what they will go with.

It's not like it's saving people money. Instead it's letting them create things they never could have before

It’s saving huge amounts of money for a lot of small businesses. I’ve seen AI posters, business cards, fliers, logos, etc from accounting firms, plumbers, electricians, chippies - you name it. Whether these ad-campaigns are actually working for them, I don’t know.

I see those too. But almost none of these were paying someone design the Flyers previously. They just had shittier flyers the owner pumped out of docs

> The numbers clearly show the average user does not care about the AI look because they can't really tell the difference between human-gen and AI-gen.

Do you have a link to the numbers that clearly show this?

The numbers of AI posters/signs/ads I see on the street…

So nothing at all. Most people would notice the difference between no ads everywhere, and ads everywhere, would prefer no ads, and still there are ads. That there are ads tells us nothing about people.

Do you need statistical numbers for every information you receive? I don’t have any numbers to show you besides the fact that everyone I have spoken to in the last 6 months knows how to generate an image on ChatGPT. I work in the construction industry, and 100% of the companies I deal with have at some point posted an AI-generated poster on their social media, or created their flyers and business cards. YMMV.

[delayed]

Well, you said "the numbers show". But anyway, not being able to tell the difference and not caring is very different from "having tried it at some point".

> everyone I have spoken to in the last 6 months knows how to generate an image on ChatGPT.

That goes without saying. If you can speak to them, if they have a pulse, they can "generate an image". A cat walking over a keyboard can generate an image. That is the lowest bar ever.

The average user is very unlikely, if preferences are high dimensional, and they are.

That stained glass sky-whale, at the bottom of the page, is pretty nice.

and yet https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50372945#50373586

Someone posted an AI picture on Twitter, that was done in the style of a great classic painter of renown. Everyone tore it apart, discussing all the details that betrayed it as a pale imitation of the original. It was roundly panned as an example of how AI will never be good enough to replace humans. After this went on for some time, the initial poster revealed it wasn't actually AI at all, it was a genuine original from the artist in question.

People just hate AI and will find a post hoc justification for their hatred in every situation. The link you gave could have just as easily been someone expressing surprise at the artists choice to not follow traditional physics... but instead be playful in unconstrained ways. Shrug.

that kind of experiment was done multiple times, someone put a very famous photo from a very famous photographer on some photography critique forum and it was torn apart: badly framed, blurry, no composition, ....

Artists aren't machines that churn out one masterpiece after another, they do create bad works (most artists would acknowledge that) and there are one hit wonders. I look at a lot of art and sometimes I like only one painting out of a series, or even out of a lifetime of work. Also, you often need the context of the artist's broader work to judge the quality of a single piece, which might otherwise appear like a bad picture in vacuum.

Most people in general, and for sure the majority of current twitter users have no clue what they're talking about when it comes to modernist art and its direct predecessors.

I’ve only seen that happen once, and it was using a cropped Monet, but by cropping it, the picture actually did become bad. It was poorly composed, the colour balance was ruined and the level of detail was too low relative to the size of the brush strokes. These ‘gotchas’, when they aren’t just complete fabrications (which, given how often I see people talk about them, but how rarely I see any evidence presented, is most of the time) generally only reveal how little the people running the ‘experiments’ understood about art in the first place.

I doubt it, same with people that use ChatGPT for everything and don’t see the slip anymore and are confused when you point it out. LLM blindness is a real thing.

This. You shoulda seen OpenAI’s own cookbook for GPT-Image-2 - literally their own prompting guide - and the dog comic was a complete mess.

Generative AI (coding, images, etc.) has only accelerated the atrophy of basic observational skills.

I'm deeply interested in this subject. In conversation, most people I talk to say they hate the look of AI generated "art," or find it uncanny or uncomfortable. However, whenever I'm on the bus or train, if I peek over the shoulder of someone, it's 50% chance they're endlessly scrolling AI generated short form video, either as unrelated clips or Chinese dramas (this being in Taiwan).

I suspect people are somewhat hypnotized by the content, in the same way a toddler is hypnotized by Cocomelon. Something about it is enthralling and keeps the attention. I wonder if it's related to the phone game icon / YouTube thumbnail phenomenon of "person's face making an extreme expression with the mouth open." AI generated videos for example still tend to have very exaggerated facial expressions and the mouth is always unusually wide when talking. I also wonder if something about the uncanny smoothness of movement (I assume caused by any form of transition defaulting to "linear") has a hypnotic effect.

I'm not sure how to look into this further. Elsagate is an interesting past example, and what I've learned so far I threw in a blog post a couple months back https://blog.calebjay.com/posts/psychic-attack/

Right now I'm looking into "Lula's army" and the AI generated content they used. I feel like there's something significant and perhaps even dangerous that could be developed bere.

Lula's army seems obviously inspired from K-pop armies

whats incredible is when in their video they're talking about complexity, the cat's images have extra limbs in low and medium complexity. They could've easily generated more versions to get the clean versions. But it just doesn't seem like they care. Maybe this is what someone who is so used to using AI to move fast becomes: someone who drops the quality bar to 80%?

They mentioned multiple times in previous blog posts that they do not cherry pick examples.

Would you appreciate more if their model generated cats with 5 legs in 99% of cases, and they cherry picked that 1 in 100 image where it has 4 legs? Do you think doing that would make them more caring and professional?

I doubt their models are that bad for simple and common things like cats, probably takes just a handful of tries at most for correct number of limbs. They could just mention the number of tries on the side like a little bubble showing up to show “Rendered in 5 attempts” or something along those lines. I wouldn’t think less of the tech personally.

That's an interesting observation, and that's also my feeling: Everything is now expected to move so fast, dropping quality bar to 80% or below is not uncommon.

Not like this is the fault of the AI progress, we could use AI to go beyond the quality what we used to deliver, too. It's just the pace expectations that are now "in the room" ?

People who make things often have an unrealistic expectation of how much users care about quality (and don't realize how much users actually care about price).

We've seen this play out over and over again, in many different sectors. The whole shtick of the old (Bellhead) telecom world was quality at the (literal) expense of price, which didn't work out well for them. Same for CD versus pirated mp3s, DVD versus pirated videos (and, to a lesser extend, theaters versus bootleg cam releases), native texting / GSM calls versus WhatsApp and similar, mainstream newspapers and media versus blogging and social media, traditional electrical appliances versus Chinese-made, and so on.

Because of the innovator's dilemma, In many cases, the cheaper, lower-quality product later surpasses the quality of its more expensive counterpart.

AI is just one more example of this happening. It lets you make more things which otherwise would be far too expensive to make, even if that often means a lower quality product.

It could be that they've been using AI so long that they're unaware of the problem.

I created some great designs and illustrations with imagen 2.5. I'm sure 2.6 will be even better.

I find it interesting that after all this time, Midjourney still seems to be the leader in aesthetics.

It's retained has a lot of the issues that other AI image gen has moved past: It's still not very good at following directions, it still makes basic mistakes occasionally like wrong number of fingers, it still often creates weird nonsensical AI messes in the background. But what it has retained all the way through, is that excellent sense of aesthetics. It seems like we haven't really figured out how to have both - you can have accurate or beautiful, but not together.

Steve's quote about Microsoft

> They absolutely have not taste. And I don't mean that in a small way. I mean that in a big way.

applies here.