20 ms·

> On the flip side, there are hundreds of ways that these tools cause genuine harm, not just to individuals but to entire systems. Yeah, agree. I think it's th

• simonw 6mo ago
  I think there's real value to be had in using this for diagrams. Visual explanations are useful, but most people don't have the talent and/or the time to produce them. This new model (and Nano Banana Pro before it) has tipped across the quality boundary where it actually can produce a visual explanation that moves beyond space-filling slop and helps people understand a concept. I've never used an AI-generated image in a presentation or document before, but I'm teetering on the edge of considering it now provided it genuinely elevates the material and helps explain a concept that otherwise wouldn't be clear.
  • lol_me 6mo ago
    yeah I'm not sure I'm in agreement that we can hand-wave assets and ads as entire classes of valuable content
  • resters 6mo ago
    This is the key point. In my view it's just like anything else, if AI can help humans create better work, it's a good thing. I think what we'll find is that visual design is no longer as much of a moat for expressing concepts, branding, etc. In a way, AI-generated design opens the door for more competition on merits, not just those who can afford the top tier design firm.
  • mwcampbell 6mo ago
    Are there any models that are specifically trained to produce diagrams as SVG? I'd much prefer that to diffusion-based raster image generation models for a few reasons: - The usual advantages of vector graphics: resolution-independence, zoom without jagged edges, etc. - As a consequence of the above, vector graphics (particularly SVG) can more easily be converted to useful tactile graphics for blind people. - Vector graphics can more practically be edited.
    • twobitshifter 6mo ago
      You can get them to produce mermaid diagrams, but you can also generate these yourself from text.
• lucaslazarus 6mo ago
  > I think it's the first time I'm asking myself: Ok, so this new cool tech, what is it good for? I feel like this is something people in the industry should be thinking about a lot, all the time. Too many social ills today are downstream of the 2000s culture of mainstream absolute technoöptimism. Vide. Kranzberg's first law--“Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.”
  • runarberg 6mo ago
    Completely unrelated, but I am curious about your keyboard layout since you mistyped ö instead of - these two symbols are side by side in the Icelandic layout, and the ö is where - in the English (US) layout. As such this is a common type-o for people who regularly switch between the Icelandic and the English (US) layout (source: I am that person). I am curious whether more layouts where that could be common.
    • bulletsvshumans 6mo ago
      This is also a stylistic choice that the New Yorker magazine uses for words with double vowels where you pronounce each one separately, like coöperate, reëlect, preëminent, and naïve. So possibly intentional.
      • lucaslazarus 6mo ago
        Yes, this is exactly correct, and I will die on this hill. Additionally, I don't like the way a hyphenated "techno-optimism" looks and "technOOPtimism" is a bit too on-the-nose.
        • nullsanity 6mo ago
          [dead]
      • runarberg 6mo ago
        That makes sense[1] but it prompts the obvious question: does this style write it as typeö then? 1: Though personally I hate it, I just cannot not read those as completely different vowels (in particular ï → [i:] or the ee in need; ë → [je:] or the first e here; and ö → [ø] or the e in her)
• NetOpWibby 6mo ago
  The Human Renaissance is something I've been thinking of too and I hope it comes to pass. Of course, I feel like societally, things are gonna get worse for a lot of folks. You already see it in entire towns losing water or their water becoming polluted. You'd think these kickbacks leaders of these towns are getting for allowing data centers to be built would go towards improving infrastructure but hah, that's unrealistic. WTF is that unrealistic? SMH
  • Lerc 6mo ago
    >You already see it in entire towns losing water or their water becoming polluted Do you have any references for such cases? I have seen talk of such thing at risk, but I am unaware of any specific instances of it occuring
    • NetOpWibby 6mo ago
      I know I've seen such a story on HN before, you can probably find it by searching for "water" and "data center/AI."
      • Lerc 6mo ago
        The closest match I found was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44562052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44562052 The article tries to play sleight of hand with the specific instance that they cite but it seems that the loss of water is alleged to be caused by sediment from construction rather than water use. It's not great that it happened and it is something local government should take action on, but it is also something that could have been caused by any form of industrial construction. I suspect there are already laws in place that cover this. If they are not being enforced that's another issue entirely.
        • NetOpWibby 6mo ago
          That's exactly the article I was thinking of. Data center construction exposing weaknesses in local infrastructure is a double-edged sword; you wanna know if things need upgrading but you don't wanna be negatively affected by it. Maybe there should be some clause in these contracts that mandate tech companies foot the bill for local infrastructure improvements.
• Gigachad 6mo ago
  This is where I’m at. If you can’t be bothered to write/make it, why would I be bothered to read or review it?
  • tempaccount5050 6mo ago
    Because I'm not an artist and can't afford to pay one for whatever business I have? This idea that only experts are allowed to do things is just crazy to me. A band poster doesn't have to be a labor of love artisanal thing. Were you mad when people made band posters with MS word instead of hiring a fucking typesetter? I just don't get it.
    • AkBKukU 6mo ago
      > can't afford to pay one for whatever business I have At small scales what "art" does your business need? If you can't afford to hire an artist (which is completely fine, I couldn't for my business!) do you really need the art or are you trying to make your "brand" look more polished than it actually is? Leverage your small scale while you can because there isn't as much of an expectation for polish. And no, a band poster doesn't have to be a labor of love. But it also doesn't have to be some big showy art either. If I saw a small band with a clearly AI generated poster it would make me question the sources for their music as well.
    • overgard 6mo ago
      I dunno, I have some band posters that are pretty cool pieces of art that obviously had a lot of thought put into them (pre-AI era stuff). I don't think I'd hang up an AI generated band poster, even if it was cool; I'd feel weird and tacky about it.
      • runarberg 6mo ago
        I was hosting a Karaoke event in my town and really went out of my way to ensure my promotional poster looked nothing like AI. I really really really did not want my townfolks thinking I would use AI to design a poster. My design rules were: No gradients; no purple; prefer muted colors; plenty of sharp corners and overlapping shapes; Use the Boba Milky font face;
• gustavus 6mo ago
  I'm working on an edutech game. Before I would've had much less of a product because I don't have the budget to hire an artist and it would've been much less interactive but because of this I'm able to build a much more engaging experience so that's one thing. For what it's worth.
  • deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
• papichulo2023 6mo ago
  Seems good enough to generate 2D sprites. If that means a wave of pixel-art games I count it as a net win. I dont think gamers hate AI, it is just a vocal miniority imo. What most people dislike is sloppy work, as they should, but that can happen with or without AI. The industry has been using AI for textures, voices and more for over a decade.
  • tiagod 6mo ago
    AI for textures for over a decade? What AI?
    • papichulo2023 6mo ago
      Efros–Leung, PatchMatch? Nearest neighbours was "AI" before difusion models.
      • tiagod 6mo ago
        Don't you think it's a huge stretch to compare those to modern generative AI in this context? Those don't raise any of the questions that make current usage questionable.
  • Thonn 6mo ago
    Are you kidding? I think I see more vitriol for AI in gaming communities than anywhere else. To the point where steam now requires you to disclose its usage
    • papichulo2023 6mo ago
      Crimson Desert failed to disclose on release and (almost) nobody cared, gamers kept buying it.
  • loudandskittish 6mo ago
    There are already more games being released on Steam than anyone can keep up with, I'm not sure how adding another "wave" on top of it helps.
• _the_inflator 6mo ago
  We need to flip the script. AI is trying to do marketing: add “illegal usage will lead to X” is a gateway to spark curiosity. There is this saying that censoring games for young adults makes sure that they will buy it like crazy by circumventing the restrictions because danger is cool. There is nothing that cannot harm. Knives, cars, alcohol, drugs. A society needs to balance risks and benefits. Word can be used to do harm, email, anything - it depends on intention and its type.
• tomrod 6mo ago
  AI loopidity rearing it's head. Just send the bullet points that we all want anyway, right?! Stop sending globs of text and other generated content!
• lxgr 6mo ago
  I can’t design wallpapers/stickers/icons/…, but I can describe what I want to an image generation model verbally or with a source photo, and the new ones yield pretty good results. For icons in particular, this opens up a completely new way of customizing my home screen and shortcuts. Not necessary for the survival of society, maybe, but I enjoy this new capability.
  • camillomiller 6mo ago
    Is that worth the cost of this technology? Both in terms of financial shenanigans and its environmental cost?
    • vrc 6mo ago
      Depends on if you believe it will ever become cheaper. Either hardware, inspiring more efficient smaller models, or energy itself. The techno optimist believes that that is the inevitable and investable future. But on what horizon and will it get “zip drived” before then?
    • Legend2440 6mo ago
      The environmental cost is significantly overblown, especially water usage.
      • bayindirh 6mo ago
        I work with direct liquid cooled systems. If the datacenter is working with open DLC systems (most AI datacenters in the US in fact do), there's a lot of water is being wasted, 7/24/365. A mid-tier top-500 system (think about #250-#325) consumes about a 0.75MW of energy. AI data centers consume magnitudes more. To cool that behemoth you need to pump tons of water per minute in the inner loop. Outer loop might be slower, but it's a lot of heated water at the end of the day. To prevent water wastage, you can go closed loop (for both inner and outer loops), but you can't escape the heat you generate and pump to the atmosphere. So, the environmental cost is overblown, as in Chernobyl or fallout from a nuclear bomb is overblown. So, it's not.
• _the_inflator 6mo ago
  I see your point but reconsider: we will and need to see. Time will tell and this is simply economics: useful? Yes, no. I started being totally indifferent after thinking about my spending habits to check for unnecessary stuff after watching world championships for niche sports. For some this is a calling for others waste. It is a numbers game then.
• colechristensen 6mo ago
  >In general, I think people are starting to realize that things generated without effort are not worth spending time with Agreed mostly, BUT I'm building tools for myself. The end goal isn't the intermediate tool, they're enabling other things. I have a suspicion that I could sell the tools, I don't particularly want to. There's a gap between "does everything I want it to" and "polished enough to justify sale", and that gap doesn't excite me. They're definitely not generated without effort... but they are generated with 1% of the human effort they would require. I feel very much empowered by AI to do the things I've always wanted to do. (when I mention this there's always someone who comes out effectively calling me delusional for being satisfied with something built with LLMs)
• RIMR 6mo ago
  My only actual use of image or video AI tools is self-entertainment. I like to give it prompts and see the results it gives me. That's it. I can't think of a single actual use case outside of this that isn't deliberately manipulative and harmful.
• strulovich 6mo ago
  Here’s one example: I just recently used for image generation to design my balcony. It was a great way to see design ideas imagined in place and decide what to do. There are many cases people would hire an artist to illustrate an idea or early prototype. AI generated images make that something you can do by yourself or 10x faster than a few years ago.
  • dwd 6mo ago
    Did the same for my front garden. Not withstanding a few code violations, it generated some good ideas we were then able to tweak. The main thing was we had no idea of what we wanted to do, but seeing a lot of possibilities overlaid over the existing non-garden got us going. We were then able to extend the theme to other parts of the yard.
• underlipton 6mo ago
  >Like, in terms of art, it's discarded (art is about humans) I dunno how long this is going to hold up. In 50 years, when OpenAI has long become a memory, post-bubble burst, and a half-century of bitrot has claimed much of what was generated in this era, how valuable do you think an AI image file from 2023 - with provenance - might be, as an emblem and artifact of our current cultural moment, of those first few years when a human could tell a computer, "Hey, make this," and it did? And many of the early tools are gone; you can't use them anymore. Consider: there will never be another DallE-2 image generation. Ever.
• ArchieScrivener 6mo ago
  I completely disagree, this replaces art as a job. Why does human art need monetary feedback to be shared? If people require a paycheck to make art then it was never anything different than what Ai generated images are. As for advertising being depressing - its a little late to get up on the high horse of anti-Ads for tech after 2 decades of ad based technology dominating everything. Go outside, see all those bright shiny glittery lights, those aren't society created images to embolden the spirit and dazzle the senses, those are ads. North Korea looks weird and depressing because the don't have ads. Welcome to the west.
• atleastoptimal 6mo ago
  The issue is that the signalling makes sense when human generated work is better than AI generated. Soon AI generated work will be better across the board with the rare exception of stuff the top X% of humans put a lot of bespoke highly personalized effort into. Preferring human work will be luxury status-signalling just like it is for clothing, food, etc.
  • paulddraper 6mo ago
    "Artisanal art" as it were.
  • fwipsy 6mo ago
    Only novel art is interesting. AI can't really do novel. It's a prediction algorithm; it imitates. You can add noise, but that mostly just makes it worse. It can be used to facilitate original stuff though. But so many people want to make art, and it's so cheap to distribute it, that art is already commoditized. If people prefer human-created art, satisfying that preference is practically free.
    • atleastoptimal 6mo ago
      AI can be novel, there is nothing in the transformer architecture which prohibits novelty, it's just that structurally it much prefers pattern-matching. But the idea of novelty is a misnomer I think. Any random number generator can arbitrarily create a "novel" output that a human has never seen before. The issue is whether something is both novel and useful, which is hard for even humans to do consistently.
      • CooCooCaCha 6mo ago
        Anthropic recently changed their take-home test specifically to be more “out-of-distribution” and therefore more resistant to AI so they can assess humans. I’m so tired of “there’s nothing preventing”, and “humans do that too”. Modern AI is just not there. It’s not like humans and has difficulties with adapting to novelty. Whether transformers can overcome that remains to be seen, but it is not a guarantee. We’ve been dealing with these same issues for decades and AI still struggles with them.
• swader999 6mo ago
  I tend to share your same view. But is there really a line like you describe? Maybe AI just needs to get a few iterations better and we'll all love what it generates. And how's it really any different than any Photoshop computer output from the past?
• iLoveOncall 6mo ago
  Porn and memes. Obviously. This is all that Stable Diffusion has been used for since it was released.
• JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
  > What else? I used to have an assistant make little index-card sized agendas for gettogethers when folks were in town or I was organising a holiday or offsite. They used to be physical; now it's a cute thing I can text around so everyone knows when they should be up by (and by when, if they've slept in, they can go back to bed). AI has been good at making these. They don't need to be works of art, just cute and silly and maybe embedded with an inside joke.
  • reaperducer 6mo ago
    I don't care how many times you write "cute," having my vacation time programmed with that level of granularity and imposed obligation sounds like the definition of "dystopian." If I got one of your cute schedule cards while visiting you, I'd tear it up, check into a cheap motel, and spend the rest of my vacation actually enjoying myself. Edit: I'm not an outlier here. There have even been sitcom episodes about overbearing hosts over-programming their guests' visits, going back at least to the Brady Bunch.
    • JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
      > If I got one of your cute schedule cards while visiting you, I'd tear it up, check into a cheap motel, and spend the rest of my vacation actually enjoying myself Okay. I'd be confused why you didn't voice up while we were planning everything as a group, but those people absolutely exist. (Unless it's someone's, read: a best friend or my partner's, birthday. Then I'm a dictator and nobody gets a choice over or preview of anything.) I like to have a group activity planned on most days. If we're going to drive to get in an afternoon hike in before a dinner reservation (and if I have 6+ people in town, I need a dinner reservation because no I'm not coooking every single evening), or if I've paid for a snowmobile tour or a friend is bringing out their telescope for stargazing, there are hard no-later-than departure times to either not miss the activity or be respectful of others' time. My family used to resolve that by constantly reminding everyone the day before and morning of, followed by constantly shouting at each other in the hours and minutes preceding and–inevitably–through that deadline. I prefer the way I've found. If someone wants to fuck off from an activity, myself included, that's also perfectly fine. (I also grew up in a family that overplanned vacations. And I've since recovered from the rebound instinct, which involves not planning anything and leaving everything to serendipity. It works gorgeously, sometimes. But a lot of other times I wonder why I didn't bother googling the cool festival one town over before hand, or regretted sleeping in through a parade.) > There have even been sitcom episodes about overbearing hosts over-programming their guests' visits Sure. And different groups have different strokes. When it comes to my friends and I, generally speaking, a scheduled activity every other day with dinners planned in advance (they all get hangry, every single fucking one of them) works best.
• NikolaNovak 6mo ago
  While I agree with you, hacker news audience is not in the middle of the bell curve. I get this sounds elitist - but tremendous percentage of population is happily and eagerly engaging with fake religious images, funny AI videos, horrible AI memes, etc. Trying to mention that this video of puppy is completely AI generated results in vicious defense and mansplaining of why this video is totally real (I love it when video has e.g. Sora watermarks... This does not stop the defenders). I agree with you that human connection and artist intent is what I'm looking for in art, music, video games, etc... But gawd, lowest common denominator is and always has been SO much lower than we want to admit to ourselves. Very few people want thoughtful analysis that contradicts their world view, very few people care about privacy or rights or future or using the right tool, very few people are interested in moral frameworks or ethical philosophy, and very few people care about real and verifiable human connection in their "content" :-/
  • ryandrake 6mo ago
    I recently shoulder-surfed a family member scrolling away on their social media feed, and every single image was obvious AI slop. But it didn't matter. She loved every single one, watched videos all the way through, liked and commented on them... just total zombie-consumption mode and it was all 100% AI generated. I've tried in the past pointing out that it's all AI generated and nothing is real, and they simply don't care. People are just pac-man gobbling up "content". It's pretty sad/scary.
    • mickelsen 5mo ago
      I'd be a bit more humble rather than terrified, because I enjoy some AI slop too, especially funny animals that remind me of my old pets' antics. There are levels of slop. But tasteless stuff with crap graphics plastered all over, loud edits or badly calibrated tts voices were already all over reels/tiktok long before AI, and people still liked that. The unsettling thing on social media is the mind hijacking with the recommendation algo and scrolling motion that resembles a slot machine, more than the content itself.
  • Planktonne 6mo ago
    HN is absolutely not more critical of AI output than the norm. It's been true for various technologies that HN (and tech audiences in general) have a more nuanced view, but AI flips the script on that entirely. It's the tech world who are amazed by this, producing and being delighted by endless blogposts and 7-second concept trailers.
• youdots 6mo ago
  The technically (in both senses) astonishing and amazing output is not far off from some of the qualities of real advertising: Staged, attention grabbing, artificially created, superficially demanded, commercially attractive qualities. These align, and lots of similarities in the functions and outcomes of these two spheres come to mind.
• tecoholic 6mo ago
  100%. A picture is worth a thousand words only when it conveys something. I love to see the pictures from my family even when they are taken with no care to quality or composition but I would look at someone else’s (as in gallery/exhibitions) only when they are stunning and captured beautifully. The medium is only a channel to communicate. Also, this can’t be real. How many publications did they train this stuff on and why are there no acknowledgment even if to say - we partnered with xyz manga house to make our model smarter at manga? Like what’s wrong with this company?
• slibhb 6mo ago
  > Like, in terms of art, it's discarded (art is about humans) If a work of art is good, then it's good. It doesn't matter if it came from a human, a neanderthal, AI, or monkeys randomly typing.
  • avaer 6mo ago
    Whether art is considered good is in practice highly contextual. One of those contexts is who (what) made it.
  • papa_bear 6mo ago
    Provenance is part of the work. If a roomful of monkeys banged out something that looked like anything, I'd absolutely hang it on my wall. I would not say the same for 99% of AI generated art.
  • Jtarii 6mo ago
    The connection with the artist, directly, or across space and time, is a critical part of any artwork. It is one human attempting to communicate some emotional experience to another human. When I watch a Lynch film I feel some connection to the man David Lynch. When I see a AI artwork, there is nothing to connect with, no emotional experience is being communicated, it is just empty. It's highest aspiration is elevator music, just being something vaguely stimulating in the background.
    • slibhb 6mo ago
      I don't agree. If a poem is moving, it's moving. It doesn't matter who wrote it. I understand these are fundamental questions about aesthetics that people differ over. But that's how it works for me. However, ultimately, I think people will realize that I'm right around the time that AI does start generating good art.
• Havoc 6mo ago
  >and even if we cannot tell if an image is AI-generated, we can know if companies are using AI to generate images in general, so the appealing is decreasing Is that true? Don't think I'd get tired of images that are as good as human made ones just because I know/suspect there may have been AI involved