6 ms·

Santa Cruz restaurant changes logo after flurry of negative reviews for AI art

40 points by randycupertino 6mo ago

sameers 6mo ago
There are so many automated processes in a restaurant, starting from machine pressed building materials that took a livelihood away from honest human woodworkers and carpenters. Someone please help me understand why this reaction isn't just the latest form of Ludditism (Luddism?) that'll naturally fade away as time passes.
- add-sub-mul-div 6mo ago
  There are many concerns and complaints about LLM technology that don't apply to other forms of automation or even other forms of AI. You're free to disagree with all of those criticisms, but they're simple to understand and they're discussed here and everywhere daily. If you don't know what they are, it must be intentional and I'm skeptical about your curiosity.
- mc32 6mo ago
  Even worse is it's just a small percentage of her patrons --but they have made it their temporary life-goal to change the restaurant in their image. Like, if you don't like the logo or how they went about creating the logo, go to a different restaurant and let others enjoy it without your jealous 1-star reviews. Those same people are probably mad "desktop publishing" took the livelihoods of people who drew things by hand, used multi-media plus used exactoes and paste to bring designs to life.
  - recursive 6mo ago
    1 star reviews, wherever they exist, are always left by a small percentage of patrons. And jealousy has nothing to do with it. Despite all the marketing budgets and hype wave, you can't force people to tolerate this stuff.
    - mc32 6mo ago
      Sure but it’s not organic -it’s organized by malcontents. They’re not voting on the food or hygiene but on their purist perception of what and how a logo should look and be made. If they were blind they couldn’t give a rats ass.
      - recursive 6mo ago
        If you're running a retail facing business you're going to have to reckon with the fact that people have opinions about things. And they might have reasons you think are logically unsound. Trying to debate them will probably not be very fruitful. If I saw two restaurants and one had an AI logo I'd go to the other one. Regardless of whether anyone tries to argue that I committed a logical fallacy.
  - BashiBazouk 6mo ago
    As someone who grew up in the pre-computer graphic arts, in Santa Cruz ironically enough, it was not paste but hot wax. Though in the early days of computers in graphic arts, all the graphic artists were just happy to not have to deal with photo typesetters anymore...
  - mcphage 6mo ago
    > without your jealous 1-star reviews What makes those reviews “jealous”? Jealous of what?
- greysphere 6mo ago
  1) Because the people who contributed to the development of those other processes received fair market value for their work (for the most part). The vast majority of contributors to the process that made this logo have not been compensated for their work. This differential can lead to an ethical judgement about the process, which can transitively be applied to the logo made with the process, and the restaurant as a whole. 2) Some automated processes lower the quality of outcomes. Microwaving food might be a faster/cheaper way to cook, but customers might criticize the results. 3) Some processes can be viewed as having lower value compared to others, independent of result quality. This is particularly common in the art and service industries, for which the logo of a restaurant is very much at the intersection.
  - sameers 6mo ago
    Thanks for the response. I want to understand more about what you mean by these comments. Re the first one, where you write “The vast majority of contributors to the process that made this logo have not been compensated for their work,” how do you compare this process from all other processes of reproducing mechanically something whose underlying aesthetic parameters were determined by analyzing how humans do things? I don’t think it’s unfair to say that the legal consensus is trending towards seeing gen AI outputs as “transformative” in the copyright law sense [1]. All creative mechanical processes - whether it’s factory made furniture, reproduced prints of the Old Masters, or now gen AI outputs - rely on some examination of prior human output, because the judgment of what people will want to use or consume has already been made historically, and the mechanical processes are different ways of distilling those decisions into something that machines can reproduce. In this particular case, the restaurant owner put effort into writing a prompt and presumably reviewing many possible outputs to pick one. What has happened with gen AI is that anyone who can somewhat visualize the artistic product they are looking for - a blurb in a specific style, a picture that has certain visual aspects, sounds that match some set of sonic characteristics they like - can now produce something passable without involving another human being. That has happened many times since the start of the Industrial Age - a vacuum cleaner does a passable job of cleaning surfaces, microwaves do a passable job of cooking foods, synthesizers do a passable job of sounding like a human orchestra, and so on. All these tasks could only be done, at any level of quality, by humans - now, humans are still capable of being more innovative and detail oriented than machines can with a variety of cognitive tasks, but machines have gotten to the “vacuum cleaner” level of producing equivalent outputs. I get the anxieties and fears coming from seeing a whole class of aesthetic and cognitive tasks being taken over by machines, because the ability to compose a marketing slogan feels closer to the notion of human identity and cultural know-how, than knowing how to clean a home well. Is that what explains the incredible degree of paranoia and resentment we are seeing, evidenced in this case by people wanting to hurt someone’s business/livelihood because of how mad they are? edit: forgot what I intended as a "reference link": [1] https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=llm+ai+transformative+use+copyright&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=llm+ai+transformative+use+c...
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- H4lcyon 6mo ago
  This is such a deep insight—you're really onto something here! This isn't just about a particular restaurant, it's a microcosm of a wider societal issue. It begs the question, why even have logos at all? Or names? For maximum efficiency and expediency for the owner the optimal restaurant of the future is a 3d printed, fully automated food cart with an LLM cashier that accepts any order and delivers it out of its nutrition depositor directly into your hands (no waste, eco-friendly!!! :D ).
lowken10 6mo ago
[dead]
huhkerrf 6mo ago
> One remaining one-star review on Google reads, “Their logo is AI generated, if they can’t make the effort to create a logo they definitely won’t make the effort to cook good food.” I'm not sure what it's called, but there has to be a name for this logical error.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- aezart 6mo ago
  Seems valid to me. I won't read articles with model-generated header images, because it's a good indicator the rest of the text will be slop as well. For a restaurant, a slop logo gives the impression that the owner doesn't care about the details and has no taste. Beyond that, the use of generative models is a big moral issue for a growing number of people.
  - npinsker 6mo ago
    Yes, this isn’t a logical error at all. If you don’t have taste in one area — actually, it’s even worse, you’re not even aware of your own lack of taste — why would I trust your taste in another area?
    - linksnapzz 6mo ago
      The best Mexican places I've been to in CA had decor reminiscent of a big-city bus station, despite how good the food was.
    - TheOtherHobbes 6mo ago
      Why would lack of taste in graphic design be even remotely related to lack of taste in food preparation? It's like arguing you wouldn't trust a lawyer with a medical negligence case if they can't suture a wound. Or you wouldn't trust a graphic designer with a restaurant logo if they can't make good scrambled eggs.
slabtickler 6mo ago
a lot of people on here are going to instantly defend any AI use in spite of the specifics but the over-abundance of blatant diffusion model art in cost-cutting nowadays, in places where it isn’t even expected, is ridiculous. marketing is by no means the peak of artistic endeavor but genai logos for small business street taco vendors, coffee shops reek of laziness. never mind the inundation of places like Etsy and Redbubble where it is getting increasingly less possible to find stuff made with human intention. shades of the anti-materialism of the 90s: now consumer products are all just generated, never made. there is this coffee shop in downtown Seattle, Artly coffee, that operates on this gimmick of serving robot-produced coffee. a 20 year old employee hangs in the back to essentially do nothing and sit on their phone. it is a silly experience worth trying once, but no more. Coffee by itself is already a cross section into the hyperindustrial production that has informed the trajectory of our lives since before being born, but i feel regardless there are such things that are a step too far
- Krasnol 6mo ago
  To be honest, that coffee idea sounds really good to me. Not having to deal with the currently still trendy coffee culture and getting exactly the same coffee every time sounds perfect. Or let's say, it's perfect if the product tastes good.
  - manquer 6mo ago
    There are few companies in this space . There is one right in Palo Alto - a demo store from the equipment manufacturer https://yummy-future.com/ https://yummy-future.com/ Coffee is not that much different from Starbucks or any other big chain or even many indie places.
  - slabtickler 6mo ago
    coffee was mid. it's right next to pike place, you can get actually decent coffee down the street. not talking about starbucks either
    - Krasnol 6mo ago
beardyw 6mo ago
I understand and even agree with these sentiments, but in the back of my head is a voice which says "artists have been copying and even stealing from one another since there has been art - what is it that makes this different?"
- spicyusername 6mo ago
  What is it that makes this different? That the artists don't get paid anymore. Nobody likes picturing a world without art, and if nobody gets paid to make art... where does the art come from? Nobody likes thinking where this trend goes. If we automate all the jobs away... everyone will starve.
  - m00x 6mo ago
    Good artists get paid plenty. The hard part of art was always about either representing emotion, or a story. AI can't do that as it has no emotion, nor story.
    - mingus88 6mo ago
      > Good artists get paid plenty. Absolutely false. You don’t even have to try hard to find scores of examples of great artists who died penniless. Artists who lived in squalor for decades until they broke through, and even then made only a modest living. 0.001% of which get “paid plenty” and that’s more due to business acumen. Creative fields are cutthroat, brutal and soul crushing. LLMs have proven that most people don’t care or can’t tell the difference between human expression and a probabilistic approximation of it. On the other hand, this article is about a sports bar logo. Only in Santa Cruz would you see people lose their shit over something so trivial. Are we supposed to be moved to tears by the human expression of a cartoon otter on a tacky surfboard?
- dijit 6mo ago
  Laziness and cost cutting, the generated logo doesn’t even look good. A logo is quite literally one of the first things you see, it informs your first impression of a company. If they really care so little about that: then it does follow that they also care little about food standards, quality ingredients and paying their chefs/waiters appropriately. All of this leading to a poor experience. A bit of artistic inspiration is fine, not everything has to be the pinnacle of design: but you know what? Those blatant mcdonalds logo ripoff logos or “falafel king” don’t inspire confidence either.
feverzsj 6mo ago
How out of touch these owners are.
- seanhunter 6mo ago
  Yes. “A lifelong dream has been crushed by a group of locals,” You don’t have some kind of built-in entitlement to success just because it’s your dream. Yeah it’s unfortunate you didn’t succeed, but if you don’t win your locals over, you’re going to struggle to run a restaurant.
imagetic 6mo ago
99 Bottles was never a beloved pub.
joshribakoff 6mo ago
This isn’t just a story about an AI logo, it’s a story about locals who feel the business they frequented was replaced by someone trying to make a quick buck. And an owner who believes that means the locals want to “destroy” her business. Im not choosing a side, but it doesn’t seem like they have a strong future with or without a logo. That’s just Santa Cruz culture, very aggro surfers. Many of the surrounding restaurants are very immersed in local surf culture and put a great deal of resources and effort into their decor.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
  > That’s just Santa Cruz culture, very aggro surfers This sums it up well. If this were in New York, I’d be on the owner’s side (provided the food lives up). In Santa Cruz, it’s just tone deaf to (a) not involve the community in the design process, (b) not take the hint from the reviews and then (c) play the victim in the media.
  - dcrazy 6mo ago
    Maybe Santa Cruz residents should grow up. Thankfully we seem to be making progress against this NIMBY micromanaging culture up here in SF.
    - JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
      > Maybe Santa Cruz residents should grow up It's their town. Also, I can't help but wonder why the owner didn't fight fire with playful fire–her place is literally called the salty otter. Be lovably salty!
    - AlexeyBelov 6mo ago
      What does "grow up" entail? Why isn't current behaviour grown up?
  - linksnapzz 6mo ago
    "involve the community in the design process". I'd create an ad campaign for all my competitors-flyers, doorhangers etc. with the same info their usual ads have, but with slop-AI art all over them. There isn't anything wrong w/ Santa Cruz that couldn't be solved by motivated YIMBYs parking a city of 800,000 people on top of it.
bwb 6mo ago
I run a Reddit group. Someone thought a fantasy book cover was AI art, and everyone piled on, talked crap, attacked the author, etc. Turns out 100% human by a well-known artist. We had to make a rule against AI witch hunts. It brings out the worst in humans.
- dzhiurgis 6mo ago
  Seems like people just need meaning to exist. 5g, ev’s/oil/renewables, smartphones, privacy, identity…
  - bwb 6mo ago
    well said, I agree, and those big things become holy wars even though they largely have zero impact on them. Better to focus on things closer to where they can have an impact, I think they would be happier.
- dlcarrier 6mo ago
  The craziest part is that has basically replaced the stock photo and royalty free images market, but that market wasn't really any different than the generated image market. There never was much paid to artists; it's more of a marketing and business development business. Sure, the most well regarded science fiction and fantasy artists get covers painted just for their books, but otherwise it's usually something off the shelf. I've seen unrelated book covers with the same image. It's no different outside of publishing, with the same smiling families showing up in advertisements for all sorts of businesses.
- Ferret7446 6mo ago
  The AI is just an excuse, witch hunts have always happened and of course still happen. Yesterday it was witchcraft, today it's AI, tomorrow who knows? Maybe it'll be sympathizing with the anti AI faction
- burnt-resistor 6mo ago
  Yep. And people spouting FUD nonsense that they "know" with certainty how to identify AI comments, text, and art. Similar behavior has been running rampant here and should be added to the guidelines.
Simulacra 6mo ago
Seems like much to do about nothing. It's just a logo..
archagon 6mo ago
Fortunately, the solution is trivial. Just spend a few hundred bucks on an artist.

There are so many automated processes in a restaurant, starting from machine pressed building materials that took a livelihood away from honest human woodworkers and carpenters. Someone please help me understand why this reaction isn't just the latest form of Ludditism (Luddism?) that'll naturally fade away as time passes.

add-sub-mul-div 6mo ago
There are many concerns and complaints about LLM technology that don't apply to other forms of automation or even other forms of AI. You're free to disagree with all of those criticisms, but they're simple to understand and they're discussed here and everywhere daily. If you don't know what they are, it must be intentional and I'm skeptical about your curiosity.
mc32 6mo ago
Even worse is it's just a small percentage of her patrons --but they have made it their temporary life-goal to change the restaurant in their image. Like, if you don't like the logo or how they went about creating the logo, go to a different restaurant and let others enjoy it without your jealous 1-star reviews. Those same people are probably mad "desktop publishing" took the livelihoods of people who drew things by hand, used multi-media plus used exactoes and paste to bring designs to life.
- recursive 6mo ago
  1 star reviews, wherever they exist, are always left by a small percentage of patrons. And jealousy has nothing to do with it. Despite all the marketing budgets and hype wave, you can't force people to tolerate this stuff.
  - mc32 6mo ago
    Sure but it’s not organic -it’s organized by malcontents. They’re not voting on the food or hygiene but on their purist perception of what and how a logo should look and be made. If they were blind they couldn’t give a rats ass.
    - recursive 6mo ago
      If you're running a retail facing business you're going to have to reckon with the fact that people have opinions about things. And they might have reasons you think are logically unsound. Trying to debate them will probably not be very fruitful. If I saw two restaurants and one had an AI logo I'd go to the other one. Regardless of whether anyone tries to argue that I committed a logical fallacy.
- BashiBazouk 6mo ago
  As someone who grew up in the pre-computer graphic arts, in Santa Cruz ironically enough, it was not paste but hot wax. Though in the early days of computers in graphic arts, all the graphic artists were just happy to not have to deal with photo typesetters anymore...
- mcphage 6mo ago
  > without your jealous 1-star reviews What makes those reviews “jealous”? Jealous of what?
greysphere 6mo ago
1) Because the people who contributed to the development of those other processes received fair market value for their work (for the most part). The vast majority of contributors to the process that made this logo have not been compensated for their work. This differential can lead to an ethical judgement about the process, which can transitively be applied to the logo made with the process, and the restaurant as a whole. 2) Some automated processes lower the quality of outcomes. Microwaving food might be a faster/cheaper way to cook, but customers might criticize the results. 3) Some processes can be viewed as having lower value compared to others, independent of result quality. This is particularly common in the art and service industries, for which the logo of a restaurant is very much at the intersection.
- sameers 6mo ago
  Thanks for the response. I want to understand more about what you mean by these comments. Re the first one, where you write “The vast majority of contributors to the process that made this logo have not been compensated for their work,” how do you compare this process from all other processes of reproducing mechanically something whose underlying aesthetic parameters were determined by analyzing how humans do things? I don’t think it’s unfair to say that the legal consensus is trending towards seeing gen AI outputs as “transformative” in the copyright law sense [1]. All creative mechanical processes - whether it’s factory made furniture, reproduced prints of the Old Masters, or now gen AI outputs - rely on some examination of prior human output, because the judgment of what people will want to use or consume has already been made historically, and the mechanical processes are different ways of distilling those decisions into something that machines can reproduce. In this particular case, the restaurant owner put effort into writing a prompt and presumably reviewing many possible outputs to pick one. What has happened with gen AI is that anyone who can somewhat visualize the artistic product they are looking for - a blurb in a specific style, a picture that has certain visual aspects, sounds that match some set of sonic characteristics they like - can now produce something passable without involving another human being. That has happened many times since the start of the Industrial Age - a vacuum cleaner does a passable job of cleaning surfaces, microwaves do a passable job of cooking foods, synthesizers do a passable job of sounding like a human orchestra, and so on. All these tasks could only be done, at any level of quality, by humans - now, humans are still capable of being more innovative and detail oriented than machines can with a variety of cognitive tasks, but machines have gotten to the “vacuum cleaner” level of producing equivalent outputs. I get the anxieties and fears coming from seeing a whole class of aesthetic and cognitive tasks being taken over by machines, because the ability to compose a marketing slogan feels closer to the notion of human identity and cultural know-how, than knowing how to clean a home well. Is that what explains the incredible degree of paranoia and resentment we are seeing, evidenced in this case by people wanting to hurt someone’s business/livelihood because of how mad they are? edit: forgot what I intended as a "reference link": [1] https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=llm+ai+transformative+use+copyright&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=llm+ai+transformative+use+c...
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
H4lcyon 6mo ago
This is such a deep insight—you're really onto something here! This isn't just about a particular restaurant, it's a microcosm of a wider societal issue. It begs the question, why even have logos at all? Or names? For maximum efficiency and expediency for the owner the optimal restaurant of the future is a 3d printed, fully automated food cart with an LLM cashier that accepts any order and delivers it out of its nutrition depositor directly into your hands (no waste, eco-friendly!!! :D ).

lowken10 6mo ago

[dead]

huhkerrf 6mo ago

> One remaining one-star review on Google reads, “Their logo is AI generated, if they can’t make the effort to create a logo they definitely won’t make the effort to cook good food.” I'm not sure what it's called, but there has to be a name for this logical error.

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
aezart 6mo ago
Seems valid to me. I won't read articles with model-generated header images, because it's a good indicator the rest of the text will be slop as well. For a restaurant, a slop logo gives the impression that the owner doesn't care about the details and has no taste. Beyond that, the use of generative models is a big moral issue for a growing number of people.
- npinsker 6mo ago
  Yes, this isn’t a logical error at all. If you don’t have taste in one area — actually, it’s even worse, you’re not even aware of your own lack of taste — why would I trust your taste in another area?
  - linksnapzz 6mo ago
    The best Mexican places I've been to in CA had decor reminiscent of a big-city bus station, despite how good the food was.
  - TheOtherHobbes 6mo ago
    Why would lack of taste in graphic design be even remotely related to lack of taste in food preparation? It's like arguing you wouldn't trust a lawyer with a medical negligence case if they can't suture a wound. Or you wouldn't trust a graphic designer with a restaurant logo if they can't make good scrambled eggs.

slabtickler 6mo ago

a lot of people on here are going to instantly defend any AI use in spite of the specifics but the over-abundance of blatant diffusion model art in cost-cutting nowadays, in places where it isn’t even expected, is ridiculous. marketing is by no means the peak of artistic endeavor but genai logos for small business street taco vendors, coffee shops reek of laziness. never mind the inundation of places like Etsy and Redbubble where it is getting increasingly less possible to find stuff made with human intention. shades of the anti-materialism of the 90s: now consumer products are all just generated, never made. there is this coffee shop in downtown Seattle, Artly coffee, that operates on this gimmick of serving robot-produced coffee. a 20 year old employee hangs in the back to essentially do nothing and sit on their phone. it is a silly experience worth trying once, but no more. Coffee by itself is already a cross section into the hyperindustrial production that has informed the trajectory of our lives since before being born, but i feel regardless there are such things that are a step too far

Krasnol 6mo ago
To be honest, that coffee idea sounds really good to me. Not having to deal with the currently still trendy coffee culture and getting exactly the same coffee every time sounds perfect. Or let's say, it's perfect if the product tastes good.
- manquer 6mo ago
  There are few companies in this space . There is one right in Palo Alto - a demo store from the equipment manufacturer https://yummy-future.com/ https://yummy-future.com/ Coffee is not that much different from Starbucks or any other big chain or even many indie places.
- slabtickler 6mo ago
  coffee was mid. it's right next to pike place, you can get actually decent coffee down the street. not talking about starbucks either
  - Krasnol 6mo ago

beardyw 6mo ago

I understand and even agree with these sentiments, but in the back of my head is a voice which says "artists have been copying and even stealing from one another since there has been art - what is it that makes this different?"

spicyusername 6mo ago
What is it that makes this different? That the artists don't get paid anymore. Nobody likes picturing a world without art, and if nobody gets paid to make art... where does the art come from? Nobody likes thinking where this trend goes. If we automate all the jobs away... everyone will starve.
- m00x 6mo ago
  Good artists get paid plenty. The hard part of art was always about either representing emotion, or a story. AI can't do that as it has no emotion, nor story.
  - mingus88 6mo ago
    > Good artists get paid plenty. Absolutely false. You don’t even have to try hard to find scores of examples of great artists who died penniless. Artists who lived in squalor for decades until they broke through, and even then made only a modest living. 0.001% of which get “paid plenty” and that’s more due to business acumen. Creative fields are cutthroat, brutal and soul crushing. LLMs have proven that most people don’t care or can’t tell the difference between human expression and a probabilistic approximation of it. On the other hand, this article is about a sports bar logo. Only in Santa Cruz would you see people lose their shit over something so trivial. Are we supposed to be moved to tears by the human expression of a cartoon otter on a tacky surfboard?
dijit 6mo ago
Laziness and cost cutting, the generated logo doesn’t even look good. A logo is quite literally one of the first things you see, it informs your first impression of a company. If they really care so little about that: then it does follow that they also care little about food standards, quality ingredients and paying their chefs/waiters appropriately. All of this leading to a poor experience. A bit of artistic inspiration is fine, not everything has to be the pinnacle of design: but you know what? Those blatant mcdonalds logo ripoff logos or “falafel king” don’t inspire confidence either.

feverzsj 6mo ago

How out of touch these owners are.

seanhunter 6mo ago
Yes. “A lifelong dream has been crushed by a group of locals,” You don’t have some kind of built-in entitlement to success just because it’s your dream. Yeah it’s unfortunate you didn’t succeed, but if you don’t win your locals over, you’re going to struggle to run a restaurant.

imagetic 6mo ago

99 Bottles was never a beloved pub.

joshribakoff 6mo ago

This isn’t just a story about an AI logo, it’s a story about locals who feel the business they frequented was replaced by someone trying to make a quick buck. And an owner who believes that means the locals want to “destroy” her business. Im not choosing a side, but it doesn’t seem like they have a strong future with or without a logo. That’s just Santa Cruz culture, very aggro surfers. Many of the surrounding restaurants are very immersed in local surf culture and put a great deal of resources and effort into their decor.

JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
> That’s just Santa Cruz culture, very aggro surfers This sums it up well. If this were in New York, I’d be on the owner’s side (provided the food lives up). In Santa Cruz, it’s just tone deaf to (a) not involve the community in the design process, (b) not take the hint from the reviews and then (c) play the victim in the media.
- dcrazy 6mo ago
  Maybe Santa Cruz residents should grow up. Thankfully we seem to be making progress against this NIMBY micromanaging culture up here in SF.
  - JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
    > Maybe Santa Cruz residents should grow up It's their town. Also, I can't help but wonder why the owner didn't fight fire with playful fire–her place is literally called the salty otter. Be lovably salty!
  - AlexeyBelov 6mo ago
    What does "grow up" entail? Why isn't current behaviour grown up?
- linksnapzz 6mo ago
  "involve the community in the design process". I'd create an ad campaign for all my competitors-flyers, doorhangers etc. with the same info their usual ads have, but with slop-AI art all over them. There isn't anything wrong w/ Santa Cruz that couldn't be solved by motivated YIMBYs parking a city of 800,000 people on top of it.

bwb 6mo ago

I run a Reddit group. Someone thought a fantasy book cover was AI art, and everyone piled on, talked crap, attacked the author, etc. Turns out 100% human by a well-known artist. We had to make a rule against AI witch hunts. It brings out the worst in humans.

dzhiurgis 6mo ago
Seems like people just need meaning to exist. 5g, ev’s/oil/renewables, smartphones, privacy, identity…
- bwb 6mo ago
  well said, I agree, and those big things become holy wars even though they largely have zero impact on them. Better to focus on things closer to where they can have an impact, I think they would be happier.
dlcarrier 6mo ago
The craziest part is that has basically replaced the stock photo and royalty free images market, but that market wasn't really any different than the generated image market. There never was much paid to artists; it's more of a marketing and business development business. Sure, the most well regarded science fiction and fantasy artists get covers painted just for their books, but otherwise it's usually something off the shelf. I've seen unrelated book covers with the same image. It's no different outside of publishing, with the same smiling families showing up in advertisements for all sorts of businesses.
Ferret7446 6mo ago
The AI is just an excuse, witch hunts have always happened and of course still happen. Yesterday it was witchcraft, today it's AI, tomorrow who knows? Maybe it'll be sympathizing with the anti AI faction
burnt-resistor 6mo ago
Yep. And people spouting FUD nonsense that they "know" with certainty how to identify AI comments, text, and art. Similar behavior has been running rampant here and should be added to the guidelines.

Simulacra 6mo ago

Seems like much to do about nothing. It's just a logo..

archagon 6mo ago

Fortunately, the solution is trivial. Just spend a few hundred bucks on an artist.