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What do we loose when we ditch generative AI? Easier poster making? What good does that do? So now pop&mom can have a poster in their shop that looks as if some

by tgv 8d ago

What do we loose when we ditch generative AI? Easier poster making? What good does that do? So now pop&mom can have a poster in their shop that looks as if some graphic artist was paid for it, but wasn't. Will that drive the economy up? Improve poverty? Halt the war? Make life more tolerable? No, it just adds the pretense of having a professional designer, something that will quickly loose its added value when everybody does it.

bonoboTP 8d ago
That's true. Since ornamentation is effort-signaling, it may get dropped once it's cheap. Same thing that happened with clothing and home decor. The functional part may be beneficial though, even on utilitarian grounds. But yes, a lot of design is not about function but social signaling of taste and money as well as fashion.
9dev 8d ago
You seem to think design is mere flourishing, nice colors to make something pleasant to look at, but ultimately superficial and useless. I would strongly object to that--visual presentation can carry a lot of additional information, and improve the transmission as well. Giving more people the ability to present information well leads to more efficient communication, which I wouldn't just dismiss this easily.
- bulder 7d ago
  But there isn't any extra information in AI posters. It's necessarily either something that can already be conveyed in writing (that is after all, what they're prompted in), or something the AI pulled in based off of the text unintentionally, at which point no actual information is being conveyed by the added visuals.
  - ereiamjh 7d ago
    I think you need to remember that most people have no eye for design, and that includes even just presenting the essentials of an event in text. And AI can actually do it much better than the average idiot. Of they ask. Like, if you ask - "here's the event details, let's make a poster" in the right way, it's going to come back and say "you've supplied the venue name but not the street address, do you want to include that?". And then it'll lay the info out with generally sensible relative sizes and positions, better than the average idiot would. And, probably about equally as well as the average "I'm not a designer but I know a bit" amateur - and a lot faster. The catch there is that the idiot only gets this if their prompt is right - and since they're an idiot, it probably isn't. I think there's a gap in the market for a service with system prompts that make it work for people who don't think very hard. (That might be what, say, Canva Pro does with its AI features. I don't know because I'm not paying for that.)
    - nevertoolate 7d ago
      So you want to reduce entropy by “fixing” semantic mistakes and hardcoding some design decisions “by the book” and end up with what exactly? The exact same poster everywhere?
      - ereiamjh 6d ago
        That's a more interesting question than you might have intended it to be. A designer's job has two contradictory aspects. One is knowing the rules and following the rules. The other is having novel ideas, and breaking the rules when it works. The balance between those depends on the brief, and the designer's place in the ecosystem. For example the architect I paid to design my extension wasn't in the business having novel ideas - he designs well proportioned buildings in established styles, that work as living spaces, don't fall down, and get approved by planning authorities. But other architects are paid to design skyscrapers that look like nothing you've seen before. For a school fete poster, you're probably more in the first category - follow the rules. But you want to know where there's room for variety within those rules. Which is where the blog post starts - not every Spring fete poster has to have bunting and daffodils.
maplethorpe 7d ago
If you ditch generative AI you go back to needing to pay an artist/designer for their work, and they likely charge more than ChatGPT because they might have rent/bills and that sort of thing to cover.
- ereiamjh 7d ago
  The sort of use cases I was think of (village fête etc.) would never have paid for a professional designer. We're talking about an event that's delighted to raise £500 for the church roof repair fund. Even £50 for a poster is 10% of the fundraising lost. If it wasn't AI, it would be Comic Sans and some clipart.

by tgv 8d ago

bonoboTP 8d ago

That's true. Since ornamentation is effort-signaling, it may get dropped once it's cheap. Same thing that happened with clothing and home decor. The functional part may be beneficial though, even on utilitarian grounds. But yes, a lot of design is not about function but social signaling of taste and money as well as fashion.

9dev 8d ago

You seem to think design is mere flourishing, nice colors to make something pleasant to look at, but ultimately superficial and useless. I would strongly object to that--visual presentation can carry a lot of additional information, and improve the transmission as well. Giving more people the ability to present information well leads to more efficient communication, which I wouldn't just dismiss this easily.

bulder 7d ago
But there isn't any extra information in AI posters. It's necessarily either something that can already be conveyed in writing (that is after all, what they're prompted in), or something the AI pulled in based off of the text unintentionally, at which point no actual information is being conveyed by the added visuals.
- ereiamjh 7d ago
  I think you need to remember that most people have no eye for design, and that includes even just presenting the essentials of an event in text. And AI can actually do it much better than the average idiot. Of they ask. Like, if you ask - "here's the event details, let's make a poster" in the right way, it's going to come back and say "you've supplied the venue name but not the street address, do you want to include that?". And then it'll lay the info out with generally sensible relative sizes and positions, better than the average idiot would. And, probably about equally as well as the average "I'm not a designer but I know a bit" amateur - and a lot faster. The catch there is that the idiot only gets this if their prompt is right - and since they're an idiot, it probably isn't. I think there's a gap in the market for a service with system prompts that make it work for people who don't think very hard. (That might be what, say, Canva Pro does with its AI features. I don't know because I'm not paying for that.)
  - nevertoolate 7d ago
    So you want to reduce entropy by “fixing” semantic mistakes and hardcoding some design decisions “by the book” and end up with what exactly? The exact same poster everywhere?
    - ereiamjh 6d ago
      That's a more interesting question than you might have intended it to be. A designer's job has two contradictory aspects. One is knowing the rules and following the rules. The other is having novel ideas, and breaking the rules when it works. The balance between those depends on the brief, and the designer's place in the ecosystem. For example the architect I paid to design my extension wasn't in the business having novel ideas - he designs well proportioned buildings in established styles, that work as living spaces, don't fall down, and get approved by planning authorities. But other architects are paid to design skyscrapers that look like nothing you've seen before. For a school fete poster, you're probably more in the first category - follow the rules. But you want to know where there's room for variety within those rules. Which is where the blog post starts - not every Spring fete poster has to have bunting and daffodils.

maplethorpe 7d ago

If you ditch generative AI you go back to needing to pay an artist/designer for their work, and they likely charge more than ChatGPT because they might have rent/bills and that sort of thing to cover.

ereiamjh 7d ago
The sort of use cases I was think of (village fête etc.) would never have paid for a professional designer. We're talking about an event that's delighted to raise £500 for the church roof repair fund. Even £50 for a poster is 10% of the fundraising lost. If it wasn't AI, it would be Comic Sans and some clipart.