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I find it kinda funny that even "smartest", most capable models often have a very hard time going beyond surface-level, top-of-mind associations, when faced wit
by vova_hn2 7d ago
I find it kinda funny that even "smartest", most capable models often have a very hard time going beyond surface-level, top-of-mind associations, when faced with creative tasks.
Of course, a "Japanese Minimal Poster" has a sakura and a stylized flag of Japan, duh
A human designer would probably think that "Japan -> sakura" and "Japan -> Japanese flag" are way too obvious, too banal, too stereotypical, and, most importantly too boring. And then they would probably sit for a while and try to think of something fresher and less clichéd.
But AI has absolutely no problem with going with the cheesiest, most overused trope.
- micromacrofoot 7d agofor the price you pay ai you would 100% get a cherry blossom tree from an inexperienced designer
- edude03 7d agoAi costs under $10 though, you wouldn’t be able to hire a human for that
- xp84 7d agoPretty sure 90% of the posters of the type at the top of the article are made for $0. I bet for $10 you could get real artists from non-Western countries to make a simple poster, but these days people would probably claim those $10 jobs and then have AI generate them anyway.
- micromacrofoot 7d agoright, even worse... if you paid 5X that you'd still be getting whatever was the first idea that came to mind You're easily in 10X territory to get something pretty basic with a round of feedback and maybe 50X to start to get something good the low to mid range of any visual design market has essentially been destroyed
- alex43578 7d agoDestroyed or democratized? I'd question the financial judgement if a local fair actually paid a designer for a poster and revisions, versus just literally typing something in Word and adding some clip art.
- micromacrofoot 6d agoobviously a lot of nuance, but depends on the scale of the fair at least... some have sizable design and marketing budgets you could still use clip art so this isn't democratizing shit, it's laundered copyright theft it's also destroying the market for royalty free stock art by essentially cloning copyrighted art the entire economy for this sort of design is being absorbed by venture capital, it's not even like a traditional -> digital art shift
- jfewhfuehg 7d agoIf you understand how curve fitting works, then it is a very predictable outcome.
- Avicebron 7d agoSure, but what's interesting is if you tell it to "behave unpredictably" or "don't use tropes" it usually fails down the same curve. Which is predictable, but telling.
- nephihaha 7d agoI remember seeing a poster for Chinese New Year years ago, and someone had included the kanji for Japan on it (日本). Obviously they just wanted generic looking characters without bothering to see what they meant. I couldn't resist writing a comment on the poster about it. It showed whoever did it had no clue about East Asia or Chinese script...
- refactor_master 7d agoAre you insinuating those 1970s fonts takeout fonts aren’t actually how Chinese people communicate? I knew they were AI!
- danpasca 7d ago> But AI has absolutely no problem with going with the cheesiest, most overused trope. Considering your prompt fits exactly that description I think the AI delivered perfectly. Try using some actual design language and see how well it does.
- afpx 7d agoThe thing is, they aren't creative. When I ask an LLM to go beyond the mean, it has no idea what to do and returns incoherance. Its responses seem to have N latent dimensions of information. But, the value of each of those dimensions is always the midpoint. With creative prompting, I can push it to respond in ways that go beyond the mean, but it can't tie them together cohesively. It doesn't have anything in its training data to fill the hole in space. No ability to extrapolate.
- danpasca 7d agoMy point is that those kinds of prompts are dumb and I actually expect the model to produce slop. In programming we write these huge prompts that go into a lot of detail, and when we do that, it actually works. I've never asked a coding agent to go beyond the mean, that just sounds like a dumb thing to do. Apply this rule in design and I'm sure you'll get better results. Kinda what the blog post is all about.
- mysterydip 7d agoIsn’t the most overused trope the most statistically weighted to be chosen from a group of options? It makes technical sense but as you say leads to boring outcomes
- boredhedgehog 7d agoThe masses love clichés and stereotypes, which is why these "artiste" designers frequently miss their target audience.
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- oliwarner 7d agoThat's a prompt problem. If you named a Japanese artist or style rather than giving an adjective derived from a country, you might get something that wasn't national wank. Yes, a human might do this step for you. A mediocre one might not.
- bluefirebrand 7d ago> Yes, a human might do this step for you An artist (even a mediocre one) almost certainly would do this step for you
- raincole 7d agoYeah because... AI is a tool, not an artist. In other words water is wet.
- kalleboo 7d agoThe reason it isn't obvious is because the tool is marketed as replacing the artists, and that's how people are using it. Also what the author of this post did could easily be added to the training/harness/skills of ChatGPT in a future version.
- MichaelZuo 7d agoOf course they have ulterior motives to push the message that it can replace high quality human artists, even though that would be ridiculous under any serious analysis. That doesnt mean you have to believe them.
- phoghed 7d agoAh yes they should have gone with that one wave
- ereiamjh 7d agoAuthor here. Well of course Spring + Japan = Sakura. In a way the model would be faulty if it didn't reach for that cliché. That's what it's meant to do. If you want originality, you need to supply it. AI fills the vacuum with the obvious thing. And in a way that's a feature. If I was creating a poster myself I'd think "nah, can't use sakura it's too obvious". AI gets you past that hurdle. "Yeah, we used the cliché, it looks nice, let's move on". This is if it's for a school fayre, village fête, etc. - brilliant originality isn't the goal. But it's nice when your poster doesn't look the same as three other posters on the same noticeboard (I have seen this). If brilliant originality is needed, a human has to bring it. Although an LLM with the temperature turned up can offer some nice seeds.
- ManuelKiessling 7d ago"AI fills the vacuum with the obvious thing." I like that a lot.
- Maxion 7d agoIt literally is how they work. They look for the next most probable token. Always keep that in mind when writing a prompt or reading output. If you don't supply it, it will fill it in with the most obvious stuff.
- iandanforth 7d agoIf you need pseudo-originality I have a skill for that: https://github.com/iandanforth/force-associations https://github.com/iandanforth/force-associations
- aleksiy123 7d agoTyty I was thinking about something similar
- mohamedkoubaa 7d agoI love it. Entropic prompt injection
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- thordenmark 7d agoThat's on the prompt, not the AI. You could be specific about what imagery to use like a torii or a Japanese castle, and so on. Whatever you leave to the AI you're most likely going to get the most generic version. If you're low effort in the prompt yet get low effort results, if you put some effort into the prompt you can get better results.
- gretch 7d agoPersonally I think if you were going to make a poster for a Japanese themed spring festival, and you did NOT include some sakura, you completely misunderstood the assignment. Your promotional poster for a community gathering should not be subverting the western gaze on Japanese culture, or any other concept from art criticism 101. It's supposed to get average people in your neighborhood to glance at it for 5-10 seconds and say, "cool looks like a good time"
- sm-silversight 7d agoArtist here. I'd rip off Kawase Hasui 100 different ways without using sakura or subverting anything.
- atomicnumber3 7d agoMore like 100ms or less as their visual field coincidentally sweeps over wherever the ad is posted in the physical world. In this regard, it's even more important to use something people subconsciously associate with your thing.
- wiether 7d agoYMMV but my experience tells me that the more cliché something looks, the more likely it's bad/cheap. I've never been in a cliché-looking restaurant that is actually decent. Meanwhile, the best restaurants I know have, at best, a flag or some kind of small drawing to give a clue about their nationality, but otherwise they look like a regular local one.
- ddosmax556 7d agoRight, but the best restaurants are not most restaurants. The best high end events are not most events. Most events and restaurants could be improved a lot by AI already
- jere 7d ago> I've never been in a cliché-looking restaurant that is actually decent You either have an absurd standard for "decent" or this is one of the weirdest comments I've ever read here.
- nomilk 6d ago> But AI has absolutely no problem with going with the cheesiest, most overused trope I genuinely wonder if this can be addressed (at least partially) as simply as prompting: "don't rely on overused tropes", or something to that effect.
- x1n13y84issmd42 6d agoYet there are countless extremely banal posters, made of sakuras, flags, red sun rays and purely random hieroglyphics that mean nothing, made by humans for the entire history of poster-making. Most illustrators available to most businesses for hire would do worse job for more money and much more time than an LLM would do. Probably an unpopular opinion, but advertisement does need a creative bar too high. No one cares about it. It’s enough to have a black text on a white background saying what is happening, when and where. The rest is optional, and most of the time gets in the way of understanding the poster info. Y’all terribly overestimate quality of human art (as well as how informed humans are and how accurate their answers are) while riding the LLM hate train.