What my hundred poster prompts got wrong first time round, and what changed in version 2 after Hacker News readers spotted the same flaws I had.
7 comments
Claude steered me into improving the prompts with actual evaluations... which cost me actual money...
Good to see a huge range of the same thing in so many styles. I've done similar at a smaller (free) scale to explore art styles and avoid the clichés that the image models prefer, with some success.
My feelings, when presented with this big grid, is that if it looks simple[0], or that what complexity it contains is the sort of thing I expect in either a clip art[1] or stock photo[2] library, I prefer it.
Where it appears complex[3], that's where my gut says ~"nobody would put this much effort in, they must have asked an AI to do it for them".
[0] e.g. CoBrA, Vorticism, Minimalism
[1] e.g. Memphis / 80s Postmodern, Wayfinding / Signage
[2] e.g. Streamline Moderne, Constructivist, Dada Collage
[3] e.g. Woodcut, Mexican Calavera, Victorian Broadside
I think pretending you didn't use AI, when you did, is unworthy. So I'm not trying to make posters that fool you into thinking it's handmade. I'm trying to make AI posters that aren't crappy.
I've got some AI writing too, and I don't try to remove all the clues that tip you off it came out of an LLM. I only try to remove the tics that make it read badly. And I present the work upfront as being AI-assisted.
The only problem there is, in the real world, there's a cohort of people who don't think "that looks crappy because it's AI" so much as "I don't care if it looks great; I object to AI on principle; I now hate the thing that poster is advertising". If you cared about that cohort, I guess you'd either lie about using AI, or simply not use AI. But I kinda wonder how long they'll still be around.
Mexican Calavera, you picked up on - might be one of the weakest, as it seems to apply a Day of the Dead layer on top of "default ChatGPT crappy cartoons".
Read the full thread on Hacker News →
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