YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Everyone's sick of seeing the same default ChatGPT style on posters for everything from village fetes to coffee shops to school plays.

But I'm convinced that just vetoing AI is to throw away the baby with the bathwater. So I set out to prove it.

This feels like an AI trap almost. A lot of the badness comes from people who don't want/can't put effort into it, so we all get a deluge of the sameyness.

The author claims that the AI posters don’t have to be horrible, but fail to see that the dozen variations generated are not distinctive - they might have somewhat different typography or imaginary, but still have the same AI uniformity and smell as the crappy restaurant poster you see on the street. The core issue is not only technical, but also the lack of vision and imagination when creating art or even infographics.

Designers republic and memphis were the only designs i couldn't immediately see were AI generated.

The only reason i couldn't tell memphis is because it's aping a known design language already, it's just a perfect copy so me not being able to tell it wasn't AI isn't a free pass in this case.

I think if there was a little less "grid" feeling to the layout details then i wouldn't be able to tell on a few of the other designs either.

Edit: the designers republic version is quite a lot different than the others, it's not just that it's the only design to avoid pairing every feature with an icon, it's the whole layout variety - there's different font sizes, the positioning of elements is very well done to my eye. I'm gonna say this has to be another case like memphis, there's some pre-existing design language that i don't know of and it's just aping that. It's much more human than the others which i can believe are straight ai.

But the thing is, all have that icon+text style in the "tombola, cakes and drinks..." part. If I wanted to be distinctive, this is what I would have tried to get rid of at first, not the "visual style" (it's sort of like Windows XP visual styles, no matter how different they are the overall layout is still recognisably Windows).

It’s not complicated - the default style signals low effort. Why should I get excited about the village fete if the organizers put in the barest minimum of effort?

But there’s another reason it drives people crazy - it’s low effort trying to present as high effort. If the sign was simple Comic Sans then it would at least be charmingly honest.

That icon+text row is the tell for me too, though I'd blame the prompt more than the model, nobody ever asks for an awkward layout.

That default style is very recognizable. I am seeing it everywhere.

I guess it is like the early days of wordprocessing, where you saw Comic Sans everywhere.