About Me
Hi. My day job is building software for people who pay me to build software. In the evenings, I build software for people who don’t pay me to build software (myself included). I mostly write about building software on here. That probably doesn’t come as a shock.
Latest Post: They Don't Have to Be Horrible
Before the other day, I can’t say that I had ever considered whether it was possible for AI slop flyers to not be horrible. I will suppose, for the purpose of argument, that not-horribleness exists merely at a superficial level, that not-horribleness reflects some aesthetic judgement. I will suppose that you can put aside the question of whether something AI-generated is inherently not good—that you can[1][1]1. You cannot. overlook any of the ethical questions.
Frontier models have truly mind-boggling numbers of parameters. Is it so unfathomable that some of those configurations might produce novel outputs? I don’t think so—I find it pretty unsurprising. The question of whether it’s possible for these tools to produce anything other than offensively[2][2]2. Putting aside that the reason you find it offensive is because you know that it’s AI-generated. ugly slop is a fundamentally uninteresting one.
The sort of restaurant owner who puts in front of their business a sign showing the most trypophobia-inducing depiction of a cheeseburger known to man has no interest in the aesthetic quality of the image.
If the images you use to advertise your business could be generated by typing one sentence into the free tier of ChatGPT, it’s over. Aesthetics be damned. Arguments about how, with a little more effort and a few prompt tweaks and some more tokens, you could something obtain aesthetically-pleasing—or, at least, unobjectionable—will fall on uncaring ears. The cost, or absence thereof, is the point. The lack of effort is the point.