Definitely not AI, but if these are new commissions it's not unreasonable to suspect an element of self-parody, playing up the aspects of the originals that amuse people.

> For what it's worth, I'd guess there is a real author, whose command of the English language is worse than ChatGPT, and who asked the LLM to rewrite his work in the right style for the website.

Sure. But if the author doesn't notice the nonsense that the LLM is introducing, it harms as well as helping.

"Primed for colour" is a strangely uninteresting thing to be saying about the sacks. If this requires any non-trivial effort, it would make more sense to describe the process. If the author actually wanted to talk about that, chances are the LLM removed useful information.

And putting aside that "These weren’t just any flour sacks either — they were durable, easy to roll up, and ready for reuse." is three "classic LLM tropes" in a row ("not just any"; a gratuitous emdash where any dash at all only becomes necessary because of that introduction; an ascending tricolon), it's just a bizarre thing to say. First off, if the sacks were sewn together to make a larger banner, then it doesn't make sense to talk about rolling up the individual sacks. Second, the phrasing suggests something exceptional, but these are all totally ordinary and trivial properties of pretty much any sort of flour sack. Many different materials are used, but all of them would be "easy to roll up" when empty, and making them durable and reusable is just common sense in that environment. The artists were clearly just using a fairly obvious material they had at hand, so this sudden bit of marketing-speak is entirely out of place. Third, the features highlighted all have to do with the sacks, but not with either each other nor the banners. In particular, a sack being "ready for reuse" is ready for reuse as a sack, not for its material being repurposed for something completely different (we typically call that "recycling", not "reuse").

The bit about "the designs" may well even be true, but it's a complete non-sequitur here, a point that doesn't really merit deeper explanation.

The writing isn't just "banal" but nonsensical in context, veering off into free-association. There's more potentially being hallucinated here than just the "facts". Never mind the accuracy or truth of what's written; this sort of thing makes it hard to accept that the prose even reflects the author's intent.

> The text adds some pieces of information you wouldn't get from the images alone

But this is exactly where being AI-written bothers me! I don't really mind the style (the LLMs have learned to write a particular way because 1. people write that way and 2. other people like it) and I don't have the "boooo stochastic parrot plagiarism machines booooooooo" sense of disgust at AI that some people have, but I do know that when LLMs write things those things are ... not always true.

(Of course when people write things they aren't always true either, but the LLMs get things wrong more than humans do.)

Which means that when the article tells me something interesting -- flour sacks! mobile cinemas! exhibited in galleries! -- I can't trust it. And that, for me, is the main damage that outsourcing your writing to an LLM does: it destroys trust.

> Did any of these things actually exist?

The single live link suggests that they do.

https://deadlypreygallery.com

Good comparison, thanks, helps put it into perspective.

Either of these better titles or no?

“…from Ghana, Africa…”

“…from Africa’s Ghana…”

(China, Asia & Asia’s China don’t really fit so probably not?)

True, although Asia is also nearly twice the size of Africa, which might have something to do with that.

This is spot on. The real reasons the headline is "Africa" and not "Ghana" are:

- To sensationalize the story by positioning it as a another manifestation of a supposed "African" nature/character.

- The idea that African countries by themselves are too insignificant to seek/need to know about, but an entire continents? OK, maybe. Many people are comfortable in ignorance, real or feigned.

Putting Ghana on the title would have been just fine. I'm Ghanaian btw.

It's not clickbait. The article provides exactly what it says.

The only debatable part is that it's not all of Africa. But otherwise it's a very accurate description of the whole article.

Clickbait is "You won't believe the art that came out of this continent!" or "Look at the wild things artists did to attract an audience!".

How exactly is that clickbait? You might not like it, but that doesn't make it clickbait. That's like saying it's clickbait to say Europe in a headline instead of Austria.

words, words, words.

a shit stirrer shows up and now 2/3 of the comments in the thread are offtopic. is that the kind of commentary you seek?