I hadn't even looked at the floral pattern. It's awful.

I wonder how pissed Apple was when they realized they had paid him a few thousand (going by his posted rates) for "art" that used gen AI to a significant enough degree to have nonsensical components.

>for example, the sharp outline around an out-of-focus xmas tree feels like a human-made artistic choice

If I had to guess, it looks like he did the components of it separately and then just pasted them all in together. For example, you'd expect the light on the plate to brighten the milk carton near it. And the shadow on the plate doesn't line up with the bright light shining on the carton's side. These are just classic sloppy bad artwork mistake.

> And for what it's worth, the image pretty consistently trips gen AI image detectors (e.g., https://hivemoderation.com/ai-generated-content-detection).

Notwithstanding your previous points, these sorts of AI detectors flag many false positives, they're not worth relying on. The only one that could actually work is specific watermarking in the images themselves, such as what Google does with SynthID in their generated images.

The structure of the carton is off. The spout. The opposite end of it.

Being a trained artist myself I don’t think many artists would deliberately make that kind of design choice considering given the overall style of the artwork.

Thing is, from a commercial standpoint, who cares? It's an image used to promote a TV show on a social media account. There will be a tiny, loud community of AI haters who make a stink on social media, but the vast majority of people will be oblivious, and the quality issues with the image will have zero bearing on whether anyone watches the show; whereas the fact that the post exists probably WILL drive a few to watch who wouldn't have otherwise.

The fact is we're in a world where algorithms consume more attention than ever. There's more content than ever. We're more sedentary and glued to useless shit on a screen than ever. We consume content like we're pigs, and what do you feed pigs? Slop. I don't like this, and I try to keep my diet as healthy as I can, but it's probably still worse than it was 20 years ago, and most people don't care at all. It's all consumption for the sake of mindless distraction. The slop exists because the demand exists. People will watch the show anyway.

> 1) The maze on the carton can't be solved.

It can if you just go around the maze.

There are two giant loopholes in the statement "In general, I always draw and paint by hand and sometimes incorporate standard digital tools"

The first is there can be 'non-general' cases, and this could be one of them.

The second is a lot of 'standard digital tools' include AI features these days. A person can use generative AI without leaving photoshop.

"I always draw and paint by hand and sometimes incorporate standard digital tools" would apply if I were to make a 30 second scribble in MS Paint and then upload it to ChatGPT or similar tools and ask them to make a version of it in whatever style I wanted.

Most likely, he did exactly that. Made a rough sketch and then achieved the final product either by just handing it to a model (which I'm guessing based on the maze) or he used gen AI tooling in his digital painting software to polish it into a finished painting.

It's not an accident that he's being so cagey and using exactly that verbiage.

> The days of having time to make something great are mostly over.

Such times never existed, you just failed to notice. Flat design took over not because it was pretty, but because it was cheap and versatile. That's why I love the furry community - you can see those people value art as a goal itself, rather than a mean to achieve other (often monetary) goals.

AI is essentially austerity. The entire culture is about to become McDonalds.

Truth. It's a hard pill to swallow. But this is the reality. It's irrelevant if it has our approval or not.

I imagine a device using a large metal serving spoon to throw vomit on a queue of metal cafeteria trays.

An update to the previous post notes that matches the actual prop: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/12/27/slopibus

Follow the link on Gruber's own post. The milk label thing occurs on a prop on the actual show.

The maze has no viable path either, and odd half-drawn lines.

It's funny that this comment is also an example of a confidently wrong judgment. The props are 100% accurate to what's going on in the show. Not really possible to explain why without spoiling it, but the milk cartons are supposed to be suspicious.

How much evidence do we actually have that AI wasn't used for these "real props"?

(Personally I don't care about my ability to tell the difference between what's AI and what's not; I care about my ability to tell the difference between well-crafted and not, and that seems to be functioning fine)

Vince Gilligan has stated in interviews that the anti-AI themes are coincidental and Pluribus was written before the AI boom.

If it was intentional, they wouldn't be as shy about admitting it.

But as far as your "correction" goes, even if the anti-genAI overtones at its inception are a coincidence, it wouldn't be too crazy for someone making related art today to play up the coincidence anyway. So I think your original idea was still a reasonable guess.

Everyone in the industry who is trying to find a way to weasel and deny using AI is using the same "incorporate standard digital tools" bullshit phrase. I think Epic said the exact same phrase when the Fortnite community caught them using AI art in the latest season of the game.

It's not that it's ugly--it's that it's obvious AI slop. We are, for the time being, still in that "uncanny valley" phase with AI art where a human who knows what to look for can still easily discern AI slop from art. For now, there are still telltale signs.

I think there must be an "uncanny valley" for artwork. It is somewhere between norman rockwell and aunt tilly's nature painting. Closer to norman rockwell in detail.

You are wrong; the image is clearly AI made.

I don't know, I think we're just finding that it also applies neatly to a lot of stuff we were already seeing before genAI. Edit: "blogspam", for instance, is almost the same phenomenon.