> I think this is the actual image: https://cdn.saffire.com/images.ashx?t=ig&rid=OhioStateFair&i...

"Celebrating Ohio's and America's 250th birthday"

Ohio is 223 years old, having officially joined the United States as the 17th state in 1803.

> they didn't explicitly forbid AI

Yes they did; the contestants must be at least 18 years old and residents of Ohio.

AI is neither.

Would it be within contest rules if an 19-year-old resident of Ohio served as an artistic director, giving suggestions to a 12-year-old from Kentucky who does the actual work?

It immediately looks like AI slop because nearly every square inch is filled with with something, however meaningless and useless it might be to the overall composition.

AI is good at filling an image with shit, and bad at knowing when to leave space and what isn’t necessary.

> Notably, the zipline is all wacky, and two piggies are #1, probably more things I didn't notice at a skim?

To nitpick, the Flags can't decide on if the US had 9 or 11 original colonies -- for celebrating "America's 250th birthday" the person that created it could have at least made sure the flag wasn't weird. Sheldon would be having a field day...

Jebus, that image is dogshit. There is no way in a million years I would put my name on something like that. It truly is the age of the shameless. If you have no shame and no ethics, you really can go far.

Huh, I thought I was reasonably good at this but didn't see them.

Rather than getting annoyed about it, maybe it could be a fun puzzle? Spot the AI glitches in this image.

Maybe do that contest before giving the award, though, among the finalists?

Maybe it's just me, but that font and its layout feels extremely recognizable to me as the "AI image sign font" that I've already seen on posterboards for a bunch of restaurants in SF.

> …[we] will be reevaluating the rules and processes for 2027…

…by which time we will have hoped the public will have forgotten about all this and moved on.

Ribbons are splotchy and weird, and have designs that don't line up and stars that are misformed.

Are they going to use it as an official poster or something? It is it just a side competition? Feels like they might come to regret spreading it. Both the first and the second smell rather strongly of AI, though the winner seems the most egregious.

The zipline? That's not a zipline.

Ironic.

It’s good and things aren’t that blatantly wrong but I can tell it’s AI. It’s not the mistakes you pointed out, but there’s something about the overall image and I can’t put my finger on it.

For whatever reason, the photo is point. People are only doing it for the photo and only doing the photo for the competition. I agree that we lost something, I just also think a majority of people don’t know what’s missing: they just put effort to make the photo, rather than to make the desk

Theres a strange element of shamelessness to it, though I also think theres (sometimes) another of adoption/novelty. To you or I, steeped in the internet and hacker news culture, its pretty clear that sharing AI work as your own is a transgression; an inherently rude act. Its even impolite to share ai output in general, unless the discussion calls for it. I think some people I see out in the world doing it are still encountering this stuff and thinking through the consequences and ideas and experimenting for themselves and having moments of joy and wanting to share. I've seen this with "poems" people I know have gotten it to make, shared with me with genuine happiness on their faces.

But after a bit more time spent using it, and working with the culture, right-thinking and socially aware people really ought to develop a sense that what was superficially impressive is the same each time. The first poem is the same as the hundredth, the pictures all look the same. And they start to think about the lack of effort, the fact that anyone can "make" them, and that everyone has the same ideas, and they quieten down.

The only people left using it are the next generation of clueless/naive, and those who are shameless - trying to use it to grift the remaining clueless. Unfortunately the inherent speed of the technology makes these shameless few able to be VERY loud across the internet. I have yet to meet one in person

It's the same with the tokenmaxxing phenomenon with the leaderboards, of course people will game any system, and I'm also impressed by how well people can do so, sometimes it's honestly shocking.

Were the bonus prizes good? Anything worth putting a ton of effort into?

i think over time, the bar will rise, you’d have to imagine how low quality the submissions prior to AI would’ve been since most people aren’t that good at decorating nor have the time

i think as the novelty wears off on the average person, it’ll probably be seen akin to stick figure drawings in the future

I disagree... while those are definitely better art-wise, they are not better marketing-wise. I imagine this is why the ai one won because the others do nothing to actually sell the fair.

This is where the AI submissions get really sad.

If everyone was competing based on their AI submissions then I wouldn’t care. It can be fun to have a slop-off where everyone competes to see what they can coax out of the LLM.

When a contest is designed to get people to compete with each other, it’s just sad when the win goes to someone who did the least amount of work. In this case, the result isn’t even good.

If the people judging weren’t familiar with AI they probably mistook the details and textures as evidence of high effort and skill input. If you didn’t know better about AI, some of the quirks like the messed up lines might look like someone’s awkward attempts at a unique artistic style.

The 5th almost feels like an AI benchmark akin to the infamous Pelican.

Those look so much better. I’m not even saying those are definitely hand crafted but they certainly don’t have the “slop” aesthetic.

They look much better. I don't know if it's just my exposure to AI images but the first place one looks so obviously like AI slop.

It's not a fact.

I will never accept AI generated items as creative nor valid entries in a contest.

Try not to tell people what they need to accept.

Acknowledge? Admit? Recognize? Fine.

Accept? Not bother caring about? Don't demand people do that.

This.100%. As people often lucky enough to work in niche sectors where users care to about the tiniest details we forget sometimes the majority of "stuff" out there exists without a soul already. Think of boring document templates, shop signs, cheap clothing designs, etc. And to he honest AI will probably raise the bar for all that stuff by a lot. Ofc like you mentioned it'll sometimes lead to misleading content (eg made up food pictures in menus), but if that happens that'll just be a byproduct of the service provider and consumers not caring enough to make that have an impact on the underlying business.

People don’t care means if every poster were labeled “AI generated” with a black banner at the bottom, people wouldn’t care.

Most can’t _recognize_ GPT & Gemini posters.

Good point on preview of feature.

Enough people cared that they decided to ban AI submissions in the future. Did you even click the link before commenting?

They don't need to care, they just need to learn to tune it out, after which it becomes ineffective.

Characteristic of this style of AI art is pseudo-detail: the artwork looks busy but when you inspect the detail, it contains no informational value. How could it, you cannot extract more detail from a prompt than what was put in.

Contrast with a Where's Waldo picture, for example that is equally information dense but contains actually delightful jokes and variation that makes it interesting to look at.

Good design doesn't work because people notice the clear information hierarchy. Good design works because good information hierarchy means people don't have friction trying to interpret it.

It looks like the sort of generic advertisement art that was common before AI.

However, I'll say that at least it's not Corporate Memphis.

or just look at the faceless and weirdly misshapen 'people' in the crowd. Genuinely who was judging this? Also I'm pretty sure Ohio isn't 250 years old, this is just crazy

It is full of obvious AIgen artifacts

What’s more interesting is that whomever the judges were didn’t seem to notice or care.

It was only until afterward were they upset

Nice the judges aren’t big users of image generators though? (Neutral they don’t read HN/Ars/etc. where they’d see examples as non-users.)

It is very noticeable. Funny how it jumps right out when you've seen AI slop often enough. #5 is good and looks "real", whatever that means any more.

There are two number "1" pigs, and two of them have malformed tails. Sloppy even for slop!

That stood out to me too. This could have been a lot better with just a little actual work.

It's really important to define what "people who can leverage AI" means. I've found that using AI judiciously with close human supervision provides an advantage, but using the latest models with the latest harnesses can look like it's giving you a huge advantage superficially while actually costing you more time in the long run.

The only advantage in using generative AI is that the market is engaged in a bunch of FOMO over it, so it looks good on your resume. That's it. It makes you far worse at doing your actual job, though. I have to deal with the slop that AI enthusiasts put out at work all the time, and they are going to get fired as soon as AI isn't trendy because their work sucks ass.

> The other four top entries are all obvious human efforts

Creator of 2nd place said they used AI but then used photoshop etc for manual composition/paint over. https://www.reddit.com/r/Columbus/s/cJQqjC7C7q

#2 looks a little AI to me.

I think #3 was maybe the best entry.

New storefronts with AI logos, food with AI caricatures of the chef, small taxi companies with GPT’s handiwork wrapped right over the doors…

Yes. A much better poster. Less busy, reads quickly. Funny and relevant. Here is her website: https://nikkismetters.com/

Totally agree, it was a simple bold design that looks to done by hand. What a low bar we are moving to.

On a positive note, I think I found her artistic portfolio online and it's absolutely beautiful. She can rest easy knowing she has 1000x the talent of the AI slop winner.

I actively think the AI poster looks bad and RLHF reveals the poor taste of the general public.

Yes, just like we accepted steroids in sports.

I'm hoping something of the opposite happens.

I still see airbrushing, along with things like music quantization, auto-tune (and manual tuning), "perfect" design, etc etc, as hugely problematic (well, airbrushing is the worst with tangible social harms among the things I listed there). All of these things are possible to use artfully, but that they've become the norm is actually pretty gross, and many people haven't so much accepted them as they have been beaten into submission to stop complaining about them.

I think this is really lost on anyone making the argument that "we've seen this before and everyone will just succumb."

What I've noticed is how much "booster" types say that "This is unlike anything that has ever happened before" and yet somehow they think the general acceptance story is going to play out "like it always does." I'm getting into "vibes" territory here because I have no data, but the AI-backlash does feel much stronger than before. I feels like there are a lot more non-artists getting not-so-trivially pissed off about this bullshit. We'll see, I guess.

What baffles me isn't even the AI part, it's that the judges showed absolutely no taste and just picked the thing with the most pointless pixel-filling detail in it.