Why Clip Art Was Everywhere Until It Wasn't [video]

53 pointsposted 3 days ago
by surprisetalk
(youtube.com)

38 Comments

gr33nq

3 days ago

Brings me back to the days of going to dgl.microsoft.com in Internet Explorer to explore the library of Clip Art graphics online. This was during the Office XP and 2003 days. Even today, that style comes across as far more authentic than the tacky AI-generated flyers you see plastered everywhere now.

Xirdus

3 days ago

I remember people being scoffed at for using clipart, for pretty much the same reasons people are scoffed at today for using AI (low effort, samey, doesn't fit the rest of the visual style, and subjectively ugly.)

Terr_

2 days ago

I feel like clipart was... honest low-effort (or at least low compared to bespoke art) whereas generative-AI stuff has a connotation of disrespect or deceit.

Xirdus

2 days ago

I definitely remember the same kind of disrespect being associated with clipart use.

xnorswap

2 days ago

Can people not earnestly cut-corners with genAI imagery?

DaSHacka

2 days ago

No. I'm overall an AI proponent but even I feel an innate sense of disgust when seeing AI-generated flyers. Feels like some cyberpunk dystopia where machines have begun to organize, advertise, and run events for the 'trite human cattle' to keep them occupied.

Lazily-placed text in an otherwise blank word document that gets printed and stapled haphazardly to a posterboard is infinitely preferable.

I feel similar about LLM-generated text, though that's even more egregious. If I have to get one more claude-written email from the company CEO I'm going postal. You have a slight excuse with art as most people couldn't draw to save their lives (including myself), but to write is literally to think. And, in the case of executives they have ONE job (to lead by communicating), outsourcing such a basic soft-skill focused role to AI is just pathetic.

Xirdus

2 days ago

> And, in the case of executives they have ONE job (to lead by communicating), outsourcing such a basic soft-skill focused role to AI is just pathetic.

Weren't executives always outsourcing writing to their (human) assistants?

Terr_

2 days ago

I think the disgust aspect might be from a kind of uncanny-valley.

Generative art and text-slop have lots of surface features which lead us to expect quality or effort, and then we're betrayed when we look closer. Our natural reaction to betrayal is to shun the actors behind it.

FDEUp

3 days ago

The Office suite during that era was very legit.

KellyCriterion

2 days ago

OT:

In the late 90s, I was at a party and the DJs were playing really cool techno styles I hadnt heard before. (back then it was about Sample-CD & soundsets, Gigasampler etc., all that stuff)

Curious as I am, I asked him what sets he used for his samples - he said: I can highly recommend all these Office-Clip-Art CD samples, because they are not used by a lot of people :-D

Rodmine

2 days ago

"High art" is just what the chosen people tell you to value. Be your own individual and you can choose what is of artistic value to you.

w-ll

3 days ago

Is there a name for the "clip art" or the style that like almost every 'Dry Cleaner' uses. I dont think its clip are but it shares many of the qualities and im talking coast to coast.

kid64

3 days ago

Yeah, "pop art".

ameliaquining

3 days ago

Would anyone who watched the video like to tell us what the answer to the headline question is?

janalsncm

3 days ago

It filled a niche at the time when there weren’t a lot of easily accessible stock images of things. Clip art was the successor to analog “clip books” used for things like ads in newspapers.

Once the internet filled that niche with more and better pictures, shipping a fixed database of images with your software didn’t make sense anymore.

It’s a good video, worth a watch on 1.5x.

kalexandrite

2 days ago

Also it was interesting how the availability of memory increasing led to far more bloat and devaluing clip art generally in the minds eye of the consumer who associated it with its context as part of a larger collection of shoddy and potentially not compatible or well formatted images that came packaged together. (At least I found this context associated degradation that was weirdly the result of progress a worthwhile frame for understanding some of the distaste, and also why the images now may seem fresh and less distasteful - since they have an entirely new context and are far less common in this moment.)

pino83

2 days ago

Thank you for the summary!

I'm not the one who asked for the summary. I just don't want to constantly watch video clips for statements worth a few lines of text. And I try to avoid BigTech. So what I'll definitely not do is clicking arbitrary random YouTube links that flood the web. So far I can definitely continue living absolutely fine without all the wisdom entrenched in all these clips.

... but if someone or something is able to give me a quick textual summary, even better.

kalexandrite

2 days ago

I want to encourage viewing - I have listened twice and watched once in its entirety at regular speed and appreciated the clear contextualization and characterization of certain kinds of commercial art in relationship to culture and technology, and the way such art’s popularity and target market allows for interesting retrospective insights into the values, preoccupations and assumptions of associated cultures that it illustrates (literally and figuratively).

The video also addresses the roll of tech in shaping what kind of images can circulate and the stylistic dependencies that result.

If you are interested in thoughtful media criticism (as I am, as I currently finish my PhD specifically investigating similar questions) I recommend this video. It went beyond my expectations for what I recognize as an under-considered element of visual culture (IMO).

abracadaniel

a day ago

YouTube itself provides ai summaries without watching the video now. Click the ai button and then click “summarize video”. You don’t need to play the video at all or sit through an ad and it doesn’t yet hide anything from the user to try to get you to watch.

pino83

10 hours ago

That's at least better than actually watching the video there, indeed.

If there is another service between me and Google which isolates me from BigTech's trackers, that's even a lot better.

fbunau

2 days ago

hey I built a product on this exact premise. I'm still working on it, please check it out if you are interested. https://knowstash.ai/

here is the answer to your question: https://share.knowstash.ai/s/s549aa4c281c349389c757a10183be4...

I'm still working on it, if you want to test it out I'd be glad to give you some credits in exchange for some feedback

pino83

2 days ago

Hi.

That's absolute a great service. I think I've seen a similar one (or exactly this one??) in the past already.

Some minor pitfalls that I personally see:

- There is AI involved, so you can never actually be sure how accurate it is. For the typical YouTube clip that flies by (we had supersonic trebuchets and whatnot), that's absolutely fine. Of course it is, because so far, not consuming them at all was also absolutely fine for me.

- If this is an online service, privacy-wise the solution is still not perfect. Admittedly: It's an improvement anyways, because it's then not Google anymore but just fbunau who builds a profile of my habits. At least assuming that you do not eventually sell me to Google.

Things that I could imagine for some version 2 or 3:

- Give it a text box, so I can ask it stuff like "did the video clip mention ...?" or "did in go deeper in ...?" or maybe just "what do you think how old is that influencer and how competent does [s]he feel? Does it even make sense to read the recap or should I move on right away?" or whatever comes to mind.

Admittedly, that'd absolutely be just nice-to-have. If that's not aligned to your big plan, just forget it.

- Have a browser add-on that automatically replaces inline YT players with the recap text. (I've seen you have a Chrome add-on, but I haven't tried whether it actually does that or not, admittedly (it WOULD work on Firefox as well, I guess?))

In general, please don't count on my as a potential future customer. Constantly checking whether I still have enough coins inserted and constantly inserting new ones would already be too much of a hassle for me, I guess. And I wouldn't want that automated either.

I'm just not good as a customer. Last time my bank invited me in order to "upgrade" my bank account to a more comfortable one with higher fees, I left the bank with a cheaper one instead. :D They've never invited me again...

Personally I'd also need to get used to the term "YouTube companion". I don't like BigTech and I try to avoid it. I don't want a "YouTube companion", but a "YouTube displacement", or a "cure for a disease called YouTube that polluted the www". :) But, yeah, in the end, that's just wording.

I really like the basic idea of that service, though! And I wouldn't say so if it wouldn't be true.

Ideally, you would find lots and lots of customers in the first place, so articles on websites will become actual articles again, and not just a trap that teases you to some inline YT player in the bottom. And then we all don't need such summaries anymore. The web is cured again at that point. Ideally you've earned enough money until then! ;)

janalsncm

2 days ago

> There is AI involved, so you can never actually be sure how accurate it is

If you don’t want to watch the full video, how will you know whether the summary is accurate or not?

One option is you could extract the transcript from the video (using AI, since the author-provided transcripts aren’t necessarily accurate) and read it. The technology for this already exists.

> Give it a text box, so I can ask it stuff

This is going to use AI as well.

pino83

a day ago

>> > There is AI involved, so you can never actually be sure how accurate it is > If you don’t want to watch the full video, how will you know whether the summary is accurate or not?

Yes. That's just what I said, right? In the end, you have no clue what energy drink, shaver, VPN or whatever they were going to sell you. ^^

But for random topics like 'Clip Art' or 'Supersonic Trebuchets', I think I don't want to read the full transcript either. :) It's going to be a lot of text, and most of it is drivel and padding.

In that regard the knowstash.ai summary was indeed exactly what I wanted!

>> Give it a text box, so I can ask it stuff > This is going to use AI as well.

Well, sure it does. But you are trying to connect two considerations together here that weren't meant to have any connection. I don't want the text box as a mitigation against inaccuracy.

Maybe (particularly for larger videos), I have some questions that are not answered by the summary (that's the point of a summary). And maybe the model can give me some helpful answers.

And it will have the same dangers of being inaccurate when AI has a bad day. And that's still fine for me for random YT clips passing by.

DoneWithAllThat

2 days ago

The section of the video on “scratch board art” claiming it was ubiquitous is very odd to me. I’ve never seen art in that style despite being of the generation that would have. It’s discussed in the video as if it was some kind of cultural touchstone of the era and I promise it was not.

buildsjets

2 days ago

Where and when are you from? It was commonplace in New York in the 1970s and 1980s, both for small business signs and school art projects.

Almondsetat

2 days ago

Clipart was the AI slop of the time. People with zero creativity or taste creating horrible flyers, posters, letters, etc. by randomly vomiting effects upon effects on text with very dubious positioning and proportions

bananaflag

2 days ago

Indeed, and as with AI, people felt very "empowered" by it. "Wow, I can do this" no, you just pushed some random buttons.

To be clear, I am also criticizing myself, I was an avid Microsoft Word user back then.