AI poster wins Ohio State Fair contest

"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.

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

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?

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...

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?

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

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.

Ironic.

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

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

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.

Acknowledge? Admit? Recognize? Fine.

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

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

Most can’t _recognize_ GPT & Gemini posters.

Good point on preview of feature.

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.

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

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

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

I think #3 was maybe the best entry.

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 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.