Please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN, and particularly not unsubstantive + negative ones, which kill the kind of discussion we're hoping to have here (i.e. curious and thoughtful).

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. Note this one:

"Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative."

This an oddly cynical comment, that I think says more about the observer than the observed.

People are having fun making images.

Like they do all sorts of things on the web.

Making an image is as simple as visiting a web-page.

That's it.

The sheer waste that accompanies image and video genAI is actually terrifying.

I challenge OpenAI to put a "your carbon footprint" field next to each generation. If you have nothing to hide, more information is surely better, right?

I know of entire media departments that went from - let’s hire an artist and see what they come up with to - let’s produce hundreds if not thousands of images to explore all possible ideas (and end up with something bland anyway).

Do you want to know how many identical questions ChatGPT gets asked every week, recomputing its answer each time because people stopped sharing results? I don't, but I'm sure it far exceeds 3 billion. "How to center a div", "how to install this and that package", "what is this pop culture reference", "who is this famous person",...

Reading the comments here is worse.

I’m doing renovation . I slap a prompt in a tile store over my room and design several types of tiles and paint from one prompt while causally browsing in almost real time .

Isn’t that the future ? I generated 200 images alone in this use case .

What’s the alternative to that ? Send it tomorrow someone who hate their job moving tiles in the toilet , may money , wait 1 week

In my home city, I started to see banners all made with AI.

From my kids schools to banners for food places.

Groan. Your comment is the most depressing thing I've read today. What a sad way to look at the world. People are doing stuff and having fun. Meanwhile a whole sub-cult is sucking from the doom straw and mumbling carbon, water, greed, blah. The sport of Golf consumes far more resources than any AI data center.

to be fair you need to create a dozen images to get a decent one. Many times i need to get to almost what i want using paint.net and hope chatgpt removes the aliasing/cleans up the pixel boundaries without messing anything up - i'm not complaining though, still faster and cleaner than photoshop -- when it works

Must be early. Try the news.

Insert "Quit Having Fun" meme here.

Why?

May I ask why this is “most depressing thing I have read today”.

Concerns about misinformation? Compute/energy use? Creative work Replaced by AI?

Having a lot of fun with my son using an image of him and dressing him in all kinds of costumes. How is that depressing to you?

Typical HN luddite mindset at this point. This is an exciting time!

How many memes/gifs do you think have been created by hand or with generators over the last ~20 years?