alt Hacker NewsI think this is fundamental. People will probably dislike whatever it is that AI images look like, because whatever they look like is going to be associated with cheap. They could have a totally different aesthetic and I think most people's conception of cheap would adapt to whatever that is.
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thrance • today at 12:15 PM
Very true. My theory is that if AI was able to produce a diverse enough range of styles (not artistic style, more like "artist's touch/bias"), then it would be much better. Exactly like Claude, talking to it wouldn't be so grating if it had, say, a 1000 different "writing styles" instead of the single one we have to engage with.
The current models have a fundamental architectural flaw: Every pixel they output costs the model as much effort as every other one. When you see detail in a work a human produced, the fact that there is detail communicates something about what the artist was focussing on. It shows you what they cared about, and by extension what you, the viewer, should care about to understand the piece. The AI, as currently designed, can’t do that, because it’s outputting entire raster images at once (and multi-pass generations tend to degrade into melty nonsense), it emphasises everything, and so emphasises nothing.
The “AI look” is a manifestation of the architecture itself, and that’s why you can really train or prompt around it. At best, bigger models have been able to partially suppress the worst aspects of it by throwing more parameters at the problem, but put the models under even a tiny bit of stress and the same flaws reemerge.