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#poster#image#more#ohio#art#something#don#didn#care#slop
Discussion (123 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Notably, the zipline is all wacky, and two piggies are #1, probably more things I didn't notice at a skim?
I guess they didn't explicitly forbid AI, and it wasn't noticed until after the winner was selected, and now you can't "roll back"? It seems this was later added to the page:
> [...] we recognize that the use of AI has changed greatly over the last few years in ways we didn’t anticipate, and will be reevaluating the rules and processes for 2027, which will include prohibiting the use of AI [...]
July 7 2026 mirror of the page without that updated notice: https://web.archive.org/web/20260707145158/https://www.ohios...
"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.
> "Celebrating Ohio's and America's 250th birthday"
> Ohio is 223 years old
You might have misread the text? I see something different in the “Celebrating Ohio and America’s 250th birthday”, which I read as celebrating:
1. Ohio overall 2. America’s 250th
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?
Not to mention that any Ai-entrant piece could be duplicated by any other entrant.
AI is good at filling an image with shit, and bad at knowing when to leave space and what isn’t necessary.
Teacher: You just have to know when to take their finger paintings away from 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?
Also seen in every FB post by small businesses as well as every garage sale post in my country
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 person running the contest wrote up something about how impressed she was with the creative use of AI.
The whole thing makes me sad - wouldn't the idea of this sort of thing be to scrounge up flags of obscure countries or make them out of paper and do a bit of arts and crafts to decorate your desk for the month? Instead people were just throwing 50 words into an AI system a few times and getting out a photo to submit.
Though its often much, much more effort to have judges who are also experts in the relevant field and give them the time to inspect in person the things to be judged. I don't think competitions will ever escape this "studying for the test" aspect fully. Its less actively harmful at least than the worst behaviors ive heard of (sabotage etc)
for a more programming related example, the sheer number of hackathons ive entered over the years where the winners had a relevant idea related to something in the news recently, and did basically nothing but a nonfunctional ui mockup of a crud app and won over teams that tried to make actually functional/fun things.
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
1. Can I benefit from it?
A Yes -> Do it
B No -> Don't do it
Variable: What is the risk of getting caught and is it worth risking?
Many or most people operate on this programming, AI or no AI.
I'm aware that social trust in some places is lower than others (and that im lucky enough to live in a place with high social trust), but I really don't think this is true. Though ruthless optimisers do exist, my experience suggests the idea that most people do this is laughable. I'd guess 1% or thereabouts. I think most people are kinda bumbling along on autopilot trying to make people happy and avoid others getting too mad at them without expending too much effort(not the same as minimizing effort) + without deviating too much from their routine.
Meditate a while, if you will, on the results of this poll: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn0njd4e2evo
I met a few of the ruthless optimiser types back when I was in the startup world. They aren't too bad if you can keep them at arms length, predictable in their own way. But if they get some power over you or you have to spend a lot of time with them it can quickly become miserable.
Not really worth putting effort into, but if I'd been in charge of the contest I simply wouldn't have awarded the prize, let alone decided to award 3 of them (initially it was only supposed to be one prize) for AI generated content.
i think as the novelty wears off on the average person, it’ll probably be seen akin to stick figure drawings in the future
4th: https://cdn.saffire.com/images.ashx?t=ig&rid=OhioStateFair&i...
5th: https://cdn.saffire.com/images.ashx?t=ig&rid=OhioStateFair&i...
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.
Think of all the poor typography around you. If you have a critical eye and care you can spot all sorts of bad choices: That's a preview of the future. AI-generated disposable art (posters, billboards, menus etc) that is orthogonal to the actual thing being sold will continue being the norm.
Acknowledge? Admit? Recognize? Fine.
Accept? Not bother caring about? Don't demand people do that.
This does happen without AI already. My local shawarma joint has a deal of the day poster of a chicken shawarma that's obviously not theirs. Next to a bottle of coke.
The poster is sponsored by Coke and the restaurant just slapped on a price.
Most can’t _recognize_ GPT & Gemini posters.
Good point on preview of feature.
Do you have evidence that people would care?
The specific case of this poster it appears they are claiming it was disclosed by the submitter that it was AI and still picked. Maybe that's diffusing the situation after, but it seems most likely these people selected and asked to care about the poster knew it was AI and still selected it. Most people would care less than they did.
The fact that a clearly sloptacular image won first place seems to corroborate that indeed people do like it. Until people's tastes change and they learn to recognize and immunize themselves against slop, the models will continue to generate it.
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.
Note the pigs are numbered 1, 2, 1. And the gondola with a floating cable and another that terminates at a tent top.
However, I'll say that at least it's not Corporate Memphis.
I read it as celebrating:
* Ohio as a state, and * America’s 250th
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
The implication is that all the other entries were even worse.
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 suppose it's funny then that the winner is fully AI, second place is partial AI, and fully human creations are the losers.
I think #3 was maybe the best entry.
https://www.mnstatefair.org/exhibits/art-and-garden/commemor...
Sadly they stopped doing them starting last year I believe :(
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/sep/19/liberal-dem...
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.
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.
It's very similar to when the internet got big and those who knew how to use it had a significant advantage over those who didn't. AI hasn't really diffused to mass audience yet, at least not to the point of using it to the extent coders do like making custom and even one-off apps, using CC or Codex instead of ChatGPT directly since giving it terminal access makes in 100x more powerful than the web interface.
Another is someone making a workout plan or a meal plan. Coders will ask AI to make a plan and add it to their calendar using GOG Cli. It's a fundamental shift in thinking and that hasn't diffused to the mass public yet. But just like the internet, it will get to them eventually. In the mean time, those who leverage AI like that will have an advantage.
For everyone and every other situation, hard disagree.
It looks AI-generated. All that detail. Short words in decorative fonts. AI doesn't know what "Midway" means in a fair context.
Imagine everyone just prompts the same AI and and the judge uses the same AI to judge them all. Why make a competition in the first place? Just prompt and create the damn poster and leave the whole community thing behind.
I'm not trying to be ignorant but I just can't imagine how it'd be in their shoes, I can't understand how AI slop still just works so many of these people, like it's been 3 years now, how is it possible that you'd be impressed or satisfied by this?