The belief that we were living in a golden age of hand-made visual beauty before AI arrived is obvious nonsense.
The golden age of illustration ended when Illustrator arrived. After that, everything became a mess of cliches and clip art, culminating with Google's Material Design, where everything looks simultaneously soulless, heartless, and bland.
AI brought some colour back. A lot of the imagery is kitsch, but illustration has always tended to kitsch, so nothing really changed there.
This is the irony of the anti-AI purity hunt. Most human-made work is crap. It always has been.
AI hasn't suddenly sent the quality of creativity off a cliff. It's commoditised the low standard of most previous hand-made work and made it easier to access.
The high end - the real talent - still stands out. But most people can't afford it, and even fewer people appreciate it.
alt Hacker News
No, they used to call that "illustration."
The belief that we were living in a golden age of hand-made visual beauty before AI arrived is obvious nonsense.
The golden age of illustration ended when Illustrator arrived. After that, everything became a mess of cliches and clip art, culminating with Google's Material Design, where everything looks simultaneously soulless, heartless, and bland.
AI brought some colour back. A lot of the imagery is kitsch, but illustration has always tended to kitsch, so nothing really changed there.
This is the irony of the anti-AI purity hunt. Most human-made work is crap. It always has been.
AI hasn't suddenly sent the quality of creativity off a cliff. It's commoditised the low standard of most previous hand-made work and made it easier to access.
The high end - the real talent - still stands out. But most people can't afford it, and even fewer people appreciate it.