"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.

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?

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is what irritates me about most AI use that I see. Lots of talk about creativity! and innovation! But most of what I see is novelty (sometimes) the first time around followed by persistent levels of intellectual and creative laziness thereafter.

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.

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.

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.

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.