Brings me back to the days of going to dgl.microsoft.com in Internet Explorer to explore the library of Clip Art graphics online. This was during the Office XP and 2003 days. Even today, that style comes across as far more authentic than the tacky AI-generated flyers you see plastered everywhere now.
I remember people being scoffed at for using clipart, for pretty much the same reasons people are scoffed at today for using AI (low effort, samey, doesn't fit the rest of the visual style, and subjectively ugly.)
No. I'm overall an AI proponent but even I feel an innate sense of disgust when seeing AI-generated flyers. Feels like some cyberpunk dystopia where machines have begun to organize, advertise, and run events for the 'trite human cattle' to keep them occupied.
Lazily-placed text in an otherwise blank word document that gets printed and stapled haphazardly to a posterboard is infinitely preferable.
I feel similar about LLM-generated text, though that's even more egregious. If I have to get one more claude-written email from the company CEO I'm going postal. You have a slight excuse with art as most people couldn't draw to save their lives (including myself), but to write is literally to think. And, in the case of executives they have ONE job (to lead by communicating), outsourcing such a basic soft-skill focused role to AI is just pathetic.
> And, in the case of executives they have ONE job (to lead by communicating), outsourcing such a basic soft-skill focused role to AI is just pathetic.
Weren't executives always outsourcing writing to their (human) assistants?
Is there a name for the "clip art" or the style that like almost every 'Dry Cleaner' uses. I dont think its clip are but it shares many of the qualities and im talking coast to coast.
It filled a niche at the time when there weren’t a lot of easily accessible stock images of things. Clip art was the successor to analog “clip books” used for things like ads in newspapers.
Once the internet filled that niche with more and better pictures, shipping a fixed database of images with your software didn’t make sense anymore.
I'm not the one who asked for the summary. I just don't want to constantly watch video clips for statements worth a few lines of text. And I try to avoid BigTech. So what I'll definitely not do is clicking arbitrary random YouTube links that flood the web. So far I can definitely continue living absolutely fine without all the wisdom entrenched in all these clips.
... but if someone or something is able to give me a quick textual summary, even better.
The section of the video on “scratch board art” claiming it was ubiquitous is very odd to me. I’ve never seen art in that style despite being of the generation that would have. It’s discussed in the video as if it was some kind of cultural touchstone of the era and I promise it was not.
Clipart was the AI slop of the time. People with zero creativity or taste creating horrible flyers, posters, letters, etc. by randomly vomiting effects upon effects on text with very dubious positioning and proportions
In the late 90s, I was at a party and the DJs were playing really cool techno styles I hadnt heard before. (back then it was about Sample-CD & soundsets, Gigasampler etc., all that stuff)
Curious as I am, I asked him what sets he used for his samples - he said: I can highly recommend all these Office-Clip-Art CD samples, because they are not used by a lot of people :-D
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 34.5 ms ] threadLazily-placed text in an otherwise blank word document that gets printed and stapled haphazardly to a posterboard is infinitely preferable.
I feel similar about LLM-generated text, though that's even more egregious. If I have to get one more claude-written email from the company CEO I'm going postal. You have a slight excuse with art as most people couldn't draw to save their lives (including myself), but to write is literally to think. And, in the case of executives they have ONE job (to lead by communicating), outsourcing such a basic soft-skill focused role to AI is just pathetic.
Weren't executives always outsourcing writing to their (human) assistants?
https://theslingsandarrows.com/my-new-filing-technique-is-un...
Got a lot of laughs from the bizarre humor and clip art usage
Once the internet filled that niche with more and better pictures, shipping a fixed database of images with your software didn’t make sense anymore.
It’s a good video, worth a watch on 1.5x.
I'm not the one who asked for the summary. I just don't want to constantly watch video clips for statements worth a few lines of text. And I try to avoid BigTech. So what I'll definitely not do is clicking arbitrary random YouTube links that flood the web. So far I can definitely continue living absolutely fine without all the wisdom entrenched in all these clips.
... but if someone or something is able to give me a quick textual summary, even better.
To be clear, I am also criticizing myself, I was an avid Microsoft Word user back then.
In the late 90s, I was at a party and the DJs were playing really cool techno styles I hadnt heard before. (back then it was about Sample-CD & soundsets, Gigasampler etc., all that stuff)
Curious as I am, I asked him what sets he used for his samples - he said: I can highly recommend all these Office-Clip-Art CD samples, because they are not used by a lot of people :-D