My workplace did a sweepstakes for the world cup and there were bonus prizes for decorating your desk. All three winners had simply uploaded photos of their desks to an AI image generator and had it add flags etc to decorate and submitted that. One person used AI to make it look like he was wearing the jersey of his assigned team.
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.
For whatever reason, the photo is point. People are only doing it for the photo and only doing the photo for the competition. I agree that we lost something, I just also think a majority of people don’t know what’s missing: they just put effort to make the photo, rather than to make the desk
i think over time, the bar will rise, you’d have to imagine how low quality the submissions prior to AI would’ve been since most people aren’t that good at decorating nor have the time
i think as the novelty wears off on the average person, it’ll probably be seen akin to stick figure drawings in the future
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 [...]
extremely noticeably so, too. A shame that the judges arent equipped to notice this sort of thing: the winning entry is pretty clearly the sort of result you get with a first naive attempt of "make a poster" with no style guidelines at all.
My workplace did a sweepstakes for the world cup and there were bonus prizes for decorating your desk. All three winners had simply uploaded photos of their desks to an AI image generator and had it add flags etc to decorate and submitted that. One person used AI to make it look like he was wearing the jersey of his assigned team.
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.
For whatever reason, the photo is point. People are only doing it for the photo and only doing the photo for the competition. I agree that we lost something, I just also think a majority of people don’t know what’s missing: they just put effort to make the photo, rather than to make the desk
i think over time, the bar will rise, you’d have to imagine how low quality the submissions prior to AI would’ve been since most people aren’t that good at decorating nor have the time
i think as the novelty wears off on the average person, it’ll probably be seen akin to stick figure drawings in the future
I think this is the actual image: https://cdn.saffire.com/images.ashx?t=ig&rid=OhioStateFair&i...
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...
extremely noticeably so, too. A shame that the judges arent equipped to notice this sort of thing: the winning entry is pretty clearly the sort of result you get with a first naive attempt of "make a poster" with no style guidelines at all.
It is very noticeable. Funny how it jumps right out when you've seen AI slop often enough. #5 is good and looks "real", whatever that means any more.
The poster: https://cdn.saffire.com/images.ashx?t=ig&rid=OhioStateFair&i...
Note the pigs are numbered 1, 2, 1. And the gondola with a floating cable and another that terminates at a tent top.
It is full of obvious AIgen artifacts
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 other four top entries are all obvious human efforts as well. Must be annoying for them to lose to a blatant AI entry.
This is pretty much exactly what I expect from Ohio.
What's crazy is that the winning poster looks like one-shot AI output and probably was given the mistakes in it.
Maybe they were looking to generate publicity. There's no way they picked those over the 4th and 5th place.
That would be enough for me to skip the fair. Money talks; AI in the arts needs to walk.