Ask HN: Why are AI generated images so shiny/glossy?

It’s just the typical aesthetic model used and isn’t inherent to the tech itself. It’s very easy to make AI images in specific art styles, with the result that you can’t tell they’re not real.

This is actually something of a pet peeve of mine - people sharing AI images never use styles other than the generic shiny one, and so places like Reddit.com/r/midjourney are filled with the same exact style of images.

Edit: if you’re looking for other style inspiration ideas, this website is a great resource for Midjourney keywords: https://midlibrary.io/styles

A big part of that must be that most people don't know how to describe style. That is something I bump up against often with generative AI - it can be obvious that two images are different but hard to describe why.

But why is this the prevalent, default AI style across many models? Is it in the training data or is it some bias from the algorithm?

This must have some concrete answer and not just "it is the way it is"

The same reason that after Jobs died, it was decided that iPhones should be large enough to fit in people's pockets. Because: many engineers in tech wear cargo shorts.

Is it easy? Are you aware of any good tutorial content on this? I have libraries of images I'd like to feed into generative models. Think gritty, noisy stuff. I'm just not aware of how to do it.

I just edited my post and added a link to https://midlibrary.io/styles, which might give you some ideas.

That is a good question. My guess is that their training data was a mix of photorealistic images and historical paintings, and thus the outcome is the cartoony style that looks somewhat realistic but not overly so.

There’s also the possibility that they avoid being too realistic for fear of deepfake scares WRT the underlying tech. And so if you want images that look realistic without being believably “real”, you’ll get something like the default aesthetic of Midjourney.

Because it's the way it is.

"It" isn't AI here. It is human mind. As an old aritst said, monkey likes shiny things.

Agreed, aesthetic literacy is very low and most people probably couldn’t name more than a handful of art styles.

That's definitely been one of my hurdles. Though ammusingly one thing that's helped is to give an example to ChatGPT and ask it to describe the art style.