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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3510 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 17, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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What art style was discredited the most by the AI? I have just encountered the works of Guillem H. Pongiluppi when someone posted his Chapterhouse: Dune illustrations, and I can't tell if they are AI or not. Both my eye and free detectors scream they are, but he's been drawing in this hyper-realistic, full-effort, high-contrast style for a long time, and this is the style that a lot of diffusion models use when you tell them to draw something "realistic, highly detailed, trending on Artstation". Imagine wasting years mastering a style that diffusion models will learn from your work and devalue your whole portfolio.

Or is he cleverly doing AI-washing now? Why draw anything yourself, if you can tell a model to draw "like Guillem H. Pongiluppi" and then get angry when someone compares your work to "AI slop"?

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Interesting. I think the AI effect comes from the lack of meaning permeating his pictures. The characters are posed dynamically but without purpose. Gargantuan objects loom randomly. All sorts of outlandish crap from our commercial trash-heap culture are juxtaposed in a way that brings out their banality. Subtextually it's undermining itself, presenting a sort of anti-meaning. It's funny that he's probably going for these effects deliberately, whereas it's more of an inherent byproduct for AI.

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