I live in New Okhla, a satellite city of New Delhi in the National Capital Region of India.
Everyday on my way to school, I've been passing this one public bathroom building for the past eight or so years. They used to denote the genders with regular text, which is normal and maybe even a mundane detail.
However, somewhere in 2023 or 2024, they replaced those with AI-generated images of a man and a woman to denote each section. Was this needed? No. Did they do it anyways? Yes.
Now, the city authorities already had perfectly fine images for getting the point across, so the lack of that is clearly not the reason for this.
The only other reasonable explaination is that they want to appear advanced and high-tech.
The irony is that due to how much AI companies have commoditized both text generation models and image generation models, the veneer of advancement only really works upon people who've not been exposed to AI usage in the past year or so, which is probably a minority of Noidites (Noiders? Noidians? Okhlites?).
This wasn't a particularly meaningful post per se, I just wanted to talk about something that kept popping up in my mind. But again, the more AI slop I'm subjected to each day, the more I yearn for human-created work.
Even if a human's output isn't as good as a clanker's, it atleast has some soul in it. That's what matters for me, personally.
The AI generated images on the public bathroom building proceeded to get vandalized. This is perhaps one of the only times I'd openly laugh at vandalism.