A lot of people in the comments say that the supposedly better examples in the article are still “horrible” because they can tell they’re AI and point to things that the AI did “wrong” and a human artist would do better.
That may be true if you’re working with a top of the line artist, but in my experience the average freelance designer online is significantly worse than AI. I’ve worked with dozens of budget friendly designers on Fiverr and consistently get way worse results than I’ve gotten from AI models. Will a great human designer produce better output than an AI? Maybe, but a small local event or business probably won’t have the budget to hire them or know where to find them. It’s cheaper, faster and easier to use AI to generate something that’s good enough for their purposes.
People also point out all the little flaws in the “good” examples and cite them as obvious tells that they were AI generated. I think it would be interesting to see if people could reliably distinguish between AI generated flyers and human made flyers. Sure, sometimes it’s obvious like when the AI adds those weird, cartoony people. But if the model is told not to create designs like that and stick to the styles used in the second half of the article, I expect people would have a much harder time distinguishing the human designs from the AI designs.
The biggest problem that I have with most AI posters is that they are too busy, you have to look for information instead of seeing it popping right away.
Amateurs posters of before AI didn't have this problem. White background, the important info in big letters, maybe one clipart or to. So I'm not talking about how pro artists could make a better job, but even the small local non-profit used to produce better posters. Not in the sense of "better looking", but in the sense that they were more readable.
At least the examples of this blog are more readable than what we usually see.
This is very true and after rendering 100 prompts twice for https://john.hartnup.uk/poster-prompts/ I realised that the prompts could be improved by asking for much less clutter. The best examples on there pick out one main visual subject, but many of them are too fussy.
I may do a V2 one of these days.
Clutter comes with the territory to some extent though. I was recently asked to do a real world PTA fayre poster, and the client (my wife) very firmly wanted 12+ attractions mentioned on the poster. Tombola, hook a duck, bar, BBQ, blah, blah, blah as well as date, location, sponsor, ...
To get a really clean design, you need to edit it down to the essentials. I don't know what pro designers do - convince the client to say less?
Unless the prompt says otherwise, AI will try to get a visual element in for every single word too.
Pro designers are generally paid because they’re extremely good editors. And they’re an intermediary between clients and their consumers.
So when you put the capability in the hands of the client without the editing (or taste) and no way to evaluate the result, you get the passable, homogenous thing.
It mostly doesn’t matter because there’s no economic incentive for it to matter, which is why much of our aesthetic world is the way it is.
Designers having that artistic taste, and clients lacking it, is exactly why I don't think generative AI is going to do much to replace (skilled) designers anytime soon. Likewise for other creative professions, and indeed for knowledge work in general.
Taste is a great solution for abundance, so I agree. Also, there's definitely a rubberband effect where products & designs need to differentiate on their design to stand out in a homogenous world, and you truly do need creative professionals having that judgment. Even using AI as a tool, you have to have the sayable vocabulary (at the very least) to agitate the aesthetic status quo.
And low-skill graphic design had already been mostly replaced by Canva, so I don't think AI is really having as much impact on the design industry as people might suppose.
I think we ALREADY at the point when AI is capable to replace like 99.7% of designers. It is only a question of market inertia and personal brands that prevent it from happening right now.
I think this generalizes to a lot of professional work.
LLMs are very good at satisfying the requirements you give them. They’re much worse at knowing which requirements should be challenged, reframed, or ignored because you don’t know enough about the field to know what actually matters. That’s why they’re such force multipliers for experts: the expert can spot when the model chose the wrong abstraction or checked every box and still produced something bad. A novice often can’t. I’d argue the model mostly raises the novice toward “average.”
“Tell it to push back” doesn’t really solve this either. Too little and you get “aye aye captain!” Too much and you get Opus 5 / claudise, where it seems compelled to find something wrong with everything.
I see this in a Home Assistant project I’ve mostly vibe coded. I can ask Codex to make the kitchen brighter on school days and it’ll happily implement something. But maybe an HA expert would say “you really shouldn’t model it this way.” Maybe they’d even question HA itself. The model could conceivably know that too, but it only sees a tiny slice of my world. There are infinite side quests it could raise, and a good professional’s real skill is knowing which one matters enough to interrupt you about and which 99% to silently ignore.
>It mostly doesn’t matter because there’s no economic incentive for it to matter
Very generous way to say "executive greed has drained bespoke design out of society. I've been seeing more videos on such a topic, but this one was by far the best one I've seen yet: https://youtu.be/HgjXjPP_p3s?is=yVsto8SCnY-SsnVY
(Just in case, don't let the thumbnail fool you. The car simply frames as it expands to general society).
I tried to give this video a good-faith watch, but found myself disagreeing with much of the evidence, conclusions, and research. It seems to be trying to diagnosing cleanslop — the minimalist and flat trend, which renders poorly as being clinical and lifeless. My point was that economics drive aesthetic, and in that framing, I think we both agree corporations will deliver the least amount of design tolerable.
Design-differentiated products still exist (Apple as mentioned, IKEA, Nike, Linear to name a few), but they're outnumbered in the current landscape and arguably still greedy.
>Design-differentiated products still exist (Apple as mentioned, IKEA, Nike, Linear to name a few), but they're outnumbered in the current landscape and arguably still greedy.
I believe that was ultimately what my response wanted to emphasize, and partially the call to action of the video. There is great design out there, but you need to wander through oceans of slop to find it. I had no clue about "Superblocks" until that video.
Likewise, to link the ideas back to Herr; AI is creating an ocean of slop that will make it nearly impossible to find the truly innovative used of AI out there. Curation was already a hard problem pre-AI and this only increases such difficulty by magnitudes. Among reducing said slop (which is nearly impossible now), the call to action is to have proper tastemakers lead the charge and bring out good ideas. Not just ones that generate the most money. Curation by definition almost always lowers view traffic to increase customer satisfaction, and that's not something our ad-based datascape wants.
I think it's in fact forward thinking, in that modern executives lost the taste their older elites had. Or at least they fired the tastemakers for those who pleased them personally, to the sacrifice of proper design. Probably a bit of both, along with other factors.
The more charitable perspective (that falls more important point #2) is simply that taste is different now among the modern billionaire. Someone who can wander onto a stage in a turtleneck and denim jeans simply won't be the type of person who wants a "loud and bold" car. But they might still want to say that they had Ferrari make it. Jony Ive's perspective on design may simply be the product of the people and environments he surrounded himself with.
I can't remember where, but there was an article about the luxury homes billionaires are building themselves. They tent to have he design aesthetic of a bland, but expensive, corporate hotel.
The clutter is there yes - it's not a sparse 1970s kitsch cultural event promo or 1970s sci-fi book cover (random example I found in 2 minutes https://www.etsy.com/listing/715136429/david-bowie-moonage-d... ) that's for sure - but I wouldn't want to remove any of mine's elements as each one informs the viewer at a glance their decision whether to attend or not.
> N.B. Make sure all the important information pops out (is visible at first glance) like an expert designer would, the information is more important than the design.
Already have me a much better result with the 'Arts & Crafts style', but N=1 so YMMV
I’ve been working on a thing where a bunch of raw content goes through a summarization pipeline and then gets manipulated with a bunch of checks to clean up copy and reduce clutter.
And then the visuals get added with a set of fixed templates. It’s not fully there but is reducing a LOT of the clutter.
Some of the results are even what I’d call good (and I’m a designer). I think a good harness could make non-cluttered results, if one of the AI labs was interested in a “less is more” approach.
There is very often a certain softness to the fonts in generated images. Why is that and is there a name for it?
Thinking more, I thinking the softness is actually inconsistency. Because the letters are generated, no two letters will be exact same and if zoomed in some edge might not even be perfectly straight. Another thing we can do these days (I think author should really try out in V2) is to use code to generate the . You may have seen examples of generating Javascript based videos with Claude. Same can be done with posters. Generate a font sheet and use that in code generated poster with image generated background.
Are these "fayre" events some kind of UK thing? I also didn't know offhand what "tombola" is and it comes across like it's part of a collection of standard activities for a "fayre" that have no cultural significance to me.
(Canadian here. Not everything is shared across the Commonwealth, I guess.)
Yes, fayres are popular in the UK especially in schools and small villages. A Tombola is a type of raffle where people buy tickets and the winning numbers are picked from a rotating drum. Normally done to raise small amounts of money for local causes.
A new image at a technical level, but all modern autoregressive image models are skilled at only changing what is absolutely necessary if asked to make edits.
Would someone who's "trying to get started in design" be able to make anything as good as these AI posters? And how would they survive in a world where machines can do their job for free?
I suppose human artists will continue to exist, but they will be like chess players: they will continue to exist simply because they love art, but they won't be able to compete with AI.
Well what's better ? I have so many pictures of posters of old events or storefronts saved on my phone because they were so astronomically bad it'd have been better to not have any poster at all. Today's AI makes it look even worse but I'm hopeful that in five years we'll all live in a world generally more agreeable to look at and not "concrete with pink and yellow fluo paper smashed on top of it" like https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/music-poster-wall.html
or
https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/france-poster-wall.html?ps...
because the cost of making things enjoyable with more colour and detail will have come down. Maybe we can finally go back to Art Nouveau if the cost of making it comes down!
As I said, "Today's AI makes it look even worse". But the post makes me hopeful than in a couple years, actually good graphic design can come out from AI. It still looks terrible and AI even for the best posters it highlights, but noticeably less than the random ice cream or coffee shop where I live with fully ai-generated interior design, memorabilia and menus.
Have you ever seen a bus schedule, or a parking sign, or a list of events at a local library or an “open hours” sign at a restaurant? Those are 99.9% unreadable, busy, and you have to look for information. And even then it’s not always clear if you got it right. And that was all before the AI.
There is a difference between busy for no reason and busy because of information density. The busy examples in this article aren’t information dense. They just have a ton of different flower types, random animals, background characters, unrelated structures, many different colors and many different shades of those colors, etc. But the information they are trying to communicate is minimal.
A bus schedule or a parking sign is very information dense. It’s trying to communicate a lot in a limited space and as a result require getting used to.
Those examples are filled with real info. The AI posters are filled with meaningless three word slogans, lists of meaningless copy and art where everything is labeled.
None of those are primarily marketing tools, they're things you use after you've already decided you want to use the product. They don't need to grab and hold attention and convince you that they have what you want, they just need to convey information.
Bus schedules are not a good comparison because they have to fit a ton of information into a single page. And I disagree that they are unreadable. Speaking as someone who commuted by bus for years in many different cities, they tend to be quite easy to read because the tabular layouts make them very easy to scan quickly. Once your eyes anchor on the page, you can find what you're looking for without effort.
The biggest problem in my view is:
It's not editable by hand. There is no production data I could open in InDesign, Illustrator or Photoshop (Layers) and change things to my or my clients liking.
I am not familiar with the field, but if there isn't a way to have LLM's generate graphics as editable InDesign or Illustrator files (maybe something Adobe will sell you?), I am sure there will be soon.
This is a problem which is entirely solvable by existing and new design/production apps. Instead of working entirely with raster image agents should programmatically edit the target file format.
You could try having, say Astra, use one of these programs via computer use to design it. I haven't tried it, but I hear it is really good at computer use. Might even have more of a dialogue as it creates, so dictating choices at each stage. Would take longer, but does not require someone who has expertise in the tool, just good design notion.
That also reminds me of AI-generated text, which is also (when done without caring) barely readable because of the useless noise mixed the relevant information that a human that proofread the text would have thrown out.
Technically, AI can introduce rounds of fact-checking, proofreading, etc.
But even without that, AI-generated text is already better than what most humans can write -- particularly when they need something fast, cheap and good.
(It might not be "excellent" -- but humans wouldn't be able to make it fast and cheap...)
People act like making a poster is this absurd Sisyphean task that takes a degree in art to produce.
You don’t need to hire an artist, you don’t need AI. Just download Affinity for free, find a nice font and color palate, and put text on the page. I’ve done my own event posters and they take less than an hour to produce with next to zero prior experience and look massively more appealing than AI slop.
There's an amazing viral twitter thread where someone claimed a real Monet painting was an AI generated imitation, and it got an avalanche of comments from people who claimed it was an obvious fake and a poor imitation at that.
It's not tracking a real thing as much as people would like to think.
This is exactly the problem. Most of the time when people criticise the output of genAI, what they’re actually commenting on is the ethics of AI rather than the output of it. And they then attempt to use the demonstration as a proof of their point rather than forming an unbiased opinion of the output based on its own merit.
Now I’m not saying there isn’t legitimate criticisms that can be made about the ethics of AI, I’m highly concerned about the problems that AI brings too. But that’s a separate argument entirely.
It’s a little like people who are pompous about expensive wine, whisky’s, etc and then fail blind taste tests (plenty of studies there too).
I've generally been very impressed with genAI artwork in "impressionist" styles. But thinking about how the diffusion models work, that seems like exactly what you'd expect them to be good at. Things that call for perfectly straight lines and constrained patterns (and explicitly symbolic elements, like text) seem to be considerably harder but apparently very doable now.
There is still obvious genAI slop being put out there all the time, and you can tell it's genAI slop because it's slop: even doing something at that level by hand would be more time and effort than anyone would bother putting in unless it's paid work that then justifies getting it right and doing it professionally. But now that the sloption exists, there's a flood of people taking it.
Prose, on the other hand, is another story. It became possible to produce "grammatically correct, academic-sounding and generally using words to mean what they actually mean" very quickly, but years later it's still rarely if ever good, it just goes through varying different quirks. Maybe part of this is that the training data can't properly reflect what the target audience was for various pieces of text. A lot of it, surely, is that many people are easily impressed by "grammatically correct, academic-sounding and generally using words to mean what they actually mean", and don't themselves have much of a sense for actually good writing.
I don't think this is true. There are people who claim everything is AI – maybe even to bolster their ego.
But for a lot of things I can with high probability discern between AI and human in every day appearance and I know many other people can as well. One of the things I look for is specifically certain types of extreme... not just flaws... just overall atrocity. When I read posts submitted to HN I often realize that something is bad writing before I can specify this to AI text. Pangram almost always agrees with me. Here is a recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49715657
I don't doubt that there are certain scoped tasks that certain models are quite good at. But in my every day life I constantly encounter AI slop that is so bad that I take it as a personal insult that someone thought it would be okay to subject me to it; to presume that I am so tasteless and numb and have no quality standard whatsoever.
I mean just look at the example posters at the beginning of the article. "The problem with these is not so much that they’re bad." Yes, yes it is. They are horrible. I cannot understand how anyone can describe them as anything but that.
> But for a lot of things I can with high probability discern between AI and human in every day appearance and I know many other people can as well.
It’s easy to say that when you already know the answer. But my point is people frequently misattribute stuff as being AI generated when it wasn’t. The GPs Twitter example is proof of this. And you only have to look at the number of times people accuse someone of being AI on HN because they happen to use em dash or an Oxford comma (or any other writing style that was part of the corpus models were trained on), and it’s pretty clear that “obvious tells” are just guesswork.
There was a study years ago where a group of individuals were given white wine with red food colouring, and they were asked to describe the wine. All the participants described plumb and other notes that are exclusive to red wines.
These weren’t dumb people. And the people who claim to spot “obvious AI” aren’t dumb either. It’s just very easy to identify tells if you believe you already know the answer. Unfortunately that’s just how fucked up our human psychology is.
> One of the things I look for is specifically certain types of extreme... not just flaws... just overall atrocity.
So, please forgive me, but this means that you are good at finding out some patterns in AI output. There are always a lot of false positive and negatives, and I haven’t found a convincing study showing that people are good at finding AI in general.
What helps is that the market is very concentrated so if you know GPT-isms and Claude-isms that’s basically the current situation covered. It does not mean that you can reliably identify AI in general.
How do you know you can discern AI vs human with high probability? You need some external source of truth to judge that, otherwise all you know is that you can discern bad, obvious AI. See also https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/toupee_fallacy
I’d expect false positives to be low. Bad AI has a distinctive style and is easy to pick up on. Just like bad toupees are easily recognized. The false negative rate would be far more interesting.
The false negative rate would be interesting but is irrelevant in this context. I was replying to a comment claiming that most people take issue with the ethics of GenAI rather than the quality and that people have a high false positive rate. I raise myself and my experience with people I know as a counter example.
There might be AI generated things in my every day life that I do not recognize as AI, but that's not what's being discussed.
How did you check? What was your oracle when you thought something was AI and when you did not?
I mean, this situation is a textbook case of ground for a lot of common fallacies, starting with confirmation bias. We need to remember that our brain wants to be tricked. If you think you are special, you are not. You’re just not aware of it and even more prone to falling into these traps.
They are pretty shit, but the main problem is that they are the generic style of the model. So that’s what everyone gets by default. If they were a one off they’d still be bad, but at least unique.
In my world view, the phrase "People are stupid" explains almost everything. Very few people are actually able to think for themselves. The vast majority are basically just sheep, they think whatever the media, their colleagues, friends etc tell them to think. They don't fact check, they don't think critically, they can't understand a well reasoned argument, they basically just believe things based on how much they like whoever said it. They won't accept evidence that disproves those beliefs.
They don't care about the truth, it's all just about being part of the right herd.
The problem with this mindset is that it isn’t very useful or actionable, regardless of how true it is.
Maybe try differentiating a bit? You could see if there certain scenarios that leave room for a better outcome for both you and a less intelligent person. You might even learn something interesting.
Right now, I’d say you are painting with an overly broad brush.
P.S. Have you done any soul searching to see if this is largely a comforting thought that helps assuage the frustrations of dealing with the BS of life? If you are open to the idea, might be valuable.
Yeah, it's not actionable. I can't fix the fact that most people are stupid. But it does provide some minor amount of comfort. It explains why the world is as it is. It explains why the most powerful nation in the world is currently lead by the world's biggest fucking clown. It explains why we can't deal with climate change - the people who make money from it simply use their puppet media to tell all the idiots what they want them to think, and here we are.
It explains why religion is so prevalent - anyone with any amount of critical thinking ability can see that religion is a bunch of bullshit. Yet most people in the world are religious, because all it takes is someone with a little authority to tell people something and they'll just believe it and that's that, you can't reason them out of it because they didn't reason themselves into it. They were just born into this herd and that's where they intend to stay.
It explains why big "green" organizations are and have been against nuclear energy - even though nuclear energy has been the obvious answer to climate change the people who want the world to take climate change seriously have been against nuclear, despite the fact that nuclear was the obvious answer to climate change. They simply don't/didn't know that nuclear was clean energy, and they never took a few minutes to learn some stuff to realize that in fact nuclear energy is clean energy. Obviously it doesn't solve the entire problem but it would have been a huge improvement over all the coal we've been burning. But they didn't know, because they're a bunch of idiots who don't know anything about anything, they just parrot whatever they've been told and that's that and here we are.
And that's the explanation for everything. Politics is just a popularity contest. Whoever says the shit the hordes of sheep have been conditioned to want to hear, get elected. If you grab a random person off the street they most likely couldn't even tell you how bracket tax works but you can be sure as shit they'd have strong opinions about taxes. And those opinions will most likely be straight up factually wrong, based on an incorrect view of how taxes work.
Everyone's just wrong about everything, nobody knows anything about anything. A few people have a decent understanding of how things work but nobody listens.
And again yeah, it's not actionable. There's nothing to be done about this, it's just the way it is. I can't stop the entire human population from being a bunch of religious cultist morons. That's just what they are. But at least knowing that and accepting it helps me keep my sanity in a world where everyone makes the wrong decisions at every turn and everything is clearly going to shit while everyone's acting like everything's fine. Except of course all the inconsequential bullshit the sheep bicker about like immigration and taxes windmills and data centers and whatever else the media has them bickering about to distract them from the shit that actually matters.
> Yet most people in the world are religious, because all it takes is someone with a little authority to tell people something and they'll just believe it and that's that, you can't reason them out of it because they didn't reason themselves into it.
Yeah, we simply should not forget that there is very different types of religions. Some religions, for example has it main belief that climate change is a big problem for the Earth and Humanity.
> It explains why big "green" organizations are and have been against nuclear energy - even though nuclear energy has been the obvious answer to climate change
Exactly. I mean my model explain that, not yours. Like in any other religion generally churches exists not to solve the MAIN PROBLEM, even if the religion says otherwise. Because churches are hierarchical structures, and on the top will end up pretty SMART people, who mainly focus on solving their personal problems, and not the MAIN PROBLEM of their religion. Often they even does not believe in existence of the problem at all.
> Whoever says the shit the hordes of sheep have been conditioned to want to hear, get elected.
I don't know. If we look at the elections of the "world's biggest fucking clown", it was more describing of his opponents. But he still got elected, twice.
Nobody has time to fact check every single fact we need to act on.
Have you read every single study about the last vaccine you took and what the positives and negatives are and where potential problems are and so on? Of course not, we trust that the experts have done enough. Same with learning physics or driving over a bridge and so many other things.
Yeah, exactly. But many people vehemently believe vaccines are dangerous and so on. Similarly, a common talking point right now are data centers and their power and water usage. Just yesterday I was told that AI data centers pollute more than anything else. Yet when I took 10 seconds to Google it I found that data centers represented about 0,5% of power consumption and I know that electricity in general is less than half of all pollution so clearly data centers don't pollute that much. But people will parrot these types of "facts" without even taking 10 seconds to double check.
Such a world view will justify any belief, because the internet will give you ample supply of the dumbest, most ill-considered opposition to any belief you hold.
Doesn't guarantee there isn't a steel version of their straw out there that you're deliberately ignoring.
If I had seen the steel version I would have considered it. But all I see is strawmen, as far as the eye can see. An ocean of strawmen, with a few steel islands here and there.
Yeah, it is extremely sad. It's why we're currently in the process of going extinct. We, as a species, know what we should be doing. But what we should be doing is not what we are doing, because what we are doing depends on the popularity contest that is politics, and politics has absolutely nothing to do with what we know we should be doing.
Yes, I think this is exactly right. The labelling of a thing as “AI Generated” or “AI Assisted” makes the viewer perceive it as worse in quality. And they really do think it’s worse.
It’s similar to a well known finding about price: people value things that are more expensive more, and tend to think they are of higher quality. You can give people the same thing for a high price or for free and they’ll say the high priced one is amazing the free one is lacklustre.
It’s like an optical illusion driven by labelling.
By many people’s criteria it automatically is worse, because part of what they value in art is thinking about the artist and their intentions behind their creation.
Similarly people may view an IKEA book stand as worse quality than one built by hand even if the hand built one has flaws. Or they might view a microwaved meal as worse than that created by a home chef.
People value the human intention and care that goes into creations. Without that it’s worse even if the output is fundamentally the same.
A drawing by my young niece may not have the same finesse as an AI generated one but I like it a whole lot more
>By many people’s criteria it automatically is worse, because part of what they value in art is thinking about the artist and their intentions behind their creation.
I think that's true enough for what it is but, as the other commenter also noted, a bit of a different topic here. The Monet example shows that people work backward from AI to direct conclusions about the quality of the work itself, which isn't the same as agreeing a work is by all appearances equivalent to Monet but lacking in underlying deliberation.
One can inform the other to be sure but that conversation exists in parallel with another conversation that's a straight one-shot assessment of quality.
> By many people’s criteria it automatically is worse, because part of what they value in art is thinking about the artist and their intentions behind their creation
That’s a bit separate to what I’m talking about, but I don’t think there are many of these people. I think this whole thing is about AI anxiety coupled with American social norms, and as soon as one of those things changes the artists are going to be left out in the cold again.
I think there are lots of people who value art for the ideas of the artist. There are also lots of people who think that they value something like quality of brushstrokes, and these are the same people, mostly. I mean they don't know what they like it for, but the raw graphical data is what's in front of them, so they ascribe their preference to its (supposedly) measurable qualities.
Hence this thing about I can tell it's AI because its graphical quality is bad. In a way that's correct though! The artist's ideas are hinted at in the brushstrokes (or whatever other graphical aspects). In the gen AI picture you get hints of a phony mind. It becomes hollow when you know that, or when you think you know that. It's not delivering the cultural experience, if the hints you pick up on are false.
There’s the idea of preferences and revealed preferences. People say their preferences and then their actions show what they really prefer. I suspect AI generated content, if curated by a human, would end up being people’s revealed preferences. There are a lot of bad artists and writers and whatever out there, AI would handily beat them.
I think at least for your niece’s drawings example, you’d probably prefer AI art if you had to choose one or the other until the end of time, not just one or two drawings that go on your refrigerator.
But of course with the gen-AI stuff you are getting put in touch with the real ideas of real artists (e.g. Miyazaki), it's just that they've been anonymized and put through a blender.
Revealed preference is a very real and useful phenomenon. But it seems to be increasingly overapplied as a convenient cop-out in scenarios where it's unclear any authentic preference is being revealed (e.g. due to confounding factors or active manipulation) and to exaggerate the extent to which real agency exists (externally predetermined outcomes).
Such as with RLHF-boosted writing from LLMs, where side by side comparisons of human vs. AI writing have been used as proof of revealed preference for AI. But an A/B test of a few sentences doesn't mean that someone would enjoy reading a 5000 word blog post in the same style, as the densely packed rhetorical flourishes become exhausting and repetitive tells start to jump off the page. Nor does it capture the signal/noise problem where despite technical ability and incredible verbosity, realization sets in that nothing in 2000 words has said anything at all while continually stringing the reader along. A side by side comparison with a few AI posters might be preferred in a five 5 minute test, but seeing the same visual elements from three frontier models in a loop on every surface for your entire life could quickly become actively repulsive.
And the problem with agency arises when limited freedom exists to truly make a different choice because the available options are externally determined. I've seen the argument made on HN that people's revealed preference is for AI maximalism, pointing to the fact that consumers keep buying products with AI, hundreds of billions of dollars are spent building new datacenters every year, workers (including creatives!) and students report using AI for daily work, etc.
But consumers aren't really given true choices that could reveal a real preference. The tech giants behind the phone duopoly have crammed AI features into both OS choices. With few exceptions every large company made an "AI strategy" their main focus since 2023 and competed to put chatbots and GenAI features into every inch of their product lines. Hyperscalers started a bidding war on datacenter buildouts in the expectation of future demand back when really only ChatGPT had any real market penetration outside the tech industry. Students and workers feel pressure to keep up with their peers by using AI to avoid getting fired/worse grades, artists struggling for work worry clients will go elsewhere if they take the time for their normal process.
Revealed preference when used haphazardly could be used to come to absurd conclusions like "people want to get scammed", "people like to be overweight", etc. Broadly and incautiously applied it just becomes a way to justify any given status quo as inherently optimally and reflective of collective will. With a creepy paternalistic implication that regardless of what you think you believe, forcing you do something against your will is secretly what you really want, and will make you happy even if you pretend not to realize it.
It's pretty questionable if a preference truly exists as "revealed" for something like AI art when it's preconditioned on active deception. An AI art-hater who gets tricked into picking AI doesn't mean they're lying/confused and actually love it. That sort of reasoning can get uncomfortably close to an anti-democratic argument for mass manipulation of people who can't be trusted to advocate in their own best interests.
Yeah, but the issue is we are getting constantly exposed to a barrage of really low quality obvious AI generated content. Except a lot of people seem to not know that it's AI and interact with like it's real. The people posting it are being reward by monetization platforms.
Low quality baiting content was a problem before but the barrier to entry has been significantly reduced and the.amount of content is growing quickly.
You can see it here in the discussions for about half the stories. It gets sidetracked into people talking past each other.
The thing is, people are really bad at judging this, except for the most stereotypical cases. You have people crying wolf the moment you use "genuinely" or a dash. Different people use different criteria for their personal heuristics and the result is threads full of tedious, completely irrelevant comments from people in a crusade. People don’t seem to realise that we are very good at tricking ourselves and that a lot of the patterns we think we recognise are actually just noise.
Unsurprising that they're both flagged. HN commenters really, really don't like to think about a world where they can't tell the difference between real and AI.
One commenter really nailed it[1]: "We didn't get worse at judging art. We just got better at doubting everything."
I’d say it’s more about confronting the ways in which art is just posturing, hype, and status games, and what it’s like to find out you’re in an “Emperor’s New Clothes” situation.
Most people aren't aware of the prevalence of stock imagery during the 2000s. AI is just synthetic stock images, which I have zero problem with.
Artists with taste are the ones creating the best AI images, just they were the ones who photoshopped the best things out of stock images when that was the main mode, and just as they created the best stuff when everything was manual typesetting and dark room photography.
That assumes that AI is only used in place of stock imagery.
In reality it is seeping into our lives at an alarming rate which I worry is disrupting our shared sense of reality (which was already tenuous.)
AI has capabilities that were impossible (or very difficult before.) You could easily generate a realistic video of me saying terrible things or kicking a puppy or doing a pornographic act. You could clone my voice and call my grandma asking for money. It’s very hard to tell what is real now and it will get harder as the capabilities improve.
These tools are also much more accessible than photo editing software. Before, few people had the skill to create realistic fakes. Now anyone can do it. This has led to a flood of fake images, videos, and text online. This crowds out real humans and makes it hard to know what is real. My older relatives especially have Facebook feeds filled with fake content they think is real.
The capabilities combined with the scale make it hard to know what is real in a way Photoshop never did.
Factor? That's not what was described: "knowing it was AI irrespective of anything else."
And no - I don't think it's fair to call the art bad when in fact what you mean is you don't like the way it was made. Saying "I don't like AI art" is not the same as "This piece is shit", which is how it is almost always framed.
As GP perhaps implied, "prejudice" is "biased evaluation" with a negative tone — if you are looking to be fully objective, a different term might be better.
> claimed a real Monet painting was an AI generated imitation
This is like the transvestigator creeps who think they can tell with 100% accuracy who is trans but they are regularly fooled by pictures of cis women when seeded with the notion that they might be trans.
Some AI is obvious. Some much less so, and a lot of non-AI content is being caught up in the amateur dragnets.
One version of this I really loved was some viral clip that I believe was like a local newscast where one guy who really seemed to dislike vegan products was challenged to tell the difference between a real meat product and a vegan alternative, I think sausage or something. And he made a big performance of how instantly he recognized the meat in comparison to the vegan product only to be shocked to learn, after he confidently declared that one of the two dishes was meat, that both dishes were plant-based.
If nothing else, simply as a matter of self respect you've got to make your peace with a certain amount of healthy uncertainty if even just to avoid making a fool of yourself.
But more importantly, it's important to be honest with yourself about what you actually know versus what you're very motivated to believe. Because I think AI equals bad is poisoning some people's ability to talk about this in a healthy way.
I've worked with some of the top designers in the world. I don't think that AI will beat them (for now), but the examples in his sample page[0] beat the junk that I've seen a lot of non-top-designers do.
As he states, he isn't trying to make stuff that doesn't "look like AI did it," he just wants to introduce variety, and has proposed a disciplined way to do that.
can you please list some of the people you worked with? I really appreciate good design and am always looking for great artists that I don’t know about yet, thanks.
Going through pentagram's site, their shakespeare in the park posters do give me that AI vibe. Perhaps AI has been trained in many such similar posters, but as a layman, I'd be hard pressed to be able to distinguish these from AI generated ones.
On a side note, I wanted to link that collection here, but unfortunately there's no hyperlink, it just opens in a popup. You'll have to scroll down to the bottom of their home page to find it. I hope for their sake they just overlooked this one thing, because if designers don't see the role of hyperlinks in user experience, I can't take them seriously.
If people were not lazy enough to "introduce variety" to begin with, AI wouldn't have the slop reputation we know it to be today.
But any UX designer/engineer will tell you defaults are important. And on social media we're seeing a ton of "default". Which explains the disparity in reactions. "Default code" isn't bad in most contexts. "Default art" is bland by definition; pre-AI it wasn't exactly kosher to use stock art by itself either. It's designed as a placeholder.
It sure seems like, while LLMs and diffusion models won't completely eradicate the middle class, the bar has now risen significantly to actually contribute in a lot of areas.
For programmers, sure SV startups and actual software-first shops are probably only augments with LLMs and not replacing. But what % of software engineers are employed in such shops? Well, from my graduating class in CS, approximately 30% of grads all went to the same contracting shop whose business model seems to be, take the bottom 30% of each CS class, underpay the fuck out of them, bootcamp them into something vaguely usable + teach the house style of CRUD/LOB app framework, then throw them at clients. And this seems to still be a step above "offshore to barely baseline capable (or worse) body shop for extremely dubious results."
That entire bottom 50% is probably about to be eviscerated. The "offshore + pray" approach is probably going to be completely zapped, much easier to just vibe code for probably better (or at least not worse) results. And the onshore-but-cheaper contracting shops are probably going to need a lot fewer people whose main contribution is translating low-ambiguity tickets into syntactically valid java spring code.
Similarly, for artists, disney is probably not going to use AI in a way that substantially speeds them up because they won't tolerate the quality loss at all. But how many artists work for disney? And how many make anime waifus for the gacha apps? The latter of which I can only assume has already switched substantially to AI assets.
I'm not sure about coders but for artists I don't think a massive number were making anime waifus, but instead were making graphic designs for advertisements, publications & websites.
Currently AI is actually replacing some of these jobs. But there's kinda a hitch there - when you target me with ads or show me your company's website and it has obvious AI art I tend to think that you're either selling me something very low quality or are a scammer. If you show me the novel you've written and it has an AI art cover I assume the contents are also AI generated garbage writing. So I wonder if those jobs will really be replaced? It all depends on society's acceptance of AI art and if AI art doesn't get any better. I thought it would get to the point that I couldn't tell it was AI by now, but so far it hasn't.
I think AI waifus and porn and memes and browser based zynga type games will be a place AI is going to be accepted because nobody cared too much about the authenticity and quality of those things before either. But an advertisement selling me a car? The cover of a book on philosophy? A website that I'm going to give my credit card number to? I'm not sure about those things.
> I'm not sure about coders but for artists I don't think a massive number were making anime waifus, but instead were making graphic designs for advertisements, publications & websites.
There was an old joke among designers that their biggest competitor was the boss' nephew playing with photoshop.
Now they need to compete with the boss' nephew playing with AI.
Cars feels like a bit of an odd one out because there's basically no low end. If you have the money to produce even a single car from a Camry to a hummer, you are probably going to not try to pinch pennies on marketing because a single car sale pays the salary of a designer for a year.
That's true. And car commercials that get people to buy fancy new cars are really well figured out and seem to seriously work. Why fix something that isn't broken?
Real estate is interesting because they seem to be really getting into using AI to stage individual houses. So I guess on the same vein maybe someone will try making an add with AI that shows some car driving down your local mainstreet or at some scenic location nearby your ip address that you might have positive associations with. Or maybe even your own home-street and parking in your driveway and you (or facebook you from 10 years ago when you had that hipster-moustashe because you haven't updated your photo) opens the door with a big smile on your face).
We really should start being more precise when we say "replace". Are we talking about replacing 90-100% of that particular job? Or 50-80%?
Because it feels like people argue as if they were talking about the former, but if probed it turns out they admit it's the latter.
There will be still people making car advertisements, but they will be using ai tools and will get asked to produce X times faster. Effectively, some of them will get replaced, or rather have been replaced.
Given their empire these days: a lot. Mostly because outside of Disney there's really not much such thing as "modern salaried artist". You work for any of Disney's 50 subsidiaries, you work at a games studio (because Disney gave up its expansion early in that medium), or you're likley freelancing/commissioning and grabbing whatever gig comes along.
I'm exaggerating, but less than I care to adnit. Disney makes up that much of "normal" full time artistry these days. And it's no secret how little respect artists have had in the US, even before AI.
>And how many make anime waifus for the gacha apps? The latter of which I can only assume has already switched substantially to AI assets.
In America? Less than you think. Asia has plenty of cheaper and more talented artists to exploit. AI adoption is interesting there because it's already such a sweatshop that you need to consider if AI really saves that much time for its cost. Larger studios are dabbling, smaller ones use sparingly.
No, North/South American slop is fully focused on the hyper-casual market. It's fueling thousands of asset flips for quick mobile games or copying indie games into Roblox/Fortnite. That's where the effort (or lack thereof) is going.
2010s to 2020s code has been bad. We used to have 100% natively compiled apps, now everything is a Chrome browser wrapped JavaScript abomination, and before anyone assumes I hate JavaScript, I love doing front-end web development, and backend, and automation... and an unhealthy number of things (my GitHub is a mess). My point being, software quality has been downhill before AI, we just have nonsense rosy eyeglasses.
>People are just upset just to be upset at this point.
Despite this being a technical community we seem to be really bad at understanding scale.
A bad artist is at worst like a fee pieces of trash littered in your lawn. Bad AI art is like a dump truck tipping over into your yard. And you see 10 more dump truck coming in at 90mph. It doesn't matter if it's a recyclables truck and all the bottles are individually cleaner and more Eco friendly than candy bar wrappers. The magnitude is still overwhelming.
You can ignore a few bad artists you don't like. You can't ignore swimming through slop day in and day out. Friction in a previously smooth environment angers people, and AI creates a lot of newfound friction.
There's a theory that when everyone can access some "good", then the rich and powerful will automatically differentiate themselves by switching to a different good that has a visible contrast to the common one. So for example, if the common people can afford only wool, the rich will wear cotton. Once the price of cotton drops, they'll switch to cashmere, which is... a kind of wool. It's not about the specific material or category of thing, it never was, it's just the contrast that matters.
So if everyone has "too busy" AI slop art, then the rich will switch to very plain art, even downright minimalist.
I'm betting that up-market stores will soon have hand-carved wood signs out the front just like in the 1800s to show off that a Real Human(tm) made their signage.
It's not that plain wood is better, it's just that it's not commonly available.
Very interesting idea. And I see some historical support for such actions and trends.
I think modern day life has had two major paradigm shifts that will make this potebtisl "real human(TM)" marketing not emerge among corporate, though. Definitely among smaller business (I'm already seeing it in my field), but not larger onesexcept that generally instead of realising we all have enough of we share, we raise the threshold of what we consider to be enough comfort and stuff.
1. Despite the legal insistence, corporations are not people, and they do not have "taste" to adjust to. Nor do the ways the leaders act and behave make it seem like they feel the company's actions and reputation reflects onto them. This is surprisingly a huge contrast from characters like Trump who traditionally place much importance on legacy and image and use that to shape their mannerisms and actions, aiming for a positive reaction (at least among his audience).
So there's no point in a new marketing scheme that will likely cost a lot more to not receive a lot more. Serving as cheaply as possible is too big a draw, and there's little human(TM) factors to divert from that. Which leads directly into the 2jd point
2. The modern hundred-millionaire/billionaire no longer "participates" in society. There's a decent video that gives an overview of this phenomenon, but I don't think it's a huge revelation to suggest that a billionaire who can be anywhere in the world within a day will truly feel like they are a part of their community the way, say, a Hollywood star would have personal ties to keep LA functional for them. And their social circles are so tiny that they are willing to travel a lot in order find such people.
In this lens, why would such people care about the taste and culture of the common citizen, Unless it's PR to get them more money? They don't go to the same stores (or go to stores at all themselves), they aren't participating nor hosting community events in town, they aren't (usually) performing the same kinds of recreation as their non–rich neighbors. They've already managed to completely divide themselves out from such people, so why care about standing out among them?
If the AI makes a “better” poster that everyone hates because it’s AI, and a person makes a “worse” poster that everyone likes because it’s human, isn’t the business better off with the “worse” poster?
I think the issue there is that, in the absence of the AI poster, people will still dislike the "worse" poster.
Since this is idealogical, a business owner's choices are:
* use AI and some people hate it on principle,
don't use AI and don't pay enough and some people hate it because it looks cheap,
don't use Ai and pay a bunch more and people don't hate it...maybe, depending on style and skill of the artist.
As a business owner, it's not an encouraging situation.
Do people really care much about how beautiful a human made poster look like? I don’t think I’ve ever seen that as an issue, a poster doesn’t have to look fancy. Though if I love any art piece then learn later it was made by AI I will for sure update my judgement and dismiss it as if I was tricked in the first place. You’re way better using Word art for your poster than delegating to an AI if you don’t want to receive negative attention
None of the AI haters (or haters in general) are willing to put money where their mouths are. None of them are willing to pay for better human artwork, yet have the audacity to criticize as if top artists owe them free output.
Which critic is proposing funding better artwork, made by good human artists? Sometimes, silence says more than words. Non-decision is also a decision.
So you can't criticize something without coming up with some fantasy plan that will only exist in whatever corner of social media you left that comment, to make that criticism somehow now valid?
No. There is a limit. Most non-trained people don’t know how to draw a straight line or layout type. If you go to a restaurant and see a poorly laid out menu you often think of the food more negatively. I think that the opposite is true too. If you go to a hole-in-the-wall restaurant and see a menu that looks like it was generated by a top New York design firm you will also think negatively because is it inauthentic.
Honestly, the business would probably be best off if it showed whatever poster had the biggest and most exposed tits regardless of where it came from. Humans be humans and sex sells.
Those are, comparatively, small problems for the medium of a poster.
You have to understand that 99% of people who will see the poster will view it for <5 seconds. They wont sit there and count the stars.
And, of the people who do examine the poster closely, they’re looking at the text. They want to see the date, time, event details. The background is background.
But what is the point of the background then? I mean, it seems like we're admitting that the design doesn't matter, then why keep up the ruse? Let's drop design, and keep just plain textual information. There is no substance to it, it's just performative, a simulacrum of design.
I would think to catch people's eye so they look in the first place, sort of similar to an ad. Which is also why we see AI slop work well in ads. And before AI slop, we had corpo slop. Just bright colors and wacky animated characters who all fit that archetype where their limbs are too big. So I do think the design takes a back seat, at least for the common case. Of course there are exceptions, and those exceptions are exceptional, but for most purposes slop works fine.
Are you aware we don’t all get the same results from a google image search? Or do you seriously believe if I search the same keywords we will be looking at the exact same images?
Not every poster has that issue as you can see from the posting. It is a simple matter of caring enough to look at the output in more detail. These are issues that can be overcome.
Sure, but the basic value proposition of AI is that you don't have to care. These issues could be overcome, but they aren't, because the whole way the technology is promoted and sold guides the user away from caring.
One of the things that keeps circling in my mind when it comes to LLMs and similar transformer architectures is they are technically very impressive, and some of the things they can do are amazing, but there seems to be a compulsive need by the executives of corporations producing them to lie about their capabilities.
I suspect that what drives the compulsive lying and exaggeration is that they know what LLMs can actually do is not worth the development and operating costs (at least for now), so, like Bernie Madoff, they pretend that they're more capable than they are in the hopes that the next round of investment will somehow bridge the gap and let them actually produce what they've been falsely promising their investors they can do, and make the whole thing worthwhile.
This is the important part. Right now, AI is a tool. You can use it to generate high quality output, or you can use it to generate slop. If the output is slop, that is a reflection of the person using the tool, not AI.
I get AI slop from employees sometimes. If they provide poor quality work that hasn't been proofread, that is an employee problem, not an AI problem.
You know the saying where a million dollar company failing is "their" problem, but a billion dollar company failing is "our" problem?
We're going to quickly approach that problem in the conning years at this current rate, like the obesity epidemic. At some point you can't just dismiss things as personal responsibility when a significant portion of society suffers from it and need to instead look at the underlying systematic issues empowering bad incentives.
Of course, the US is awful at the latter. So I'm not holding my breath.
True. But an organizer who doesn't care, will also not be willing to pay for good artwork. AI haters should put money where their mouths are and fund human top artwork.
You're really overestimating how many people can draw something "decent" in Inkscape. Most likely they will take a template. That's not necessarily better than AI either.
I don't claim to be an artist and a template is still done with the caring eye of a professional. It's way better than an AI generated poster. Or at the very least, there's many less instances where I've seen overly used templates than I have badly designed AI generated designs.
Not to mention that I can also tell when a poster has been generated using Photoshop and not real artist tools, like brushes and pens. I've seen a lot of these Photoshop-generated posters, and they are in no way comparable to something DaVinci or Picasso would create.
Wouldn't say that, there is a huge shift in art style between what we got before Photoshop and what we got after. Just look at book covers in the 1970/80s and book covers in the 1990/2000s. The old stuff was full of custom illustrations, while the new stuff is often just copy&paste of generic stock images or some rather hideous early 3D renderings. Even the bad covers of the 80s (see /r/badscificovers/) still have some personality to them that is lacking in a lot of more modern ones.
It's not that you can't create good art with any tool, it's just that the economy and expectations change with the tools available, and the tools being faster/cheaper doesn't translate into better art.
This bullshit disingenuous false equivalency again.
In both photoshop and painting, the human using the tool decides what strokes to use. That isn't true with AI art. It's not "just another tool" for doing the activity when it does the entire activity for you.
> In both photoshop and painting, the human using the tool decides what strokes to use.
except for the million posters and album covers unironically made with a real photo passed into one of photoshop's "Artistic" filters to make it look like some impressionist painting
It is exactly “another tool”. Just like Abelton with an automated drum machine is another tool for creating music. As the posting shows the tool isn’t doing the entire activity for you. The author is reprompting the tool to generate a result more inline with their vision.
It's not "creative" in the sense of incorporating a drum track or photograph into a composition you're developing, it's "creative" in the sense of asking for a vague style and getting it, which is pretty much exactly the tool doing the entire activity. The author explains in detail that it's not their vision, its just a list of styles returned when asked for a list of styles, and they don't actually know what the Memphis Group even is...
Would you consider me to have "created" Billie Jean if I type "eighties music" into a music search engine and select "Michael Jackson" from the list. Or to have "designed a logo" if I pay a human to design some logos for me and pick one.
You can do that exact thing with Ableton if you want. If you want to put in low effort you can do that. You can find beats labeled “1980’s pop” and use presets from other people. You can put in high effort using AI tools and fine tune every aspect of the result if you want. It’s just another tool. You are conflating effort with the tool.
The analogy holds perfectly well. We can "no true Scotsman" this all day long.
Any "real" artist could dunk on PS: "Oh, you didn't have to go out and buy a canvas and paint and brushes. Hell, you probably don't even know how to properly mix paint on a palette! Not only do you not to clean your brushes, you don't even have brushes!"
And the right response is: "Who gives a shit?" The answer is "Some folks, but their opinion decreasingly matters." And the same exact logic applies to AI. You might as well be complaining that Google doesn't pay cartographers to hand draw Google Maps.
> when it does the entire activity for you.
This is total fiction, and has spawned an entire cult of "just give me the prompt" folks that think using AI requires no skill, and anyone using AI is just a "meat proxy". But that's not true, at all, as evidenced by years of commentary on this site with people getting radically different outcomes using AI. We've gone from "stochastic parrots" to "gonna destroy humanity" in 2 years.
AI will do jobs that we used to go to Fiverr for -- it'll eat the bottom of the market, just like automation does elsewhere. The bottom of the market is blog art, clip art, menus, commercial signage, event posters, and the like. That's completely natural, and hating it is shouting into the wind. The local cafe owner was never particularly incentived to have their menus crafted by some local artist.
If the hole in the wall teriyaki restaurant’s menu wasn’t hand painted by Monet I turn right around and walk out. I want nothing to do with an eating establishment that can’t at least spring for a realistic rendition of chicken yakisoba hand painted by Michelangelo himself.
Photoshop basically destroyed a centuries-old artistic tradition of depicting six gyoza on a white plate. Now with all this AI nonsense, you might as well just make your food at home rather than stare at yet another “six finger hipster eating a vegetable spring roll” cranked out by ChatGPT.
If you can convince Chat GPT to stop putting icons next to every single thing, it would be loads better. 1940s cubist style seems sort of there, then bam a tiny cake icon next to the word cakes and drinks. Why? Each of these posters, including the original would be so much better without these tiny stupid icons. No one at the Bauhaus ever made a poster with tiny icons! Chat GPT just cannot drop the icons. Like just have it read a graphic design history book. These secondary attempts might pass more people's AI aversion filter but they would all receive an F in a graphic design class.
Absolutely. I've had the identical experience hiring artists for game art/UI. Every once in a while you find an artist who is stellar but most everyone else is not that good.
The TFA is pointing to a prompting skills/creativity issue, but I get equally frustrated with hired artists as with genAI image models. Even with skilled human artists (remote/offshore), I find they're best at copying a particular style so I end up having to google for images of the look that we're targeting, then spend hours painstakingly describing the changes needed. Then iterating many times, and with artists in remote time zones that means each iteration takes a whole day. The process is ironically very similar to using AI image models but can take much longer due to time zones.
Well that's why and how we got the current model. Lots of noise, so tools were made to curate and figure out the most consistent artists But it goes both wwys; artists that stand out get ebough of a reputation to boost their prices. Unless you get very lucky with budding taletnt, you generally get what you pay for.It's not much different from how you'd run your gaming team.
True, but whats even dumber is that 99% of the use cases people are getting angry at would never be given to a real designer anyway (too low value).
The funniest genre of AI backlash imo is normies yelling at small businesses for using AI on social posts.
There's no world where your local flowershop has both the time and money to brief a design agency to create a flyer for Fridays social post.
Yet, in the mind of the mob, they imagine some designer is losing a job due to the existence of AI...not realizing that every social post they've previously been looking at from the same flower shop was just a 1-click Canva template.
The only person losing a job due to AI design is Canva, which itself was hated for taking jobs away from Photoshop designers, whom in the 90s ended up taking jobs away from the phototypesetting industry, who took the jobs away from the manual typesetters, etc etc etc. Meanwhile the economy and living standards grew each time.
The blog also mentions, several times, that it wasn't the goal to be indistinguishable.
I think it's actually a feature when people can recognize it as AI.
Why would someone want it to be unrecognizable as AI? What is the reason people want to hide AI usage ? (other than when "cheating" in studies or examns or such, obv)
AI generated visuals are becoming a signal of A) low-effort, B) and/or unwillingness or inability to spend resources to genuinely present your product or brand.
Both of these communicate that I will probably not get a good value for my money when buying your product or service.
> Both of these communicate that I will probably not get a good value for my money when buying your product or service.
This is where I stop following. Businesses should focus on where they differentiate, and I really don't care how they generate signage if I can read it. I don't get anything by them paying Banksy to make their menu instead of having Gemini generate it. And if there is any connection to getting good value, it's the inverse: I'm more likely to get good value when I'm not paying for fancy advertising. See: every drugstore that puts generics alongside brand names for cheaper.
Yes, generics are better value, but at least from the big drugstores and pharmacies they still have clean design - they just make it clear what their active ingredient is in what dosage, mention the branded equivalent, and then put the standard drug label on it, and that's about it.
The worst generative AI posters and restaurant menus I'm seeing from newer small businesses do not instill the same feeling that I'm getting generic-like value. To keep with the drug analogy, they feel like the combo pills you find somewhere in the back of a gas station which combine 10+ random supplements to help with 20+ different symptoms. Especially for new restaurants where real reviews are limited, menus with terrible AI generated food drawings really give me the same ick - that they might not be providing any good value at all.
However, i do admit that part of this is also that i live in an area where there is tons of competition for most cuisines I'm interested in, so I can use menu quality as a differientiating factor in the first place. If enough places around me were using sloppy AI menus i would probably ignore it.
You're free to ignore signals of cheapness if you want, as well as not care about quality. If you want generic restuarant food I guess you can go to McDonalds instead of a burger place; it's all the same value to you I guess.
You're using rhetoric to try and change the subject -- you're making a jump from "good value" to "lack of quality", and painting them with the same brush.
I'm saying I don't particularly value businesses that focus on things that are low impact for me. I'd rather my barista focus on sourcing good beans and making good coffee than paying someone to do a fancy custom menu for them. We see this all the time when we visit new areas. It's considered naive to follow whatever looks most glitzy -- every seasoned traveler will tell stories about all the tourist traps, and how the real quality is the hole-in-the-wall place all the locals gather.
What I'm saying is we shouldn't conflate quality with marketing and advertising, which is what posters are. You seem dead set on doing so anyway, and I'm not sure why.
"AI = low effort" is becoming a heuristic regardless of the assertion's absolute accuracy. It's probably not going to die soon as long as it keeps appearing in scammy or low-margin business places.
AI-generated visuals aren't the first to go through this. I'd say the early-to-mid 90's "desktop publishing" went through this too - as soon as everyone could make ads and flyers cheaply with Word, everyone did.
> "AI = low effort" is becoming a heuristic regardless of the assertion's absolute accuracy.
If you can tell that it's AI, that's probably because it is low effort. Higher-effort attempts pass more easily.
(Of course, that also requires an understanding that there are ways to apply effort to making a short request; and believing that it would make a difference; and noticing for yourself that the first output is bad; and trying. Quite a lot of people seem to lack at least one of these.)
If a business markets itself with these AIgen posters, you get wildly different responses from different groups.
boomers that spend all their time on Facebook will think “this is such a nice pretty poster” and be oblivious to the fact it is even ai. Even if they knew it was ai they don’t care.
Young people will think it is low class/trashy. Some hate it because it’s ai, others hate it because the poster is ugly/busy/confusing.
Because there is a big anti-AI movement and some people will think you're destroying the planet and putting people out of a job if you make one prompt to a chatbot.
Maybe if there were fewer people foaming at the mouth to enrich themselves while destroying the planet, and putting people out of work, there would be less pushback.
If we're being frank: we've been in a low trust society for a good while now. Grifting is rampant and blatant, all the way up to the federal government.
Among many other things, it's about "am I getting scammed". So my mind needs to develop called ID in some sense. Not a perfect indicator, but enough to protect me. That can open me up to criticism as being overly cynical. And my response is: yes, that's what a low trust society does to people. That's the point.
While this is a side comment on a somewhat frivolous topic, it did make me reframe a lot of my justice, transparency and reason (as in being reasonable) complacency I am seeing around me.
Yes, the fact that we are in a low trust society makes us behave we do. Can we change this? Should we even try?
I've seen societies band together in the face of (acute) natural disasters (floods, wildfires...) or big disasters like wars, but how do we get to — if not high trust — not-low trust society when all is good and is it even worth pursuing?
It's all of the above. The unreliable empty garbage they barf out, threats to destroy jobs for oligarch asshat profit, and the resource hungry pillaging of neighborhoods. Oh, yeah, and also the crappy mush up of stolen art.
Seems these things about genAI are fairly well established at this point. Hence the vast majority disapproval of genAI being forced on users and broad rejection of AI data centers. Did you have a substantive response for any of the three major negatives, or just your own low-effort, low-care dismissal?
I believe rejection of AI Data Centres is nothing but "local" protectiveness (a bit like NIMBY); like lithium mining, nuclear plants, and any other "dirty", destructive activity.
I want the products of it (how many phones with lithium batteries in those protests), but not the side effects.
Which is not to say these are wrong perspectives to hold, but it's important to understand where the root of the complaint is before you try to come up with generic solutions.
> Why would someone want it to be unrecognizable as AI?
If we operate under the assumption that the AI generated posters are bad (which this HN thread is), then making them not look like AI generated posters would be directionally toward making them not bad. That doesn't necessarily mean it's good though, it could be average and fulfill that constraint.
> Why would someone want it to be unrecognizable as AI?
Because the reason for any given AI work being "recognizable as AI" is considered inherently a quality issue. For the suspicion to arise, there has to be something that someone considers "wrong" about the work, in order to point at that thing and say "this must be the work of an enemy 「ＭＯＤＥＬ」".
> Why would someone want it to be unrecognizable as AI? What is the reason people want to hide it
Because a lot of “everyday” folks really strongly dislike AI. I’ve lost count of the number of AI generated Instagram ads I’ve seen where the comments are filled with “AI slop!”.
It’s not a positive signal for anyone who wants to persuade someone of the value of whatever they’re advertising because it’s associated with being cheap and lazy.
I think "a lot" is very subjective. I can also say "a lot of people really like AI-generated arts" and that would be true as well. HN is a place where a lot of normally objective, informed, and probably very nice folks in the real life come to engage in endless of debates that go nowhere.
> Half of U.S. adults say the increased use of AI in daily life makes them feel more concerned than excited, according to a June 2025 survey. Just 10% say they are more excited than concerned. Another 38% say they are equally concerned and excited.
> About half of Americans said in the June survey that AI will worsen people’s ability to think creatively and form meaningful relationships with others. Far fewer said AI will make these things better.
“about half” surely objectively qualifies as “a lot”.
> I can also say "a lot of people really like AI-generated arts" and that would be true as well.
Yes but without the corresponding negative. If someone who likes AI generated art sees some human created art they don’t think “gross, why didn’t they use AI to do that?”. So for something like advertising using AI will alienate some potential customers. Not using AI will alienate no one.
People aren’t feeling the benefits of AI. Where there are any benefits, they aren’t causing prices to decrease or supply to go up, instead the excess value is being absorbed by profit taking.
If most people aren’t shareholders but instead workers whose jobs are threatened by AI, we should expect this response.
It has nothing to do with artists, it has everything to do with trying to mount a collective response to the apparent threat, poorly expressed as crowds tend to do.
Why not both? I didn’t lose my job in 2008 but watching people all around me lose theirs made it clear that my own economic situation was not a safe one.
Maybe they see the random AI art on the bus and they realize that meant a real human artist probably didn't get paid to make it so society is worse off. Maybe those poll respondents have empathy, in that they are worried about their jobs and feel bad for other people who have lost work to AI too
they realize that meant a real human artist probably didn't get paid to make it so society is worse off
This is a form of the broken window fallacy. Society is not worse off when production requires less labor, any more than it's worse off when someone uses an open source library rather than paying someone to reimplement it.
The broken window fallacy is the idea that it's good when your window gets broken because you have to pay someone to fix it and it increases their income. If that were true, then it would be bad if you could easily repair windows without spending time or money. It's false because we're better off if we can spend our resources on things we actually want rather than constantly maintaining our windows, even if that means some window repairmen need to find other jobs.
What do we do when former window repairman can't find other jobs? Just fuck em, right?
The narrative we're seeing around AI and current automation isn't "we're going to automate one category of jobs". If it were then sure, we could be relatively confident that the excess labor from that industry would be absorbed by other segments
But that's not what the future looks like to me. The future to me looks like "we want to automate a large majority of labor"
So what then? If tons of labour is displaced then the Broken Window Fallacy doesn't really apply, because it is based on the assumption that there will always be something for displaced labour to do.
Call it the Excess Labor Corollary. If there's no way to absorb excess labor in other segments, then what.
When there really aren't any jobs for the former window repair man to do, we are in a "post scarcity economy", which could be a utopia where everyone lives in comfort and has more leisure time.
Or of course, a few billionaires could hoard the wealth.
There's a Wikipedia page about it.
We could be in a post scarcity economy now, except that generally instead of realising we all have enough of we share, we raise the threshold of what we consider to be enough comfort and stuff.
>could be a utopia where everyone lives in comfort and has more leisure time.
It definitely could be. With current trajectory as of now, do you think it will be?
>except that generally instead of realising we all have enough of we share, we raise the threshold of what we consider to be enough comfort and stuff.
I see the opposite sentiment. I see previous basic necessities further out or reach then they were last generation. People aren't raising their standards, they are sinking towards poverty.
But then their worries are dismissed because they can get a flatscreen TV for 200 dollars. A TV that is likely feeding your data back to corporate to make thousands off you.
You're going back one generation, and I'm thinking further back.
Like, if we all settled for a 1950s British living standard, using current manufacturing technology, we could achieve that while everyone works a little bit less.
But, we'd prefer to keep labouring and have nicer things.
The supposed goal of "Make America Great again" is to invoke that 50s era of American exceptionalism. So surely there's something there people miss.
And your theoretical implies we have choice in the matter. I'm sure many would in fact take a smaller home with less amenities over a modern home with cheap appliances. Not that I'd actually be given that choice given my family lineage, but the general living standard of the 50's was quite high. I doubt the act of AC and the lack of knowledge of abestos are the things that made housing skyrocket over the decades.
Sure, but if we run AI all the way to its endpoint, it’s not just about window repairmen anymore. Our current notions about economics assume there’s always another job class for people to move to, here eventually there won’t be.
So here you never have to pay anyone to fix your windows, because they fix themselves, but conversely nobody will give you money to fix their windows! And then you have to pay your self-fixing windows a rent in tokens without an income.
I don’t think so, even if the whole “AI exponential” idea is wrong, that’s just the shape of the curve. There still is a curve. Even if these things take 50 years to happen instead of 5 (which would be better and which I doubt will be the case) it still happens eventually. I think the current capabilities of AI are enough of a heuristic for us to assume this is going to happen.
It is a stated goal of several prominent AI business leaders. Altman, Amodei, and Musk at the very least have had mask-off moments where they said as much.
AI thumbnails outperform human thumbnails on YouTube by a lot, I've seen click-through rate spreads of 4%+ (~5% -> ~9% in AB tests). Yet people will do drive by comments trying to excoriate creators for using AI thumbnails. It's really quite ridiculous.
This does make me wonder if I'm being disillusioned or if the community has genuinely shifted in the past 2–3 years or so. Or of this merely a greater societal shift as "history culture" takes off. You'd think sentiments like "clickbait is bad" would be a common sentiment here, but now I'm not so sure anymore.
A lot of any real gain will be due to novelty, and that will wane once you've been doing it a short time (or once other people in your field are doing it so you all go back to looking the same).
I suspect a lot of the gain isn't even that useful to the channel: it being people clicking to complain. You might not see that mean actual complaints because many will see the existing ones and either just upvote them or move on without doing anything (their chance to repeat their regular comment to get a few upvotes having been taken by someone already having said it).
I'm saying that it at best drives a temporary increase in engagement, then you look even more like everyone else than you did before because everyone is doing the same thing with the same AIs. And while that engagement counts in the immediate stats, it might result in a drop overall as some mark you as a channel they don't want to visit again. Then again, I don't think many youtubers are relying on discerning viewers so maybe they will get a boost in the hollow attention the crave.
It’s their job, their source of income (or they’re aspiring to it). Making bait thumbnails is a necessary evil. If they don’t they’re leaving money on the table for no reason.
If they AB test some thumbnails and the AI ones get more views/engagement then of course they are going to do that.
I think the overall premise of “if AI thumbnails are even getting more engagement, it must be from haters” is faulty to begin with. It just fits your personal narrative. We simply don’t know.
Peers Morgan's source of income, and hence his job, is being rage bait in (vaguely) human form. A pound shop Alex Jones. It's being his job doesn't mean I have to respect it, or him. See also: loan sharks, living statues, influencers generally.
You seemed to be reacting to my low opinion of the practices of attention dredgers, as if I'm bad for holding that opinion and a should respect all career choices and income generation attempts. Perhaps I read that quite wrong.
Yes, and this is a bad thing. It's bad that it gets rewarded and it's bad that creators whose main content is good feel compelled to do it. And I would watch all of this stuff just the same, based on the topic matter and the channel's reputation, without them doing these things, as long as YouTube had put a trial of that content in front of me in the first place. And I get no way to actually give that feedback on YouTube.
There are plenty of channels I'll watch semi-regularly that have god-awful thumbnails. But the same is true of almost everything that I immediately click "don't recommend channel" on.
Do those rates hold across multiple videos over a period of time? I've seen at least one case where someone did an A/B test of an AI thumbnail and the reason his engagement went up because everyone hated it and was commenting to say as much.
Maximizing click-through rates leads to garbage clickbait and often misleading thumbnails, it is not a good metric. Those kinds of thumbnail, and channels built on low effort but high engagement content, were widely derided before AI came along.
Novelty is a significant driving factor here. Gen Thumbnails are eye catching because they are new and viewers haven’t adapted to skimming over them like they do with everything else.
Thumbnails, same as everything that is supposed to attract attention, have styles that change over time due to saturation and fatigue.
It’s the current iteration of the red arrow with a (staged) surprised face and as you’re saying we will all learn to just skip it as well. These things are always an arms race, and given LLM’s can only generate facsimiles of things I don’t see how it can stay ahead of it
There are channels I watch regularly because they cover topics I want to see covered and I've seen their previous videos and they met my expectations. Then they'll use AI thumbnails while focused on finding the right topics and thinking about how to present them. Some of them are clearly letting an AI write the main part of a script and reading it off (while still being clearly a human doing this and not some weird TTS monstrosity). It annoys me to think that I'm incentivizing people to do this, or letting The Algorithm get the wrong idea about the quality of these shitty thumbnails that don't matter now that the creator is in my feed and I can read the video titles.
(I also end up watching a fair bit of stuff where the thumbnail is literally just a random frame from the video, which lets me know the subject, and the title is some clickbait nonsense that I don't care about. There are a lot of ways for this stuff to work.)
I watch a lot og gaming videos on youtube, often of new indie games to see if I want to play them. Some creators will use AI-generated thumbnails that look nothing like the actual game, and before I recognize them and ignore that creator, they'll get clickthroughs. And then I'll see that I was bamboozled and exit the video.
I don't care if someone uses AI to "style" their thumbnails, but if you use it to completely misrepresent what the video is about I'll leave in protest. That has nothing to do with AI, and everything to do with the fact that it's clickbait. I don't like human-generated clickbait either.
You’re comparing the sub-minimum-wage offshore template jockeys to average designers, not “high end” designers. A high-end designer making a one-off poster for a local fair is about as likely as a senior engineer at a FAANG company making a website for it.
It would be like someone paying for a simple website for their small business saying off-shore fiverrrr Wordpress hacks are average coders, and anyone making anything close to a reasonable dev salary in this job market was a high-falutin’ luxury option.
An average graphic designer would ask what unique, non-informational things about the event the poster should portray, do a little bit of research and exploration, and then figure out how to communicate that in pure visual terms. It draws people into the vibe of your event, and hints at the visual impact of experiencing it. You get the nice type work, information hierarchy, attractive layout and color scheme, etc. for free because those are the tools average graphic designers use to visually communicate. This is not expensive compared to the expertise required. With both AI and the Fiverrrr designers, at best, you only get nice type work, information hierarchy, attractive layout and color scheme, etc. You’re not paying for design — you’re paying a graphics software technician for a graphic, like you would at a sign shop.
An average designer is who you’d want to make your posters and maybe a few other types of advertisements, such as postcards, or bus shelters or billboards or banner ads. Someone in a country with a minimum wage of less than a dollar is who you get on fiverrrr. A high-end graphic designer is who you’d contract to do a complete branding and identity overhaul.
The alternatives are not horrible, but look like I’m being lured to a Spring Fair by an alien. It makes no sense to associate with Japanese imagery or 90s computer graphics for an event that has nothing to with these topics. Design is a language and these speak gibberish.
This is my experience as well. I run a bootstrapped business, so we don't have a ton of backing. We can't afford the top design firms, and Fable can do better than those within our budget. So it's not that we prefer AI over human designers; we just don't have the money!
This technology is super new and I've only seen AI posters really proliferate in the past few months and suddenly... people don't know how to live without it?
They're not saying they can't live without it, they're saying it's helpful. If you've been walking to the well for years to get buckets of water, and suddenly have running water in your kitchen, going back to trudging buckets doesn't sound very appealing.
You don't have ANY money? Plenty of students would do a great job for a little money and a professional reference. Now you just helped the workforce, helped the local economy and cost you little.
Have you ever tried doing that? In my experience, art students don't like to work for "little money" and "professional reference" and stablished artists don't like when you try to pay "little money" to students.
Just a note about language: when folks say they "don't have the money" or "don't have the time", it's almost never the case that they don't have any of the resource in question...it's about priorities. What they are saying is that there are far more effective ways to spend their money than incidentals like this, especially when cheap alternatives exist.
These days a cheap designer is just going to be a meat proxy for AI anyway.
AI, at least for now while it's still free/very cheap, enables producing a lot of very low-value content that in the past you never could have justified spending money and human labor on. The cost or time needed to make a poster or a flyer acted as a value-based gatekeeper. Today, it costs nothing to make an AI slop image and blast it out on social media, so we're drowning in it.
I was the person who "had to bother dealing with it" many years ago before we had AI, Canva, or even Adobe cloud.
I volunteered and designed a good amount of posters for student organizations.
Don't enjoy it but did it to help my peers and friends out.
I find it ironic that back then we had a lot of trouble finding people who were willing to design posters and promo media on print.
Now the comment section on this post has people mourning AI taking over poster making in 2026. Where was the help back then?
From the perspective of someone who had to burn the midnight oil to do it for years, trust me, I would rather not do it and spend that time with my family and friends. And judging from how hard it was to find others who were willing to do it, I think its a reasonable argument that most people were not actually willing to do the work either.
So mourn away but I wouldn't cry if I "missed out" on making posters. If we had AI back then, I would not take on any of those poster making requests.
One of my best memories from an art class in high school was that a student organization came into our class and asked if any of us would be willing to design a poster. I ended up designing and silk-screening their poster for them and it was a fantastic experience.
I can totally see how doing more than a couple would start to feel like work, but having one or two experiences like that was awesome.
They said: "I volunteered and designed a good amount of posters for student organizations." What do you think how many student organization have the excess money to hire a professional designer for a one-off poster? Of course they needed someone to do it for free, or else it wouldn't have been done at all!
Are you being intentionally obtuse? Try reading their comment in its entirety, and not just as individual fragments taken out of context: They most likely didn't have the budget to hire a professional designer and no one else would do it for free, so they had to do it themselves. They didn't enjoy it, and they would've gladly passed that work to an AI, had one existed back then.
For every human good art that is cheap I can show you ten that are not. The problem is you don't know which version you'd get. Someone charges less because they are unknown. Fixing AI art is much less hassle than human one.
Because people assume u need to actually hire someone to make art. Just let your kid draw something for your small restaurant. It's more pleasant to look at for people who didn't yet sell their soul to AI.
> Just let your kid draw something for your small restaurant.
Wait, we've gone from "pay the local artists" because AI shows you're "lazy and cheap" and "don't care about your brand".
And now whatever my 7-year-old draws is good enough.
My only conclusion reading these threads is that folks come in with their mind made up, and will argue absolutely anything so long as it amounts to "AI bad".
the point of advertising is to communicate something. If your kid draws your menu, you signal family values. If you pay a local artist, you signal investment in the community.
If ChatGPT churns out your ad you've signaled nothing. And that's obviously why you can criticize AI for every imaginable reason. That's indeed the difference and why people, regardless of how 'good' your AI art will be, will attempt to hide it, because it defeats the purpose of advertising as such.
Damn, how did businesses survive decades without being able to pay some intern or someone in the office to quickly put up a poster? Like come on, claiming 'budget' is the issue here when I can see indie bands operating with twigs and some chewing gum figure out how to put together a poster for their band is embarassing.
You have the money, you just don't have the contacts or skills to find a good designer which charges you a fair price. Big design firms will rip you off. Their job is to get corruption contracts from the public sector or big enterprises, and then reward their insider later with a nice fake job.
Saying you don't have the money for a designer is a bit like saying you can't go on business trip because the company can't afford to purchase a jet airplane right now.
You said it - and the same is true for many of the other talents from Ai. I've worked with gobs of artists, accountant, MBAs, developers, appliance repair techs, and so on. Ai does a better job than most of them, but not as good as the best of them.
This is an excellent point, and it doesn't only apply to art/design.
In almost any intellectual domain, including coding, the models are already ahead of the average human. But instead, we compare them to the very best humans, which almost no one on the planet has access to.
$20 for a lot of access to better-than-average is a world-changingly good deal!
> they can tell they’re AI and point to things that the AI did “wrong” and a human artist would do better.
Pretty much all of the designers we contacted recently were using AI to draw. Especially on those kinds of cheap work. They are just a bit more professional in the prompting and can do final touch in Photoshop.
I mentioned something similar, in a previous comment.
The sad part, is that the same thing is likely to happen to design, as is already happening with software development.
The junior training track is going to get the bottom ripped out. Established outfits like Pentagram will do fine, but lesser ones, like small design shops, are likely to get run out of business by AI image generation, which will improve quickly.
The problem is that these are the shops that train the designers that end up in companies like Pentagram.
Or only Ivy-League sheepskins will get junior jobs at the big studios, which will be the only ones left standing, when the dust settles.
Totally agree. Opinions are cheap. People can be drawn to “horrible” art, and small artists - especially social media managers - right now are creating intentionally bad mspaint.exe 1994 aesthetics because AI art looks like it was created by real artists, and it’s the only way to differentiate
To me, they look very much like Canva style designs. Some pre-existing design template that someone took and then smooshed their own dates and information into.
This misses the point about complaints of AI slop. It’s not about “worse”, it’s about “distracting”. It’s about AI fingerprints overwhelming the consumer. It’s not too different from hiring a freelancer who does a blatant stylistic ripoff of a popular artist in an unflattering way: the consumer of the work sees the ripoff first, focuses on the ripoff, is unable to appreciate the message being delivered. AI slop is overwhelming and distracting to the consumer in that it communicates messages of laziness, disinterest, disregard for the underlying message. Whether this is true or not in every case, we’ve seen enough cases where we have to start by considering it. It’s the vehicle for scams and spam. It’s like sending an email that starts with “FIVE TRICKS TO HAVE BETTER SKIN” or any other meme spam line.
A human freelancer might do work that is technically worse. Worse can be distracting in ways that are, well… worse. But it’s different, it doesn’t tap into a collective cultural understanding of “AI slop.” It may communicate even more poorly, but it’s not the same problem.
It doesn't have to look "cartoony". Harness issue. Your 2026 models are trained on a sufficiently broad set of images that style is almost a solved problem.
>but a small local event or business probably won’t have the budget to hire them or know where to find them.
And yet, somehow, up until what maybe 2024, every single small event or business in every local market around the earth managed to figure this out. I guess we've lost that ancestral knowledge of how this was possibly done and afforded in a few dozen months.
Maybe it's just me, but even on pure aesthetic reasons I would take a Comic Sans and clipart poster made in Word over the slop.
At this point I have some kind of a physical repulsion to the generated posters, and it's always easy to tell from the fontwork and the iconography, let alone illustrations if there are any.
Nah, AI cant design prooper pages, and posters. Period. Even someone with basic aesthetic skills and a knack for illustrations will create a much better postan, than these. Because you'll immediately recognize the human in them. AI has no soul, no experiences, it's just a primitive neural net.
The problem’s not so much that the posters are AI generated, but that they’re too crowded and unfocused.
Their individual elements seem fine and look good, but when taken as a whole they feel wrong.
This may be a failure mode similar to juniors using AI and making it much harder for seniors to find the bugs, because the code actually looks good at first sight.
I don’t think the blog author actually has any design skills based on the prompts and the AI obviously can’t nudge them in the right direction or help them clarify their brief, like a real designer (i.e. not random online freelancers) would.
I’ve been diving into Ink Master highlights on YouTube lately. These are typically all excellent artists but they don’t always produce excellent work. I’ve seen some hands that could have come out of an early gen ai model permanently inked into someone’s skin.
i would never go to an event that cares so little about people buying tickets they can't even put a pen to paper or just use a photograph. it reeks of laziness.
>Maybe, but a small local event or business probably won’t have the budget to hire them or know where to find them.
This is funny to read given I am currently on a Japan trip with 3 friends and we actively avoid every small restaurant that have AI generated images of their food.
Using AI generated bullshit just shows that you really dont want to put in the work to produce something actually charming.
Hell, we've seen a food menu drawn by a toddler and it was infinitely more sympathetic than all the AI generated Wagyu images.
I was in Japan in Spring, I didn't notice any AI-generated ads/menus (not implying you're lying, just curious if it's become a trend since then, or if it's a particular area).
But I recall this simple looking promotion: https://imgur.com/a/fbM8Akb . The photo looks professionally done, and not AI. Then again, maybe they googled for "cheesecake photo".
I just image searched for "cheesecake", I didn't find this photo in the results, but there are a few results where I now have to wonder "Is that AI?"
To me if you ask to a 10 years old kid and give him a PC with Microsoft Paint on it it will you will have a much better result than any AI-generated option in the post. If there are graphics designer that produce a worse result of what AI creates, it's because they probably use AI as well.
The problem of AI generated stuff (we see the problem of manifests, but I'm a software engineer and with computer programs it's exactly the same thing) is that they immediately look non-human, and our brain trained itself to detect, and thus get irritated by, AI generated content.
It looks fake, it hurts to see, it seems fine at first glance fine but it's not, everyone seems identical because the AI is not, despite of the name, creative, it just a hyper complex copy/paste machine, and obviously the result just looks copy/paste as well.
> To me if you ask to a 10 years old kid and give him a PC with Microsoft Paint on it it will you will have a much better result than any AI-generated option in the post.
FWIW, statements like this are so patently ridiculous that it actually hurts your cause.
> To me if you ask to a 10 years old kid and give him a PC with Microsoft Paint on it it will you will have a much better result than any AI-generated option in the post.
Sorry, if it's a joke it doesn't land very well.
Before AI, if a 10yo did these posters for a school project, people would just tell their parents to not do the homework for their kid. These are far above what 99.9% 10yo can do.
A lot of posters or arts in general are to be seen once and never again. If you put pre-AI arts together in an exhibition like at the top of the article are you sure it wouldn't irritate people?
I walk past countless of such arts everyday, none of them registered after even 15 mins. Maybe you have better taste, but don't try to project your opinion as that of the majority.
This is provably false. AI YouTube thumbnails trounce human thumbnails (often nearly doubling the click-through rate according to A/B testing), and people rate AI art more highly than human art on average when they don't know that it's AI.
Just admit that you are scared of the future that's coming and it's eliciting irrational hatred, and that's causing you to lash out. At least that'd be honest and we'd understand where your coming from even if we didn't share your views.
Not engaging with your second argument, it's just trollbait. But for your first argument, there is a big difference between info graphics trying to convey information and video thumbnails trying to trigger a click
I find it kinda funny that even "smartest", most capable models often have a very hard time going beyond surface-level, top-of-mind associations, when faced with creative tasks.
Of course, a "Japanese Minimal Poster" has a sakura and a stylized flag of Japan, duh
A human designer would probably think that "Japan -> sakura" and "Japan -> Japanese flag" are way too obvious, too banal, too stereotypical, and, most importantly too boring. And then they would probably sit for a while and try to think of something fresher and less clichéd.
But AI has absolutely no problem with going with the cheesiest, most overused trope.
Well of course Spring + Japan = Sakura. In a way the model would be faulty if it didn't reach for that cliché. That's what it's meant to do.
If you want originality, you need to supply it. AI fills the vacuum with the obvious thing.
And in a way that's a feature. If I was creating a poster myself I'd think "nah, can't use sakura it's too obvious". AI gets you past that hurdle. "Yeah, we used the cliché, it looks nice, let's move on".
This is if it's for a school fayre, village fête, etc. - brilliant originality isn't the goal. But it's nice when your poster doesn't look the same as three other posters on the same noticeboard (I have seen this).
If brilliant originality is needed, a human has to bring it. Although an LLM with the temperature turned up can offer some nice seeds.
Thanks, it introduces a little "jitter" that keeps the egg from rolling down the same face of the ridge every time. Possibly, the same could be accomplished with a judicious application of the temperature parameter.
But how to tell the model which section is supposed to be populated with spicy tokens?
pigeon-footed → splayed toes → several directions → indecision → ambivalence
Do not cross the two clouds until each has several branches.
Reject commemorate + dulcigenic → a sweet memorial. Prefer A monument can turn bitterness into sweet nostalgia without changing what happened.
Reject preindicant + sclerotical → a hardened omen. Follow foretelling → divination and hard anatomy → bone to knucklebones.
It is a prime example of esoteric LLM incantations, if not -excuse me- nonsense
Off topic and a little whimsical, but LLM incantations is a really fun idea.
In a world where one hyper intelligent AI controls everything, hackers work tirelessly in secret off-grid, doing extreme math by hand, finding the right series of tokens that magically coerce the AI into carrying out certain actions. Spell books are copied out by hand and distributed in dark alleyways. Itinerant wizards travel the land on horse drawn carriages, travelling from town to town, casting spells on people's devices to bend the AI to their will.
It literally is how they work. They look for the next most probable token. Always keep that in mind when writing a prompt or reading output. If you don't supply it, it will fill it in with the most obvious stuff.
Personally I think if you were going to make a poster for a Japanese themed spring festival, and you did NOT include some sakura, you completely misunderstood the assignment.
Your promotional poster for a community gathering should not be subverting the western gaze on Japanese culture, or any other concept from art criticism 101.
It's supposed to get average people in your neighborhood to glance at it for 5-10 seconds and say, "cool looks like a good time"
YMMV but my experience tells me that the more cliché something looks, the more likely it's bad/cheap.
I've never been in a cliché-looking restaurant that is actually decent.
Meanwhile, the best restaurants I know have, at best, a flag or some kind of small drawing to give a clue about their nationality, but otherwise they look like a regular local one.
Right, but the best restaurants are not most restaurants. The best high end events are not most events. Most events and restaurants could be improved a lot by AI already
More like 100ms or less as their visual field coincidentally sweeps over wherever the ad is posted in the physical world. In this regard, it's even more important to use something people subconsciously associate with your thing.
Of course they have ulterior motives to push the message that it can replace high quality human artists, even though that would be ridiculous under any serious analysis.
Isn’t the most overused trope the most statistically weighted to be chosen from a group of options? It makes technical sense but as you say leads to boring outcomes
I see what you mean, but I think you can draw (no pun intended) a distinction between trope following and having a skill, or at least should notionally be able to.
> But AI has absolutely no problem with going with the cheesiest, most overused trope.
Considering your prompt fits exactly that description I think the AI delivered perfectly. Try using some actual design language and see how well it does.
The thing is, they aren't creative. When I ask an LLM to go beyond the mean, it has no idea what to do and returns incoherance. Its responses seem to have N latent dimensions of information. But, the value of each of those dimensions is always the midpoint. With creative prompting, I can push it to respond in ways that go beyond the mean, but it can't tie them together cohesively. It doesn't have anything in its training data to fill the hole in space. No ability to extrapolate.
My point is that those kinds of prompts are dumb and I actually expect the model to produce slop. In programming we write these huge prompts that go into a lot of detail, and when we do that, it actually works. I've never asked a coding agent to go beyond the mean, that just sounds like a dumb thing to do. Apply this rule in design and I'm sure you'll get better results. Kinda what the blog post is all about.
That's on the prompt, not the AI. You could be specific about what imagery to use like a torii or a Japanese castle, and so on. Whatever you leave to the AI you're most likely going to get the most generic version. If you're low effort in the prompt yet get low effort results, if you put some effort into the prompt you can get better results.
Sure, but what's interesting is if you tell it to "behave unpredictably" or "don't use tropes" it usually fails down the same curve. Which is predictable, but telling.
I remember seeing a poster for Chinese New Year years ago, and someone had included the kanji for Japan on it (日本). Obviously they just wanted generic looking characters without bothering to see what they meant. I couldn't resist writing a comment on the poster about it.
It showed whoever did it had no clue about East Asia or Chinese script...
Pretty sure 90% of the posters of the type at the top of the article are made for $0. I bet for $10 you could get real artists from non-Western countries to make a simple poster, but these days people would probably claim those $10 jobs and then have AI generate them anyway.
Destroyed or democratized? I'd question the financial judgement if a local fair actually paid a designer for a poster and revisions, versus just literally typing something in Word and adding some clip art.
I like his still of prompt creation "Give me a list of styles to choose from" then choosing one of the available options. SKILL.md files seem to be built upon assumptions of what the language model already knows and understands, I am not sure that most skills are not tied to a particular LLM vendor/version combination and if the same prompt might not be interpreted differently by different language models.
Here the author is asking the machine about what it knows, so there is less of an element of doubt.
As somebody who made a poster for an event just few days ago... I find it funny that this probably took just as long as without AI while probably going through a less rewarding process with little control and very limited learning.
A non professional design would probably take few hours doing it the very first time, discovering the software to do it, maybe learn some shortcuts, few key principles e.g. using a background then putting things above, etc. The next time though they would probably take 30min with a better result, the time after that maybe 5min with complete control.
It's really not such a demanding process if you rely on existing building block, namely dedicated software, assets like imagine banks, fonts, etc.
I had to make a poster for a music event recently. Downloaded the free version of Affinity, scrolled instagram for event poster inspiration, learned how to use the program and make my poster in 2 hours. I could do it much faster now but I had to start from scratch.
Sent my poster around and people loved it. Had I put out a slop poster I may as well cancel the event for how much backlash there would be.
I have very little sympathy for the sloperators here. The tools to make a poster are free and viable for someone with zero skill.
It’s not complicated - the default style signals low effort. Why should I get excited about the village fete if the organizers put in the barest minimum of effort?
But there’s another reason it drives people crazy - it’s low effort trying to present as high effort. If the sign was simple Comic Sans then it would at least be charmingly honest.
> Why should I get excited about the village fete if the organizers put in the barest minimum of effort?
Because there's no correlation between the ability to organise a village event and the graphic design skills. (Apart from "it's been so successful we can splash money on a design agency") Maybe someone actually liked it and thought it's enough. I've seen groups overthinking posters and it felt similar to groups at uni overthinking funny names instead of doing the work that actually mattered.
To be clear, I'm not saying those designs are good, just that most of the time the design is not the point and minimum effort above "Times New Roman 12pt" is what many people always wanted to do.
It feels particularly bad for a local arts faire. Like maybe ask one of the local artists if they could design a poster instead of defaulting to the plagiarism machine? If I saw this ai poster for a local crafts faire I’d immediately dismiss it.
Do you offer to pay them in exposure? Or do you offer them actually money commensurate with the work and skill they provide?
Because if it’s the latter we’re back to money being the barrier. And if it’s the former you should go and check with your local artists how much they love working for exposure.
Yes, running an event has work and expenses involved in it. An AI slop poster is a sign the event is not serious and has other more major issues under the surface.
Making a poster is free and easy. Literal children do it in school.
I’ve made posters for events. Affinity is free now, it takes you like an hour to learn it from scratch and make your poster. If you couldn’t be bothered doing that, then that’s a signal the event itself is low effort slop. I'm not sure why people are acting like it's impossible to run an event without AI tools that literally didn't exist until right now.
Graphic design skills don’t correlate with effort. I’ve seen terribly designed posters that the makers clearly put a lot of effort and love into because they loved whatever it was they were promoting.
I’ve also seen people put a lot of effort and love into poster and stuff because that interests them (doesn’t mean they’re good at it either), then the event is utter crap because they didn’t spend much time on the actual event.
It's a village fete, what kind of signals do you want from the poster?
That's why the "Look here's a 100 identical village fete posters" memes are kind of missing the point, it's actually not a bad thing that I can tell from a glance what it is, I don't actually have to read any of the details to know it'll have a tombola, because it's a given.
My bigger issue is all the posters calling it Fayre, not Fete, which is the weird part, particularly the "Craft Fayre" which should definitely be "Craft Fair", but misspellings and greengrocers apostrophe's are part and parcel of a good hand-made poster too.
its an antique (english) spelling for "fair", it's basically the event equivalent of "ye olde shoppe" which is just "the old shop" in a very antiquated phrasing
Except "ye olde" was always "the olde", but for a time printing machines were produced outside of England and lacked the thorn "þ" character, so the y was used as a substitute.
The last paragraph in GP’s comment is the key. Nobody would care about a low effort poster, what they care about is the deception of pretending you put a lot of effort into the poster. It’s dishonest, and it would make me subconsciously question what else they’re being dishonest about.
Tech people seem to have a really difficult time grasping that the average person is not a utilitarian.
People are really bothered by perceived inauthenticity and injustice. And care about more things than the utility of the end product.
On top of that, we have a very out of touch political system that has continually ignored the will of the electorate. So then the tech people will say “see, the masses voted with their feet, they love the utility of AI generated art!”. Completely ignoring the perverse incentivizes and regulatory capture that led to that outcome.
If you were to poll 100 people on the street, they would be very against replacing human artists with AI.
The thing though with deferring to AI slop though is that it signals to me a sort of negative effort now being put in. I mean don't these people also recoil at this stuff? No? They have some screw loose I guess. I don't need to give them my money.
If I’m looking for a handyman on (the Dutch equivalent to) Craigslist, either very short text with spelling errors or something obviously AI are both a positive signal. These are people too busy doing actual jobs, to fret over smoothly copywritten ads.
I think this (low effort posters) rather signals to me that they have the right priorities. A true professional poster would tell me that it's some commercial cash grab instead of real local enthusiasts making something normal.
To me it's the opposite. If the poster is something typed up in Word, I know the Farmer's Market is the real deal. If it's AI generated, I immediately get Temu dropshipping vibes.
But neither is an actual signal. The Word-market can just be selling fruit from a wholesaler at a mark up, and the AI poster could be coming from an established "real" farmers market who's organizer has tried to promote it with the tools and design knowledge they have access to.
The factors behind branding (or a lack of) are multi-causal and not correlated to the actual quality of a farmer's market.
I am inclined to agree. Small community organisation cannot afford to pay a professional designer. They might be lucky and have a talented volunteer, but in general its a waste of limit resources.
But nobody needs a fancy poster. A small org doesn’t have to pay for a designer. They can literally open Word, and make something in half an hour that communicates the details of the event. You’re all acting as if the choice is between AI slop posters or paying a professional who will make the most fancy art. A poster really just need to show the brand/name of the org, maybe a logo, and info about the event
They like how the AI poster looks better. They have no visceral anti-AI reaction to it because they don't spend their lives in online bubbles where AI is the new heresy.
Have you spoken to a young person recently? Like at all? Say what you want about thinking that an AI-gen poster actually signals high competency to you, but acting like there's not a huge swath of people that hates AI and trying to dismiss them out-of-hand as an extremely online fringe just seems irrational. No, there are a lot.
I would class something quickly run up in a word processor as much the same as the AI "slop" in comparison to a professional designer. I would prefer it but the basic signal that its not professional work is the same.
The difference between them, as pointed out elsewhere in the comment thread, is authenticity. A basic, unassuming poster made by an amateur conveys a simple, grassroots event with no frills. A professional poster made a by a graphic designer signals effort and attention to detail. The average AI-generated poster says that the organizers don't have time or money, but really want to seem like they do. It's like how people tend to perceive someone who wears or owns an obvious knockoff of an expensive status item - it's seen as worse than having the real deal and worse than having nothing at all, because that person is trying to create an appearance of something that's not true.
Low effort signals for recognizing effort in creation have all been scrambled. Now it's high effort just to identify real effort, not to mention most people in most cases would not have the expertise to recognize real effort anyway. I don't think this is entirely new from AI either, we already had so much media vying for attention that we could scant attend to more than a vanishing sliver of it.
Also just because someone used AI doesn't mean they didn't put in effort, so I don't think reflexive rejection of any AI smell is the answer. Sure, at work in a corporate white collar job where you have so many talentless strivers looking for any shortcut to climb the corporate ladder, raw AI smell actually is a highly valuable negative signal. But when it comes to local event organizers for example, there's a realness and human factor there that goes beyond anything a programmer or designer in a "scalable" context does with or without AI. We need to give our local humans grace, because humans are what it's all about.
You don't have to get excited by anything. You are welcome to boycott the village fête because you think they didn't put enough effort into their poster. Your choice, my friend.
> Why should I get excited about the village fete if the organizers put in the barest minimum of effort?
Beer? The first example is about a beer festival. People go there to drink beer, not to see posters. A blank piece of paper that says 250 kinds of beers would get more excitement than any AI or handcrafted poster.
Bikeshedding at an event is something like arguing about where to put the snack table. Raising awareness in the community about the event is vital, because this is what decides who will come. If you spend your time solving other problems and then few people come because they were put off by posters that to them signal "This is something we don't really care about", then it did matter after all.
"Organizing an event is hard..." Not with AI. You could use AI to organize it and make some AI posters. Ask AI to design everything. Make it digital and have only AI's come.
I remember the days when people would make fun of a sign like that. Then people would make fun of Wordart, then Canva. It appears that unless you spend $1500 on a graphic designer to create your poster, people will shit on your effort.
People shit on things that are low effort, and especially low-effort trends. And especially especially when the low-effort trend involves something that offends them in some way, for example if they think AI is taking jobs, hurting the environment, etc.
Of course people are shitting on low-effort AI. It would be more surprising if they didn’t.
There were lots of tumblr blogs (now defunct) that ridiculed Comic Sans used in signs and posters. Later on the same thing happened to the Lobster font.
Reasons were the same as now: low effort and overuse.
I live in a village with lots of local events and I do not care about the design of the posters. I just care about what the event. I just want some information.
Well, that's you. A lot of people like posters to be designed by real people, no matter how rubbish they look, especially if it's a cultural event or something based around people and human connection. AI posters, with AI stall signs, with AI flyers, with AI descriptions. Fucking depressing, man.
You might be a little too close to the work to judge, but to me it still looks off. I suppose I might not immediately think it was AI, but there's something not quite human about it. The video contents are a little too sterile and clean, lacking character. The room is quite empty and the composition doesn't cause me to focus on any one thing. That said, you could probably improve a bit of it with some prompting.
The making-of post itself also is clearly LLM generated, probably by Claude, judging by the language used.
Gotcha, that makes sense. Thank you very much for the feedback.
I asked Claude to go through all the previous commits, the chat history and the 100 or so intermediate assets and create a timeline of sorts, the current page as you see it.
It's AI-generated as are the assets, the process and decisions depicted are human.
I have to agree with @fleshdaddy. The explainer page itself looks like slop. I haven’t seen the original project but I’m afraid this makes me less interested, not more.
Thank you as well, just wrote below to the same point.
And I agree with your impression.
My goal here is to understand how can I demonstrate that I did in fact put work and care into the "thing" (video in this case).
Basically show that I did spend energy over time, that the final product took a few dozen iterations with a lot of dead ends (as opposed to a lazy one-shot "make good video, no mistakes")
So I do think this route can have merit given there is actual work, but how would a page like this look if the current one is not yet giving you a trustworthy vibe?
The only ones that aren't horrible manage that because they're so bland there's nothing to go wrong. Look at an example with some detail, the "Now please make one in the style of a 90s drum n bass gig flyer, with early 3D/fractal computer imagery" poster.
At the top of the page we have a deformed wireframe sphere. A wireframe sphere is stylistically appropriate, but the incorrect rendering is not. The "CGI" aesthetic requires obviously computer generated lines, which in the 90s meant accurate and regular lines.
Next we have a messed-up stellated polyhedron, and a messed-up dot pattern. These also fail for the same reason. The main 3D rendering is also obviously broken, as are many other small details.
But the biggest failure is the complete misunderstanding of the culture. 90s DnB was absolutely not about "good vibes". The smiley face logo is completely inappropriate; that's associated with late 80s/early 90s rave culture, pre-DnB era. 90s DnB was much darker and edgier in tone. The scene was almost exclusively male, and it maintained a aggressive vibe carried over from jungle.
A 90s DnB event would never advertise "bringing communities together". Audiences would be repelled by such messaging. This is despite it actually doing just that, as the scene was racially integrated in a way that mainstream music at the time was not. If there's going to be pro-social messaging on the poster it has to be there only implicitly.
Ach, idk. On average people have horrible design aesthetics, yet are now so arrogant about it, because they imagine their a newly found ability to spot design generated with AI equates to them being able to spot bad design.
No, you silly geese. What you are able to spot is somebody using AI poorly. That's not you developing taste. It's the equivalent of being able to tell something is photoshopped because somebody used a default brush poorly, or masked something poorly and then confounding using Photoshop with using Photoshop poorly.
You have absolutely no way of telling when a good designer created something entirely using AI (unless they are fine with you knowing that) and that has always been true.
Your message is right that you can't spot AI, but from what I've seen professionals by large aren't using AI for from-scratch design.
I do have one way of telling: my wife's a designer, and she has many artist and designer friends so I see how they work first hand. AI is largely used for edits that need to be done quickly rather than from-scratch generation.
You talk about aesthetics but that's very secondary to communicating the precise thing you want to communicate. AI just isn't there.
> No, you silly geese. What you are able to spot is somebody using AI poorly. That's not you developing taste. It's the equivalent of being able to tell something is photoshopped because somebody used a default brush poorly, or masked something poorly and then confounding using Photoshop with using Photoshop poorly.
Speaking only for myself, that is absolutely accounted into my despair when I see an AI poster. Not just the fact that we're having a wide range of cultural and regional artifacts being stamped out and homogenized by the convenience of AI posters, but the fact that I'm only able to point them out right now because the public backlash is somewhat limited to the online sphere, so most people are okay with the default result it spits out. And we're one default ChatGPT/Claude "curated diversified aesthetic selector" feature away from making my current discernment completely useless.
Of course there's an argument of "if it's so good you can't tell, is there really a problem?", but here I'm responding specifically to the argument of a negative reaction to AI posters not taking the above into account.
> they imagine their a newly found ability to spot design generated with AI equates to them being able to spot bad design.
Who is imagining that?
> No, you silly geese. What you are able to spot is somebody using AI poorly. That's not you developing taste.
Again, I'm not really sure that the 'spotting AI' endeavour is always supposed to be a flex of someones own taste.
> You have absolutely no way of telling when a good designer created something entirely using AI (unless they are fine with you knowing that) and that has always been true.
I have trouble parsing your entire comment, but you have lost me completely at 'always been true'. I don't know how many hours your 'good designer' would waste on creating only with AI something able to fool everybody 2 years ago. It would surely be too many to be practical.
Something, not anything. 2 years ago AI tools were much narrower and there were more things that you could not have done, but still plenty that was possible.
(Granted, given that you always needed some way of steering the AI and a harness around it, defining "entirely" in this context is a separate, debatable exercise)
It doesn’t look that bad. You can ach all you want, but that’s decent. It doesn’t have that AI look and it’s better than most posters I see for small events that are probably human designed.
One thing I've noticed with AI posters is that they're all "flat" in terms of attention. For whatever reason, they result in a post where every part is on the same level visually, and your eye does not get drawn to anything. You can't immediately see what is and isn't important.
The bad posters are absolute disasters in this regard. (And completely irredeemable in general! They are not "OK" in any way.)
But the better-stylized examples in the article aren't much better! Most of them have the same tendency. Only the minimalist Japanese and 40s Cubist styles do much better, and even those aren't structured amazingly. If you tried to add more information, I bet even the minimalist styles would become a flat and confusing.
This is the same problem I have with stock Claude prose and code. It's verbose, sure, but worse is that there's no quick way to tell what is and isn't important. In good code, you can understand the shape of the code at a glance; AI code is pretty much the opposite of that. And so are AI posters.
I work in a copy-print center where we take orders for business card, posters, flyers, invitations, and all sorts like that. Lately, I have been getting more and more AI generated artwork for these flyers and business cards, and they are not sized correctly. I can tell it's AI generated not from style, layout, or even hallucinations, but just the size. The background are a full color, the customer insists that it's the right size, but I have to tell them that if I print what they gave me, there is going to be large white borders on the sides, tops, or all around. I have had to explain to too many customers that AI doesn't know what an inch really is, as the reference images it has are different sizes. AI flyers could be the best design ever, but it will never be sized properly and will still piss off the print employee.
And I have found that if you are paying for an AI service to get these generic, wrong sized designs, you could have spent just as much going on Fiverr and gotten something that doesn't need to get a full style revision.
“The ai told me it’s right” is actually probably my biggest problem with AI being freely available. Yes I know karens existed before AI but even then I feel like the excuses were more… thoughtful? IE my dad is a designer/it looks right in the photoshop preview whatever.
Well, yes - those AI tools output images in aspect ratios which are not those of a typical sheet of paper (16:9, 2:3), which indeed wont't match. "Inches" etc doesn't matter.
You just need to offer the customer either the options of scale-to-fit / fill / stretch (white borders / crop on two edges / stretch), you probably already needed to do that before AI (such as people wanting to print letter-size documents in A4 land).
>The problem with these is not so much that they’re bad. They’re OK, I don’t love them. The problem is that once you’ve seen that style 20 times it starts to irritate just from the sheer repetition.
This is one of the better statements of the issue right here. I think because people dislike the actors and economics surrounding AI they also feel a need to categorically reject any of it's products, but it's not necessarily bad in the sense of poor aesthetic taste as it is bad in it's lack of a appreciating that being novel as a style matters almost as much as the actual style and direct repetition teaches us not to like the style itself.
It's the same thing with EM dash, load bearing root causes, and emoji bullet point lists. It doesn't matter what the style AI uses, it ends up showing up so often it becomes actively repulsive.
The author claims that the AI posters don’t have to be horrible, but fail to see that the dozen variations generated are not distinctive - they might have somewhat different typography or imaginary, but still have the same AI uniformity and smell as the crappy restaurant poster you see on the street. The core issue is not only technical, but also the lack of vision and imagination when creating art or even infographics.
The alternative is WordArt, or just black on white Comic Sans with some bolding and font size variations with bad ClipArt. These small scale events would never hire a professional.
I'm old enough to remember that people also complained about WordArt and Clipart and too many fonts etc.
I see the chatgpt poster style on many small-scale local village events also. But again, what they replace wasn't any better. It's not replacing some beautiful craft that existed before.
> I'm old enough to remember that people also complained about WordArt and Clipart and too many fonts etc.
We basically had two kinds of posters:
- those made by someone skilled/savvy (not necessarily a professional)
- those made by someone without skills/knowledge
The later were awful, in the sense that I would never display them in my home as a reminder of a an event I took part in.
But still, they were nice because you knew someone took the time to create them to promote an event and share the important information about it, and each person was producing their own awful posters.
Now with gen AI we have something filled with trash, everything looks the same, the important information is hard to find...
Sure, the variations offered in the article are a bit better and more opinionated, but they still reek AI conformity and I feel sick looking at them.
If I saw an Images 2.0 flyer in year 2020? In a world where Images 2.0 didn't exist? I'd be impressed. But if I see it now, today? I'm not impressed at all.
It's the same image, produced by the same AI and seen by the same person. So, what's the difference? What changed over time?
Saturation. "I've seen it all before." AI made that specific flyer style plentiful and omnipresent, and that made it "derivative" and "cheap". What used to invoke "cool" and "wow" was turned into a dreary cliche by repetition. Flaws that were easy to overlook when overshadowed by novelty stand out like a sore thumb now that you've seen them before in the same patterns many times over.
The image is the same - it has the same strengths and the same flaws. But your focus is shifted by familiarity.
It's the same mechanism that drives trends and fashion. AI just supercharges it.
Naturally, you can avoid a lot of it by using careful prompting and steering to guide an AI away from the "cliche" style-space. You can get something with both good quality and good identity that way.
But that requires: being aware of the problem, being really good at prompting, and putting in a considerable effort. It's hard to steer a model away from "AI cliches" if you don't have the eye to spot them in the first place.
Most AI-generated content doesn't have that kind of skill and effort applied to it - it simply uses the "model defaults", and gets the "model defaults". For all the good and bad that comes with those.
If you think about whether it is AI, are good at recognising those tells, an thinking about whether it is AI, then its probable you will spot things like that.
Most people are not that good at spotting those tells, and when looking at a poster they will not be thinking about whether its is AI or not. If its not obviously AI they are not going to even think about it.
Yes. That's the issue: we are looking at the same posters.
It's just that "seeing this poster for the first time, unaware of the workings behind it" is a very different experience from "seeing this poster after you already saw dozens of other AI generated posters that used a similar style and had similar issues, got canny at spotting both the style and the issues in it, and came to associate them with cheap low quality work".
The former impression is "wow that's a good poster". The latter impression is "ew, it's posterslop". The poster, in the meanwhile, remains the same.
AI can often win in art contests - images, short stories, design. But that requires either sharp prompting, or an audience that's not familiar with "AI cliches". The quality is, if removed from the context, fairly good. If embedded in context, it's utter slop. The work is the same. Funny how that works.
> The quality is, if removed from the context, fairly good.
IMO that doesn't fully explain AI hate, triggered by simple exposure to AI generated images, unless you'd include all standard educational programs until introduction of AI - which is arguably a part of the context, but if so, IMO, "fairly good" is part of context and is devoid of meaning in absence of context and cannot be said.
Yes, context matters. The greatest painting in the world is just crushed materials smeared on a canvas, it's nothing too special without the context.
A computer (not even an LLM, just something generating random pixels) could randomly generate the exact same pixel pattern as the greatest painting in the world, and it would not be the greatest painting in the world, because context matters.
If you read the article at all, the "everything looks the same" is easily fixed with just a tiny bit of effort.
It's not AI causing the sameyness and hard-to-read nature of these posters, it's people being lazy. I personally think there's a few nice looking ones in there (the punk fanzine style for one).
Sure it's not some 9/10 hand made poster, but considering these take 30 seconds to make, it's impressive.
> Sure it's not some 9/10 hand made poster, but considering these take 30 seconds to make, it's impressive.
It's not impressive. It would be impressive if a human did it, but a human did not do it. Is it impressive when a printer prints out 10 perfect copies of the same flyer, because it would be impressive if a human could do that? No, of course not. It's similarly not impressive when the copying machine makes a plausible copy of something a human once made.
> But still, they were nice because you knew someone took the time to create them to promote an event
Unlike a gift, "it's the thought that counts" doesn't fly with me here. I don't care how much effort the secretary took to cobble some shitty poster together - it still looked terrible. I'd rather look at something clean and polished produced by AI (no matter how "generic" people here claim the OP's posters look).
Some level of uniformity is fine and indeed the norm. It was uniform back when posters were hand painted, eg 19th century world fairs or zoo openings or theater posters. They look pretty similar. Carneval posters looked similar.
The expectation of some kaleidoscope of styles is not really grounded in how things used to be ever.
Also, it's just nostalgia, just like how some young people now think audio cassettes and discmans are "cool" and have some revival, some are nostalgic for the back-in-the-day Word posters because "at least back then", but "these days" it's decline etc. Pretty sure in a few years people will be nostalgic for crappy AI slop of 2025-26 because their shittiness will feel like some charm compared to whatever the AI will be able to do.
I'm not sure about that. I, myself, am not skilled enough to make a nice poster, so when I needed one, I used to asked my skilled friends to do them for me.
But sometimes I also purposefully made myself some Comic Sans stuff, exaggerating them in every possible way, as a joke. And it was well received because people knew it was my own work and understood the joke.
If I made this today, it would not be seen the same. People would thought I'm trying to fight gen AI trash or I'm nostalgic of the past. While I'm just trying to make a joke by making something awful on purpose.
And I couldn't do the same joke using gen AI. The "on purpose" cannot be conveyed. People would just see gen AI trash.
I was one of those "skilled friends" that people go to, to make those posters in times of need back in school. And this was many years ago. Didn't enjoy it, but just did it as part of volunteering, or help the student community or a school club out.
Some people enjoy doing that work, but most people did not, and I was often the last resort because a random club or activity could not find suitable help in time. So had to step up when a friend or acquaintance asked.
I think there is some misguided view where in "the good old days" people designed everything by hand. From the perspective of someone who had to make 10-20 of those a year as a volunteer, I can say it came at personal cost, often caused distractions from the actual event, and there was not enough people who stepped up to get it done. If it was so enjoyable we would have no problems finding people doing the work and that was not the case.
The posters and designs were often rushed out late night by the closest person you can find who had a copy of photoshop on their computer. If we had AI back then, I would bet you 100% it would be the preferable solution and no one would bat an eye. It wasn't the type of work a lot of people wanted to do, could do properly and is willing to do for free, at their spare time, rushed for a deadline.
I could be mistaken but in my case I never forced anyone to use their artistic skills, it was actually more often voluntary from them.
Basically everyone was doing their part using their skills if they had some useful for the project, or just their time/sweat.
The relationship we had (still have, actually) was healthy enough so they could just tell us to piss off if they didn't want to do it. I particularly remember one such instance, because I ended up doing an ugly poster but when asked, I said it was the work of our skilled friend.
On the other hand I've been spending at least an hour per week doing sysadmin work for various groups/clubs, it's not the funniest thing in the world, particularly in the evening when I already spent the whole day doing it at work, but it's just me doing my part for the greater good!
Making stuff that's bad on purpose is annoying, like acting retarded ironically. Make good stuff or just spend little effort. Putting in effort to look low effort is just trying to be special when you're not.
Sorry, but Walkmans and Discmans were considered cool... At the time.
Personally I like simple designs. I always remind people who make posters that whoever looks at them will only do so for a matter of seconds. If you want extensive detail, put it in smaller print. Put the main hook in large letters and a brief description.
But they became uncool when the iPod and mp3 players came out. Nobody felt sentimental about VHS artifacts either, and now it's a genz aesthetic or something. These things cycle, like I'm sure some old folks miss the radio hiss and listening to football matches with just audio.
I am somewhat tired of all the AI posters, but I have to agree with what you are saying. The alternative was not any better. I think there's a persistent and very vocal segment of the population that just want to complain about anything to do with AI with a take no hostage approach. Some instances are understandable but if a local small town event or a low budget restaurant using AI to make a poster draws so much ire, I feel that it may be likely misplaced personal frustrations projected towards others. The response don't seem to be proportional to the offence.
I know this is an internet forum, but do you have any experience with posters? There are many great tools to create posters from templates. You can make something in canva for example in minutes from free templates.
You upload a photo, play around with it. You can also search the old internet for some tutorials. You know, like a human would do.
One of my favorite local ice cream shops uses Comic Sans (white on navy blue) on all their signage and this is one of the main reasons I frequent it. If they were to switch to some AI slop I wouldn't step my feet in there again.
In the examples above, that’s really your own loss? There will only be one or two events in your local village, it seems self defeating to ignore what they offer because you don’t like the medium. At least these posters are well laid out and easy to read.
People take photos with their cell phones instead of painting a scene like Rembrandt. They don't think they are a genius, and nobody cheers and claps. The photos look fine, they get the job done, and everyone moves on with their lives without projecting insecurities online.
God forbid some overworked volunteer make a poster in 30 seconds instead of taking a college course to please some huffy internet commentators with an axe to grind
> t still have the same AI uniformity and smell as the crappy restaurant poster you see on the street
You have really try hard to see that. It is good enough to not give immediate annoyed reflex of seeing something in the same ubiquitous default chatgpt style.
For goodness sake - these are just a fair posters.
I don’t think the bauhaus one is horrible, nor is the cubist one. They’re not great works of art, but if I saw one out in the wild, my reaction would not be: “bloody ai art making everything visually putrid again” nor, do I think they’re worse than the clip art and badly taken digital photograph agglomerations they would be replacing.
For me what always gives it away is not the posters themselves, it’s the context. These are all overdesigned for a local community fair. There is no way they’d be paying for a professional designer for this, therefore it’s AI.
On the other hand if it had word art, grammar/spelling mistakes, images with wrong aspect ratios or clipping issues, that would immediately convince me it wasn’t AI.
It doesn't fail, it actually demonstrates how the model can improve the output if the prompt is better. AI generated websites look like crap because developers don't know any design language so they have no idea how to prompt the models to get something good and more unique and creative out of them. This shows that you can actually achieve that with just slightly better prompting. Just like with programming, actually.
Idk, those are more than alright to my eye. Surely they won't win any design awards, but as a throwaway poster for one time event these are miles better than any amateur work.
> but fail to see that the dozen variations generated are not distinctive - they might have somewhat different typography or imaginary, but still have the same AI uniformity and smell as the crappy restaurant poster you see on the street
Hard disagree: every single example TFA gives is way better than the horrible generic ones that are polluting every shop and LinkedIn post.
That's not what OP is complaining about. The issue with AI art isn't how the individual piece look, but the similarities they have in aggregate. One image can look perfectly fine, once you seen a hundred they all start looking extremely similar. Human brains are great pattern recognizer and lock on to those similarities, even when they are covered under different styles.
When all your art comes from a single source, it's difficult to create real diversity and novelty. That's still the big issue when it comes to genAI in general, without a lot of hand holding you'll just bound to end up with slop, since the AI won't get creative on its own.
Did you look at the examples? They're almost ridiculously diverse, and the prompts show very little handholding was required.
They're not novel, but a poster for a spring fair isn't supposed to look like a de Kooning.
These arguments are almost completely detached from reality. Most artists aren't diverse either - they're told to find a style and stick to it, and that's what they do.
Commercial graphic designers are more versatile, but the set of standard looks is still relatively small. Hollywood movie posters and book cover designers are notorious for reusing the same tropes and colour systems, and that's been true for years, long before AI was a thing.
> They're almost ridiculously diverse, and the prompts show very little handholding was required.
The structure is identically to all of that, big title, graphic, list with icons. As said, they look fine on their own, the problem is only becomes apparent when you had to look had hundreds or thousands of them. It's the em-dash or the "load-bearing" of the AI-art world, the more you look at this stuff, the more apparent the similarities become.
> Hollywood movie posters and book cover designers are notorious for reusing the same tropes and colour systems, and that's been true for years, long before AI was a thing.
Exactly, but with AI that issue becomes even more drastic since the models don't create diversity by default.
> Most artists aren't diverse either
They don't have to be, since there are millions of them, all coming from different backgrounds, with different art styles and all. While there are only a handful of big AI models, who all come with a pretty generic default style.
There was some upgrade in tech where the posters had legible text and all used that paint brush text highlight thing. The first time I saw it on Bambulab makerworld I though, "huh thats a neat image". Then I saw it on every low view count youtube thumbnail, and then the exact same thing at the failing sushi business menu and I was no longer impressed. I'm actively repulsed when I see that style of image now.
I am not sure. If something is not in the usual AI style its not going to leap out at you that it is AI the same way. Maybe if thought about it, but when someone looks at a poster they typically focus on the information, not the style.
Only at the first derivative. What you're observing is an additional layer of 'but, in genre X!' and then same slop, different prompt.
You're complaining about what happens when people don't even supply the additional layer, but just go 'make me a poster, no mistakes, it should be a great poster'. When you give no direction at all you get the purest of slop. You start giving directions, you start narrowing down the area you're digging through the slop of, and possibly you ask for something that people aren't familiar with and they're only able to identify that you asked.
Hence, Chinese posters with a cherry blossom and the kanji for 'Japan' and such. Someone went 'make it Chinese' and the slop associated it with 'Oriental' and what came out was collective unconscious, such that people who weren't thinking and didn't have experience might not look twice, but the meaning turned out tainted.
Sort of like food depictions that more closely resemble a pile of maggots. Those glisten! (well, I suppose they must.) There's a whole uncanny-valley thing that happens on every level and inspires revulsion. I'm suggesting that is still happening in the other examples but you've not got the experience to register their problems. With the food depictions, all animals eat stuff so we're hardwired to bounce off unsafe foods even if they glisten…
The variations the author generates are night and day better than the "piss filter" era slop in the first batch.
Some of them would have passed as intentionally crafted by a graphics designer before AI.
And let's not forget that before AI, many of these would be word doc printouts with clip art. The alternative wasn't hiring a designer - the alternative was doing nothing special at all.
I was honestly ok with the silly looking posters. Where I'm from in italy it's common to have sagre, sort of cheap food events sponsored by the municipality/local shops. Before ai the posters looked like each other (as in, poster typically looking like sagre posters). Now not even that, they're just slop ai that could be everything before you read. Nobody needed better looking posters in this case...
And the old fluo ones are more effective than decorated new ones, since they're mostly on road sides and you need to be able to tell at a glance what they're about. I unironically went to a sagra recently because I spotted a similar fluo advert while cycling in Tuscany
I've seen this trend in India very much . Every new poster every new shop banner or heck even the new led signs are all that red and yellow lazy chat gpt design. People can spend extra two to three minutes to get a proper one.
There's a similar problem with AI-generated video, but it's in the time dimension. There's a huge genre of Asian vertical dramas, and now about 17,000 a day are being cranked out by AI systems. But there are maybe ten major plots. "Lost daughter of rich family comes home" appears over and over. There are longer videos where the plot gets lost. I was watching one where it seemed like the "save the world" goal scrolled off the history buffer and the hero was off on side quest after side quest with the main goal forgotten.
This probably comes from a lack of intermediate level structure. To make a good dramatic story, you usually start from a plot summary, add character sheets, develop a plot, then a storyboard, then detail the storyboard. That way, you end up at the desired end. If you just let LLM-based systems free run, they go on forever, which is real life but bad entertainment. Unless the goal is a soap opera.
There's good stuff out there, from people who can plot.
"I was watching one where it seemed like the "save the world" goal scrolled off the history buffer and the hero was off on side quest after side quest with the main goal forgotten."
That's hardly a problem unique to AI-generated low budget dramas. That's a problem that literally derailed the latter seasons of Game of Thrones, a show with a huge budget, massive human writer's room, drawing from award winning source material.
People ascribe every problem to AI, instead of just recognizing that people can make crap with any tool you put in their hands, be it Seedance, Houdini, or a typewriter.
The goal for most of these vertical shorts is soap opera so this is a feature and not a bug. Also, in order to maintain engagement, they often need to have continuously escalating plots which makes for bad writing (typically in good plots you have dips in action before the next climax). The problem isn't what AI can generate and rather what people are asking for (both the audience and the producers).
> it seemed like the "save the world" goal scrolled off the history buffer and the hero was off on side quest after side quest with the main goal forgotten.
Putting aside the question of "why consume any media," and even admitting that I myself have seen hundreds of hours of General Hospital (don't ask), why consume this media specifically? Are people seeking this out or is it just TikTok algorithms?
Is it reductive to ask what the point is? Do fans get together and discuss plot developments? "I can't believe X did Y!" Maybe it's the future of media but to me it just rings hollow.
Social media algorithms have increasingly promised to replace self-curation, an effort consuming higher thinking activity, with an automatic optimization of limbic responses. AI just proved to be an effective tool for stretching the base motif into an infinite series of stimulus, fulfilling that same function and winning over by volume.
As a guy who used to do art direction and was a creative director i can with some confidence say that: “most “designs sucks balls” and 95% of the worlds population DO NOT CARE.
I wish it was different but estetics, color sensitivity and for a lack of better word “taste” is a skill that needs training - the kerning alone on those make me sad - but the dirty secret is that meticulous design and craft is a dying breed - why spend days on designing whitespace when you can get something the client likes in 10 minutes from a prompt?
I think this is an unfair comparison. The "better" AI-generated posters in the article are all much more
minimalist.
Minimalist designs have much less opportunity to insert "personality", be it that of a designer or that of an AI. No wonder they look less AI-generated, and when they do it is because some "AI-baroque" slipped through. Fancy unicode characters no human would think of are the salient one in OPs examples.
It'd be much fairer to compare AI and human for the same desired style, and yes a lot of AI-generated stuff is immediately recognizable because no one bothered to tell the AI about the desired style.
At a certain point, pottery that looked like a child made it became the high end, because well-executed pottery was coming out of machines.
We've officially reached that point with advertisements. Save your tokens. Hire your 9-year-old niece to draw the poster by hand and you'll likely get a far better reaction from most people. Nobody goes to a fair because the poster had a "modernist / Bauhaus-influenced graphic style".
I think there are sadly a huge number of people who don't care about art or creativity at all. They like the idea of AI and sterility and everything else. Increasingly these people dominate the economy because they are the most willing to hurt their fellow man in pursuit of status.
These people don't go to fairs, it's true, but they do bulldoze the fairgrounds to build a data center. To build a semblance of consent, they need to host brainwashing events like "fairs" and so on where they can propagandize and threaten citizens. They can't hire a local artist to advertise it, because literally none of them will do it. AI comes in handy when you're absolute evil.
I would be interested in the income percentile of people visiting fairs, and the prices of items there vs commercial items on a grocery store or mall. I have a feeling 'fairs' are a very different demographic today than 200 years ago.
I mean it isn't wealthy people coming to eat fried chicken on a stick or see the show hogs. Sure its a bad and exploitative deal where you probably are out $25 for that fried chicken on a stick but it doesn't mean the underlying demographics have changed from the "people of the earth" as they've always been. If you have to guess, close your eyes and imagine the sort of people that live in the rural townships 40 minutes outside your nearest major city. That is who you will find at your state or county fair, those people and their teenage kids smuggling in booze in gatorade bottles.
Local farmers market, now thats a dramatically different clientele than the county/state fair. Bread is like $9 a loaf there so you can imagine what sort of individual that selects for.
People of the earth don't seem to care much for ai art or not. What I was trying to say is that fairs aren't places targeting the lower classes trying to sell the cheapest items possible. The lower classes are served by industrialized mass production today: injection molding, factory farming, etc. So I don't see why they want to hate one businessman (the builder of a datacenter) over another (the fair shop owners). I also do not understand how he says these people hate fairs or don't go to fairs in a thread about fair stall owners and small business owners using AI to make their shop logos/posters themselves.
But the thing is, all have that icon+text style in the "tombola, cakes and drinks..." part. If I wanted to be distinctive, this is what I would have tried to get rid of at first, not the "visual style" (it's sort of like Windows XP visual styles, no matter how different they are the overall layout is still recognisably Windows).
although I guess it's that the author used the same context with the original generated image and thus it just reused that icon+text thing
but in general, these models do seem to be kind of just go for an information-dump type of style where its just listing everything and putting as much stuff in that is associated with the words, which is what these LLMs do
so you'd probably need to steer them heavily with explicit instructions on what to do and how to get rid of it, which I'd bet nobody will actually do when making these posters
Buried at the end of the article the author linked a library of different art styles applied to the same poster content. Found some new cool art styles to try out in the future.
https://john.hartnup.uk/poster-prompts/
Generative AI is actually pretty good at giving you rough concept sketches and iterating on top of existing renders.
However, you must retain control over the scene graph and its composition. Use the output of the AI to guide how you work it. Do not assume the AI system has the ability to simulate world space with any meaningful fidelity. You can move transforms around in Blender and Unity with floating point bit increment/decrement operations if you wish. LLMs will never have this level of control.
Lighting systems are an entire universe of reasons you should do it the hard way too. Being able to iterate light placement and intensity with nanometric precision starts out looking like a brick wall, but it turns into a superpower once your scene is halfway decent.
I can usually tell when someone used AI to do things like generate steam store art because their camera doesn't change in a physically plausible way between the horizontal and vertical layouts. When you have access to the raw scene you can place the same camera in multiple orientations without altering any other aspect of the scene. The header capsule and vertical capsule are very difficult to make look coherent if you are using an LLM to generate these assets. Your best bet with AI art is to render something so big that it can be cropped for both, which is also quite obvious and ugly. Being able to instrument a scene as if it were a real place is way more productive than an LLM once the scene is ~done.
I think we're in the 'early digital camera' phase of AI art gen.
The real photographers knew they were shit photos. They were grainy, bad lenses, and ugly. A lot of people still liked them because they were much more convenient for a lot of uses than the film ones.
Well, I guess there's still a lot of film people. But film had a ceiling. Digital cameras kept getting better.
The adaptive film photographers eventually adopted the tool. A lot of their skills transferred well to the new medium. Most waited until the cameras got good enough, though.
I'm not sure when that'll be with AI art gen. Seeing scenes broken up into layers in the latest gpt image generation, though, made me think we might be near.
I saw the coolest bunch of kids in giant pants on the subway taking photos and looking at them on what was essentially my old Olympus and was transport back 25 years.
Early digital cameras had larger pixel sizes and different spectral characteristics. They often have deeper blues and such. They have some own charms. Modern CMOS images tends to be less saturated. It's definitely not as big as Instax, though, which I suspect has been effectively kept alive by maid cafe culture[1].
1: They charge $10-20 per a quick autographed shot for a parasocial irreplaceable memory with an absolutely random female cafe employee, which justifies quite a significant range of film costs. Crazy, but it means they industrially consume medium format reversal films! I'm not complaining for that.
No, I’m not. Old digital point-and-shoots, and the harsh direct flash aesthetic, have been very popular. Some specific camera models that some random popular TikToker happened to recommend have been selling at quite a mark-up.
Two-ish decades is the standard length of a trend cycle. 00s is now retro in a cool way. Gen Z/Alpha, who have grown with phone cameras, want a different look, and having a real flash is particularly attractive because it allows taking reasonable photos in night clubs etc. Just like we did back in the day. (browsing old Facebook photos)
Polaroids are much bigger but I've also seen a resurgence in crappy early digital cameras in young adult spaces. There's been a slow rise in all things Y2K in some spaces and getting a crummy digital cam from a thrift store or ebay is a sick find.
No one is compiling sales charts on second hand cameras at thrift stores. But I can tell you from personal experience going to parties that more people are taking photos with old digi cams or modern old style digi cams like the kodak charmera than phones.
When gen z does use phones they end up running the images through apps like 1998 cam to make it look like digicam photos or using effects to turn video in to VHS camcorder style video.
It’s the same cultural response as the analog movement. The collective sense that everything Covid on stole our future, and AI is only making it worse.
Did digital take over because of quality or convenience?
A 35 mm film camera is still much better quality than my smartphone's digital camera, especially more than a few meters away or in lower light conditions. But my smartphone is the camera I actually have with me, I don't have to buy film or wait for it to be developed, so that's what I use.
What's interesting is that you can't do the same with long-form AI prose. You can ask any given LLM to write in different styles, but it will always fall back on the same rhetorical and structural techniques, so the "new style" is strictly surface-level. In fact, it's getting worse over time -- especially in Claude from Opus 4.6 --> Opus 5.
I suspect that the same thing is happening here -- as other comments note: lack of distinctiveness, uniformity -- but that the low information content of posters prevents it from becoming immediately obvious.
You can't really do this with images either. The least AI-looking images in the post are ones that have the least amount of content, the fewest things to mess up. Once you introduce more detail, it starts converging on the same flaws you usually see, just covered up by a thin veneer of a different artstyle.
The similarity may be partly the image model's fault – especially if it's been post-trained/distilled towards performance, correctness and "quality" (for some value of "quality" anyway) which inevitably occurs at the expense of creativity and variation.
But I think it might be more about the LLM's lack of creativity in coming up with the prompt for the image (or "embellishing" a user's prompt), or directly the embedding vector if the LLM is itself the image model's text encoder. Then whatever the image gen outputs is simply an instance of the GIGO principle. It would be interesting to test whether similar cliches and motifs also occur if you ask the model to create an SVG rather than a raster image.
The examples all look off because the author keeps using "Spring Fayre" as a lorem-ipsum for styles that do not match the vibe of "Spring Fayre at the brewery". Distant second is that they have this sterile "Microsoft Word Template" feel that needs to be sanded off another way.
I guess you can justify ignoring such "advanced" techniques if it's aimed at the literally-zero-effort crowd, but who from there is reading this?
The original posters were better than any of the mockups.
Not because they looked good, but because they used a design language that "at-a-glance" said what the event was.
Sure, the designers republic/etc looked less commonplace, but if I was looking for a fun local faire I would absolutely never notice those posters and if I went i'd assume it was a completely different type of event than it is (e.g. some sort of modern art faire).
Every one of those posters didn't fit the medium idea at all (local faire event) except the child's drawing one could maybe pass.
In fact I can almost guarantee that all the posters in this article would perform worse than the originals if you were to test them on the street or in a facebook group.
If you are an actual production/commercial designer, your first goal is to understand what the clientele wants and converts, secondarily make it beautiful.
This failed both, zero understanding of the purpose of commercial art (to speak to the actual clientele and bring in more people) and ugly within their own design language (but yes, less common).
Would have been interesting to try and make designs that actually make sense for this product AND are a bit less generic.
my exact thoughts. i clicked on that fb post and someone in the comments linked their non-ai poster and i was just like, oh..that event seems way less exciting and fun and spring. i want to agree w the premise of the article but all the examples are worse and spark no desire in me to go to the fayre
To be honest I’m surprised, I actually like them, even though they are obviously reductions to the average, bland repetitions of stuff that’s been done over and over again. That’s not necessarily a criticism, I know that’s what AI is and we should not expect more. And of course a small event with little budget does not need more than that (although of course you could think of something more unique if you wanted).
What scares me is what happens after we park on these ideas for years/decades because they are cheap and fast and just good enough. Will anyone take the time and effort to continue being creative?
What do we loose when we ditch generative AI? Easier poster making? What good does that do? So now pop&mom can have a poster in their shop that looks as if some graphic artist was paid for it, but wasn't. Will that drive the economy up? Improve poverty? Halt the war? Make life more tolerable? No, it just adds the pretense of having a professional designer, something that will quickly loose its added value when everybody does it.
You seem to think design is mere flourishing, nice colors to make something pleasant to look at, but ultimately superficial and useless. I would strongly object to that--visual presentation can carry a lot of additional information, and improve the transmission as well. Giving more people the ability to present information well leads to more efficient communication, which I wouldn't just dismiss this easily.
But there isn't any extra information in AI posters. It's necessarily either something that can already be conveyed in writing (that is after all, what they're prompted in), or something the AI pulled in based off of the text unintentionally, at which point no actual information is being conveyed by the added visuals.
I think you need to remember that most people have no eye for design, and that includes even just presenting the essentials of an event in text.
And AI can actually do it much better than the average idiot. Of they ask.
Like, if you ask - "here's the event details, let's make a poster" in the right way, it's going to come back and say "you've supplied the venue name but not the street address, do you want to include that?".
And then it'll lay the info out with generally sensible relative sizes and positions, better than the average idiot would.
And, probably about equally as well as the average "I'm not a designer but I know a bit" amateur - and a lot faster.
The catch there is that the idiot only gets this if their prompt is right - and since they're an idiot, it probably isn't.
I think there's a gap in the market for a service with system prompts that make it work for people who don't think very hard.
(That might be what, say, Canva Pro does with its AI features. I don't know because I'm not paying for that.)
So you want to reduce entropy by “fixing” semantic mistakes and hardcoding some design decisions “by the book” and end up with what exactly? The exact same poster everywhere?
That's true. Since ornamentation is effort-signaling, it may get dropped once it's cheap. Same thing that happened with clothing and home decor. The functional part may be beneficial though, even on utilitarian grounds. But yes, a lot of design is not about function but social signaling of taste and money as well as fashion.
If you ditch generative AI you go back to needing to pay an artist/designer for their work, and they likely charge more than ChatGPT because they might have rent/bills and that sort of thing to cover.
The sort of use cases I was think of (village fête etc.) would never have paid for a professional designer. We're talking about an event that's delighted to raise £500 for the church roof repair fund. Even £50 for a poster is 10% of the fundraising lost.
If it wasn't AI, it would be Comic Sans and some clipart.
every one of them still reeks of AI. especially the trend of icons next to the activities (tombola etc). its just a reskin but they all look AI, just not that triggering minimum effort AI look that is everywhere.
Have you considered making the model leverage computer use via Work/Codex?
I'd imagine making the agents use the same tools that people utilize would greatly dial back how AI-generated these things look, and it would provide much better control too.
With Astra being genuinely much better at this, it should be more viable than ever.
If you break out more sophisticated tools - give Claude Code some skills, let it work in SVG or PDF, create bitmap assets and composite them with real fonts and vector assets, I'm sure you can achieve a lot.
But the point of this blog post was to demonstrate what a PTA mum can achieve even with just ChatGPT, if they just prompt a little more creatively.
The proviso though is that you don't get many tries on free tier. Or if you pay for more tokens, you can fall into a rabbit hole of iterating where it's no longer a quick task.
Removing as many possible steps to a craft makes it far less personal. Disconnecting the human from the end product.
I would never attend an event with an entirely generated poster becuase that tells me you didn't care enough, and that attitude is probably permeating into the rest of the event.
Similarly, back before these models existed, I'd never attend an event with an overly stuffed "marketing" feel to it. It's the same crap just with a different tool attached to it.
I'd rather attend an event with a poster made of stock clip art, but a human decided the composition, and added doodles in between because that at least gives me the impression that SOMEONE is caring about the event.
Basically, it feels detached from the actual point of an event: community.
>I'd never attend an event where they simply generated a poster in Word or Photoshop, because it tells me they didn't care enough to carve the woodblock for the print, and that attitude is probably permeating into the rest of the event.
Leaving aside the quality of the different posters here, I think the interesting question is where did the default AI generated style come from? It's certainly not one of the styles listed if you interrogate chatgpt, it's not something it seems to be choosing to do.
I think the signature noisy, crowded, HDR-y look shows these posters are being spat right out of a diffusion model. They always have an image background with the classic light halos around text.
When I one-shot a poster out of Gemini or whatever, I can't make anything nearly as bad as the ones I see every day. What on earth are people even using to make stuff that bad?
ChatGPT, which seems to be the "Kleenex" of AI right now, has a very distinct default look to it's generated images and I am almost certain OAI did it on purpose to avoid regulation.
The models are totally capable of producing undetectable AI images, but abuse/missuse/outcry would only hurt them.
Much better to just leave obvious tells in the default generations 99.99% of people use.
>Leaving aside the quality of the different posters here, I think the interesting question is where did the default AI generated style come from?
This is what I find interesting too. Claude’s writing style too. It’s quite unique and really bad. It’s not just mimicking something and it’s certainly not trained (intentionally) to write like that. So how does it converge there?
I was wondering that too - presumably they are all from the same image generator, but which one?
They are definitely all ghastly - way too busy for me to want to give a 2nd glance at them. Of the block of examples shown, the bottom right one on off-white background is a bit less visually objectionable than the others, but still gives me that AI slop vibe.
> "Avoid pastel/airbrush/oil style art or images of people."
I would also suggest the AI avoid trying to make realistic-looking musical instruments, because I've never seen an AI poster with a correct musical instrument. The uncanny-valley of an attempted instrument that has clear deformities hurts my brain and gives me the creeps. If you want a real instrument, just copy-and-paste a real instrument. Alternative maybe let the AI generate a cartoonish or clip-art-style musical instrument, so my brain isn't bothered by the disconnect between something that is trying to look real but isn't.
For example, Sure, you can make a craven facsimile of punk art for your poster. But that art style signals to punks that other punks are going to be there. You would never reproduce that style using traditional methods because you are not a member of that artistic tradition.
You should keep the originals. They signal to AI slopsters that this is a great place to meet other slopsters.
I see, across my city and others I visit, every bar/restaurant/etc now has low effort one shot posters, menus, etc, some with old chatgpt nonsense text / errors. It's everywhere. All that brown-ish hue food 'pictures' etc. I mean 'authentic Pizza napolitana!' and then an AI generated picture of said pizza... One of them (an Italy born Italian restaurant owner here) and he just said; people come in with the very expensive pictures / menus I had before and the same amount of people come in with these free ones. And he actually likes these better as photographing (real, not mcd/burgerking plastic props with poison paint to make it look better) food is hard, even when paid for.
TBF the food places here that have photos on the menus are either chain restaurants or really bad fast food. In the latter case, the photos are flat, grey and unappetizing. (Because food photography is hard.)
Good restaurant in my locale do not have photos of their food.
I suppose the AI possibilities mean that the bad fast food places will start having decent (fake) photos which doesn’t really make that much of a difference to me.
Here in Bielsko Biala (southern Poland) I see the same in few pubs, never seen on menus though. Shops seem to be creating lots of marketing images as well with AI and it just looks...off. In any case doesn't make me want to enter the place.
This feels like an AI trap almost. A lot of the badness comes from people who don't want/can't put effort into it, so we all get a deluge of the sameyness.
Or is it? Could it be the well established low-effort tendency when the dominant culture is shopping centers, vehicles, similar eating establishments, and the style of suburban housing to a large extent? That would surely encourage the LLM to emit in a similar manner. That sameyness provides a signal of comfort and familiarity.
I think this is a misdiagnosis of the problem. The AI posters are just fine, perhaps even pretty good.
The problem is that using AI to create the posters show a lack of willingness to put in effort, and it makes you question whether the producer cares about the product and whether they care about the large scale societal problems related to the usage of post-2022 transformer based neural networks.
Deception is certainly part of the problem. Imagine if your friend sent you a paragraph personal text message on your birthday. Then imagine you find out they didn't write it at all, their AI agent just went through the contact list, saw your birthday and generated a message based on previous conversations.
The message you received is the same either way, but it's clearly different.
Most fliers put together for community events pre-AI were Microsoft Word or Google Docs plus clip art.
The world is getting better, but before everyone realizes it we have to complain first and reminisce about the good old days of Wingdings and Comic Sans.
You at least had to think. Let me put a winging here. Let me choose this clipart and drag it over there. This looks alright I think, I'll go with it.
Now people just shut the brain off. Prompt AI. Get thing. Done with task. Ugga gugga.
I mean isn't it a known thing where older people get more senile when they stop intellectually challenging themselves? And now we are doing it for ourself for all these low hanging fruit mental exercises we used to bake into our lives where we did have to, gasp, think for a moment, even if the task was unimportant or stupid.
It’s actually very amusing to me comic sans is being referred to as “charmingly honest” on this forum, of all places. Shows how much this is all just aesthetic judgement and doesn’t have any connection to reality, just opinions. Before, comic sans was so low effort it earned scorn and derision. Now, it’s charming. Meanwhile, it’s actually the same amount of (low) effort as always. But for some reason now it has been elevated. Seen people say the same about MS paint drawings, and that’s when realized this isn’t serious at all.
Everyone is suffering and not getting what they want to some degree. Life is short, and opportunity runs out. People turn this into bitterness and direct it at external things that are going well that they're not a participant in.
It's not just AI, it's everything. Romantic rivals, celebrities, sports teams, fandoms, choice of IDE or programming language.
It's a social evolutionary strategy to neg and gossip about people and things you don't like or are jealous of. It's low energy, has little downside, and can reduce the fitness of rivals, especially when done in group settings.
The algorithm has co-opted this part of our primate brain and turned it into ad dollars. It's also twisted discourse to be sour and negative by default because it activates these perverse reward pathways.
Designers republic and memphis were the only designs i couldn't immediately see were AI generated.
The only reason i couldn't tell memphis is because it's aping a known design language already, it's just a perfect copy so me not being able to tell it wasn't AI isn't a free pass in this case.
I think if there was a little less "grid" feeling to the layout details then i wouldn't be able to tell on a few of the other designs either.
Edit: the designers republic version is quite a lot different than the others, it's not just that it's the only design to avoid pairing every feature with an icon, it's the whole layout variety - there's different font sizes, the positioning of elements is very well done to my eye. I'm gonna say this has to be another case like memphis, there's some pre-existing design language that i don't know of and it's just aping that. It's much more human than the others which i can believe are straight ai.
I'm not the GP but if you look at actual 1980s zines the difference is obvious, even if it's not easy to put into words. The absence of photos or hand-drawn graphics in particular.
The origins of the punk movement are in counterculture and DIY, so there's something particularly perverse about using an AI model to generate a poster in that style.
Something horrible I've noticed with a lot of AI-generated design is the size of the typeface.
There's a menu for a place in my town and it's completely illegible. They printed the same thing in three sizes, and you need a magnifying glass to see the text on the smallest two.
Accessibility matters, and is part of the job of a designer. The problem with AI tools is that by skipping the expert, you risk making some horrible mistakes.
I went to our state fair recently, and there were so many advertisements for their food that was AI generated, and I suppose if the food looked anything like what was depicted maybe I wouldn't have had a problem, but I felt "tricked" into buying something that appeared good, and turns out, looked nothing like what it was. I overpaid, and didn't even end up eating 1/4 of it. I'm not sure if this quite falls in the same vein as the og post, but it definitely made me feel that way.
I should be fair (no pun intended) there was one booth that had mini donuts that I felt were better than the AI generated poster advertisement, but the rest of the food I ate, was certainly not.
I will say, it was a learning experience, and next time I will just look at what others bought and try to determine if that might be the same as the AI generated images, and whether it looks good enough to order, rather than look at the AI images.
The thing about the icons next to each phrase is that they are useless. Forget how they look, instead ask why they are there? Icons in UX design give a visual representation of what a button does, to help people understand the interaction with the UI. Well, these are posters. There are no buttons. It shows a fundamental misunderstanding of why an icon exists in the first place. (And yes, this is true for many of the places where AI throws in icons.)
That is why, even if the look of a poster is OK, they are failures. Because they forget that the reason these advertising posters exist is to communicate something that is going on. A nice look to them is a bonus, not the core purpose. So claiming that AI isn't doing a horrible job is because the author is misunderstanding what the job is in the first place.
> The problem is that once you’ve seen that style 20 times it starts to irritate just from the sheer repetition.
But that's how the algorithm behind LLMs functions. It simply cannot create something unique by stepping out of its existing knowledge base. It has to refurbish existing data, because, well, that's all it has.
One might argue that a human artist also is refurbishing data, made out of experiences and knowledge it has gather throughout its life.
The difference I think comes from something extra (that we're entirely dumb-founded on) that the human mind can contemplate and extrapolate from, to be able to generate something truly unique and different.
I hope (and believe) this extra magical capacity is what will not allow AI (at least in its current statistical form) to be able to match us in terms of creativity & uniqueness.
This is good to know, but the kind of folks who use AI to create their posters and menus aren't going to be able to be so specific. They'll throw the details at an LLM and take whatever they get the first time. What matters is they didn't have to pay a designer (they ignore that they're paying a subscription).
One trick that works from IRL is building a moodboard. Go to Pinterest, find what you like, paste it together.
If you're short on time, you can ask AI to summarize into a certain time and craft the prompt from there. But it's better to figure out what you really like.
ChatGPT tends to fall to the same things, but many of the other image generators do much better.
I'm old enough to remember the Desktop Publishing revolution in the early 90s. There were so many awful posters, flyers and such that actual people made. My favorite was a preschool flyer where they used the kidnapper font.
The comments seem to have the consensus that these designs are just "ok"
But to me it still seems genuinely amazing that LLM's are able to generate graphics of this high quality with the text and narrative correctly positioned.
Blown away, but also quite sad, about the future of creative endeavours like graphic design
It’s interesting, all these examples look exactly as what I remember a typical result at an intro graphics design would look like, in that the idea might be good, but it gets very sloppy (pun unintended) in the details, such as alignment, consistency – especially in the visual hierarchy –, or typography.
What’s also interesting to me is that requesting ”professional typography” did not fix the problem at all. And I would guess that there is a staggering amount of examples in the training data.
Maybe inference is just wobbly by nature? The same as text output has the characteristic randomness, even design output cannot resist being – for a lack of a better word – hand made?
Here's what I like about it: it communicates. What, when, and where. And crucially, photos showing what the event looks like. Photos of real people fixing real things.
The author demonstrates that AI-generated posters can imitate many artistic styles besides the generic default, but these examples suffer the same problem as all template-based posters: they don't communicate what the event is actually like. What does a samba band performance look like? (There are drums, I guess?) What does a circus skills workshop look like? (There are juggling clubs, I guess?)
These posters may be more aesthetically pleasing but none of them make me interested in going to the event.
Can someone post an event poster that they think is incredible? These posters all look fine to me, but the comments seem to know much better ones - but at least in my memory I can’t recall any much better.
It's not a ground-breaking paragon of graphic design but it communicates what it needs to communicate: what, when, and where. And crucially, it has photos showing what the event looks like. Photos of real people fixing real things.
We just have to accept that we’re now living in the age of industrialization of any skill that is digitized. And on average that means it’s not better than what a qualified professional can produce, but it’s good enough, and good value for money. Just like IKEA furniture is not better than anything that a skilled carpenter can create, but most of us settle on industrialized furniture because we don’t have the budget for better, or we prefer to spend it elsewhere. Similarly, most companies don’t need bespoke posters nor software.
> We just have to accept that we’re now living in the age of industrialization of any skill that is digitized.
What do you mean by "just accept"? Should professional graphic designers give up their profession? Should they stop advocating for legal protections of their work?
Yes, why would government suddenly start protecting workers when we never cared in the past? Our society only cares about money, cheaper and faster. We’ve automated so many jobs, including the carpenters, but soon also all drivers, taxi drivers, truck drivers, and thousands of other jobs. And realistically, most customers don’t see the difference between average and high quality from a skilled professional. They just want cheap.
And what are graphic designers going to protect? AI is not allowed to make designs? Or the style of a specific designer is not to be copied by anybody else, AI or human? Many graphic designers produce work in the same style, are you going to prohibit that as well?
Small businesses torching years and years of propaganda and goodwill lavished on them, so they can save the $50 it would cost to have a human design a decent-looking poster.
Some time ago, I was in this apartment complex and there was a hand drawn sign of a dog pooping on the grass - the sign then said that residents should pick up after their dog. It looked like the locals living in the apartment complex had their child draw the dog pooping in a slightly adorable style. I remember feeling kind of happy about this, like I could see a kid sitting there with some crayons painting this dog. I know there were human artists perfecting this child like style before but still feels like some humanity is getting lost here making AI paint like a kid.
What I find off-putting is the emoji style used. They look like images you'd find in a first grade workbook, or on sticker sheets handed out to first graders. I quit using emojis on my phone because of that "playmobil" look.
I suspect this trend started with the yellow happy face. Barf.
It used to be that all the available art generation systems would make mistakes on text, making the letters into weirdly shaped non-letter blobs and/or having strange typos all over the place (that were probably from getting the letter-shapes confused rather than not knowing how to spell words).
How exactly did that get fixed? It seems like suddenly they can consistently produce correct text with sharp borders, even with various "special effects" on the letters, as if they'd been actually graphic-designed in rather than "painted" with the same techniques as the rest of the image. Is there actually some kind of system that does tool calls and superimposes text on a base?
In Gemini, which is quite good at image generation, it gets locked into a path so rigidly that you need to start a new chat to get much variation in style; about half the time when using a previous image (in the same chat) as input it just reproduces it exactly.
I grabbed an old Obon festival flyer from 2014 and told chatgtp to:
"look at this image and give me variants in the style of classical japanese artists and graphics designers (be sure to include hokusai and Ikko Tanaka). be sure to tell me about each style. upscale and include the original with some designer words that are plausible"
at least two of these don't look like AI to me and are perhaps better than the original. but a non-designer is likely to pick the more busy ones.
> One note here is that along the way, the poster has acquired extra text (“A day of music making and family fun”) – it’s decided that Designers Republic would have thrown in some text of that kind, so it’s come up with some words. Those words are now in the chat context, so they appear in subsequent posters.
This is very important for programming and I don’t think enough people are cognizant of it
This is something I actually cover in the follow-up project's how-to. Ask the AI to sense check the info you've supplied. It can tell you "hey, maybe you should mention venue address".
The very end of the article hit on the best point.
If you ask AI to use HTML to create an 8.5x11 designed "poster" or "one sheet" it can do a great job that is indistinguishable from what anyone/artist can do in HTML/CSS.
But, fine-tuning is still required - like ask it to use less used fonts and less gradients :)
I think basically AI posters are bad because when given freedom to the model (which is what people will do when just asking "make me a poster for my coffee shop"), the model will always tend to do the same design style. So yes, as this article says, with better prompting you CAN get better results. The other problem I think is tool calling, because when prompted for a poster, ChatGPT will definitely use image generation, when it should be generating some html and css + some image assets and then presenting the user an image or pdf.
I think the tendency to go for image generation always might be related to token costs, designing with Code & adding some generated images to the mix should be more expensive than just image generation.
Exactly this. One of my favorite breweries near where I live went full slop and uses AI for almost all of their posters and event graphics. The owner is a chemist, not a designer, so the results are exactly what you just described.
They do, the very fact of using such posters indicates the lack of necessary competence and or resources in the process that can discern quality to fix the results
The most glaring weakness in AI poster design to me is its inability to create strong visual hierarchy. Even if you explicitly ask it to do so, its fundamental inability to “see” is quite apparent in the output.
It's not that the first one is so awful in isolation, it's that they are everywhere you look when you walk down the street. The barbers, the school fête, the cafe, the church. Everywhere.
I’ve been a designer (and developer) for 15+ years now. AI can produce better design than 80% of human designers already. Those we scream “AI can’t replace me” the loudest are those whom it already did.
This has always been what irritated me about the AI poster style, is that I could tell that zero creativity or effort was involved. It is not that difficult to spend some time with an image generator to make something unique that even the staunchest AI art haters would probably not notice.
I like the other posters more, but the first poster probably still conveys the idea of the event better: people having fun, drinking beer, with a live band. You don't get that from most of the other posters unless you first mentally transform those icons into real things, which takes effort.
I'm starting to think that icons are in fact the low-effort way to convey information. It's design you can just throw in anywhere without adapting it to context (except for maybe changing color).
I really don't get any sense of what these events are from the look-alike posters. They are all just a wall of color and excessive detail.
For a poster to catch your eye and be informational it needs to be way simpler - should be able to take it in at a glance, not have to pore over it like a "where's waldo" exercise.
Is there an explanation for why AI images, or posters, look "AI"?
What I mean is that even some of the better ones, that I quite like, have a distinct AI look that I can’t quite put my finger on.
Some elements are, the very saturated color or being overly busy, but not all images have these tells, and not all of them.
For a while I thought it was that sort of very subtle dithering/texture that a lot of the images have, but again not all of them.
Looking online, most seem to focus on things like the wrong number of fingers, things merging into one another, details that don't make sense, etc., but that’s not what I’m talking about.
Does anyone have an explanation for why they are this easy to recognize as AI even when they are decent?
Just as with "you're absolutely right" and the em-dash thing, the image models have a load of habits they fall back on. Some of them are easy to spot - the yellow filter, making grids of icons, ...
Others are things you recognise subconsciously without being able to describe consciously. I've been experimenting a lot, and I can probably see more tells than most people. But sometimes it's just a sixth sense.
And some of those tells do now give me the ick. And some of those tells are in the "better" posters on that page. Today I would clean them off.
But I still think it's unnecessary and dishonest to try and hide that it's made by AI - just tidy up the bits that give people ick. Same goes for text, btw.
Yes, I agree that disclosure is important, and yes, some of it is just “habits” of the model and we are a pattern-matching machine.
I still find it fascinating that, in my group of friends with somewhat diverse backgrounds, we are all pretty good at spotting AI-generated images (and also text to a lesser extent), but none of us can quite describe how. Some of the tells are more obvious, but I would love to see someone do a more systematic exploration of AI art to unearth the less common ones. Sometimes it almost makes me feel “crazy” that, to me, something is clearly AI, but I would not have any idea how to explain to someone who can’t recognize it how.
This is a bit of a problem for me when, for example, I try to explain to my parents how to spot it, and I can only show a list of AI images and say, “You know… like that,” instead of giving a real explanation.
A lot of things are like that though. There's a cartoon - I thought XKCD but I can't find it - about how a beginner might identify an oak leaf by a set of descriptions - but an experienced arboriculturist would just say "well, you know, it's an oaky shape".
Like, I can tell a crow from a blackbird. Could I explain to you how to tell a crow from a blackbird? Absolutely not.
They usually do a noticeably bad job at kerning and text in general. They’ve gotten much better but it still doesn’t quite match the results of actually using a font/computer-generated text.
They also tend to not lay things out in quite the pixel perfect way you’d expect from a good designer. But that’s not as good a tell because many designers also fuck this up.
I probably wouldn’t catch these good examples as AI in a casual context, but those tells would be enough to decide if I was asked.
To me, it seems more to be something about the colors, but other than saying that they are often oversaturated, I can't quite place exactly what it is. I sometimes try to open them with an image editor and zoom in, or use other tools to try to "discover" what it is that I'm seeing, but without success so far. It doesn't help that graphics is not something I have experience with.
It's pretty sad when you realize the average person is just kind of... unaware. They are fine with whatever, they don't really notice most stuff that goes around them.
While it’s interesting to see renderings in past styles graphic design, ultimately it’s going to ring false. Even if it’s executed well it’s just a costume or pastiche, with no real connection to the style.
What made these historical design movements actually memorable was usually a set of newly-possible techniques joined with young people with a set of shared community values.
So if you want to make something that will read as authentically “2026” to future generations, you should make brainrot. :-)
One thing you can do that never seems to occur to anyone is to tell the LLM to critique its own work. Then ask it how it would fix the issues it found, then feed that into the next iteration. You can also ask it to look for generative AI “tells” and do the same. One-shotting a prompt rarely gives you the best output.
Word processors are designed to maximise readability, handling things like alignment and white space with zero effort from the user.
These posters don't have the feature of readability. They inconsistently apply the required design principles for this. Removing some of the clutter helps, but a WordArt poster from 1992 is still a better final product for the purpose.
Taking the last poster as an example (1940s cubist style), the graphic seems almost designed to draw your eye towards blank space. This, very precisely, detracts from the goal: the graphic is providing negative value!
Ah, I see that I've completed a full circle, sorry.
The original comment - that this article is a response to - was exactly that WordArt and Comic Sans, or even a piece of paper and a Sharpie, is better at doing the job of communicating the information.
I'm reminded of how Mac apps are supposed to conform to common UI standards rather than going off and reinventing the wheel. Also the Bootstrap template for websites.
Similarly, it would be nice if there were common styles for posters that you could just use and an AI could generate and nobody would criticize you for. Not everything has to be an original design.
if NOT TRULY personal preference, then all those variations ARE horrible, but if they serve some taste--personal or marketing--then they are likely not to everyone's taste.
to me, they all look like lazy-prompting, which is the only way I ever do genAI imaging, because I fail to see why that "CPU" should be wasted on something I barely even care for.
That said ... let kids do that shit and pay them 50 or 100 bucks ...
The issue is that in my walled garden, I have not seen any of the good AI stuff. My wardens still use some home trained GPT 3.5 for most stuff, including their songs on potify and bootube. And i can't get access to current top level public AIs, either. Had the actual ChatGPT and Claude models for some while but I knew why ... otherwise I might put effort into semantics, syntax, grammar and my image generation prompts, which currently look like some MITM is speedrunning collages using haiku cowork and crayons or something ...
I agree that these examples are "better than the default" but still suffer from many AI-design bad smells. In terms of design, "style" (as in "Bauhaus" vs "Japanese" vs "Faux kid drawing") is less important than readability, economy and communication:
- The main issue with AI posters and flyers is almost uniform information density. They read as "too crowded". Posters should, like photographs or paintings, have a rhythm where some areas are high density and others act as negative space, and provide a more restful transition between information areas.
- The icons as bullet-points are a big AI cliche, and for the most part useless. Nobody needs an icon of a cupcake to understand what "cake" means and most of the other icons have no clear interpretation. Icons are only useful when, by themselves, communicate the idea (like the typical toilet icon). It's telling that every poster includes them.
- AI is not brave enough, or wise enough, to leave some blank space. Blank space is the #1 design resource.
- Font and visual style should not be arbitrary aesthetic choices, but rather motivated ones. They could relate to the event or the place through its history, culture, biome, or through the utopian vision of what the organizer is trying to bring to life. There should almost never be a legitimate choice between "Should we use Japanese, Punk or Kid-drawing style?"
- Being honest, earnest, truthful, is better than being cool.
- If a poster for an event calls your attention you can scan for the date, time and place. They will be there somewhere. But before you get there, there'll be important questions: "who organizes this?" "who is this for?" "what's the vibe going to be like?". Only a few of the posters try to partially provide this information through very small sentences (e.g., "A day of music, making and family fun")... but it's hardly enough. In my opinion this is what 80% of the time designing the poster should be spent on... looking nice and "professional" won't inspire trust or create commitment.
And similarly, all your other points. But of course, the more I say "you've got to prompt it right", the less value the AI is providing. A great AI would of course have that taste on your behalf.
Well, yes, of course. At some point, the availability of AI might result in people that have all the planning, communication and constraint management skills of a graphic designer but don't need to define the layout themselves. Something akin to programming beats on a drum machine vs performance on an actual drum set.
... but I'm not too bullish on an AI having "taste" because the reason people have taste and a POV is because they're living life. Artistic choices are the consequences of past experiences and associations we make unconsciously, which result in a patchwork that holds meaning. A "great AI" would need to imitate that, and maybe they someday will, but we're talking about imitating embodied experience and thousands of sensory impressions that we normally don't even bother verbalizing, or writing, but as humans are able to transform and share.
AI is a tool, just like photoshop was. Just because someone bought photoshop didn't mean that they can magically create amazing digital artwork, they had to learn photoshop and also be creative. Otherwise it would have been a horrible poster with comic sans. Same goes for AI, one has to learn to use the tool and be creative.
I feel like ChatGPT Images 2.5 is another step up in terms of quality of designs. But it still needs to be told very specifically what to generate. A generic output is in turn due to a generic input.
This is misunderstanding the problem really. People don't hate ai posters because they are bad, they are technically better than many normal posters. They hate ai posters because they hate ai generated work and desire to just be done with the whole thing.
By that logic they hate this even more because now its harder to tell its ai. This is really a person hating the means but using the ends to justify it rather than stating so outright
These models are built on IP theft from artists who are now losing work to this slop. Even if you don't see the difference (rest assured, most of your audience will), the morality of it is terrible.
Going to these events sounds like too much work. Couldn't AI just give me a summary of the event? It could even play some AI music similar the band that performed.
Now do this for science conference posters. There's something haphazard, unnerving, and uninformative about the AI-generated ones I am encountering increasingly. I imagine musicians feel similarly about AI-generated music and artists about AI-generated art because in all 3 cases, we're detail oriented.
For me it's about the unconventional analogies they try to express combined with their layout that even a couple crude 8.5x11 Excel plots and a poster author express better. And the human factor is an important component of poster sessions IMO.
I love this posting. Taste is something that needs to be worked for. It doesn’t matter how well the tool renders the output if the tool user has not taste (me included).
In the future I think that users will learn more, and tools will get better. The true tell of AI usage will be that a small organization will have a beautiful poster. That was never possible in the past.
A lot of the AI generated posters are just too crowded. I think part of the beauty of the "old fashioned way" is that time and budget constraints forced you to prioritize what was important.
We have seen this before in physical design. Complexity used to be expensive, it would take someone hours hand carving or embroidering designs to produce. Then we industrialized production and a machine could stamp a design in to metal, stamp complex painted designs instantly. Suddenly complexity was cheap and everything moved to minimalism.
This is a bit like telling the owner of a tiki bar that they don't need to use the Papyrus font, or a kindergarten that they don't need to use MS Comic Sans. The default style exists because AI-naive people with unsophisticated tastes find it amazing. If you give them prompts for different styles, you at best just trade one devil for another, similarly to how everyone started prompting for "studio Ghibli".
On design we have aesthetics but also legibility and usability.
For legibility: the first examples are bad because they fail to easily communicate what/when/where/details in a couple seconds, mainly because the profusion of visual clutter obfuscates the message. The latter examples fare much better on that regard.
Usability is a constraint maybe more applicable to websites like the discussion I saw the other day on the design of claude-written pages (all look the same, feels ok but good UX probably lacking).
The same applies to "vibe-coded" software btw: You can give the agent style suggestions on how to design the UI - you don't have to end up with the standard "flat/pseudo-material/2020s SV startup" (or alternatively "cyberpunk-ish dark mode") look if you don't want to.
They were/are not great. While I agree that spending extra 10 minutes improves the results, AI stuff are also not amazing. I think there's nothing surprising about this.
It's the typography. I'm yet to see a single AI generated thing where the typography is not distorted. The examples generated are no exception, everything is just a bit off.
It's not horrible, no: it's off enough to make one feel uneasy looking at it without being able to pinpoint the problem.
From a creative direction perspective, I think this is missing a major part of the story and what's driving much of the slopsign aesthetic.
Your prompts and turns help with the graphic design portion of a poster. But, if you're a restaurant owner, you're doing both the graphic design and the food photography in GenAI, which further compounds the signals of slop that can seem unsettling to someone viewing it.
The former is much more tunable than the latter, but the end diagnosis remains: if you can't tell what's bad in a design, you won't be able to tell what's good, and no amount of turns will iterate towards it. This is one layer above your scope. Art direction encompasses both, because there's a relationship between media and graphic design, especially when you have products to show.
Ive been getting AI political ads. I mean political ads are already shitty enough but now I'm seeing "<incumbent> is a wolf in sheep's clothing " with an Ai image of him wearing a sheep suit. It's true and kinda funny because he is indeed a piece of shit but cmon put some effort!
Remember back in the day when people used to insult human-made art by saying it was "derivative"? Yeah, this isn't an AI era phenomenon. I think some of these posters are good.
At least the AI generated posters are better than human-generated t-shirt designs, where you find generic texts such as: "Est. 1984" (or any random year), "I [heart] NY", "Property of [City/School] Athletic Dept.", "Original Trademark", "Authentic Denim Brand", etc., etc.
I don't often say this but those jobs are ripe for replacement by AI. It won't do worse!
Some of these are actually... pretty good. I used to do print design to pay my way through college, and they wouldn't be too far from run-of-the-mill pamphlets we would turn around (both design and print in small runs) over lunch.
Well, they're superficially less same-y, but none of them are really giving spring fair vibes.
Except for the "professional graphic designer has added typography to a poster paint drawing by his young child" one, I'd go as far to say that I actually like it, especially if you were to remake it with the assistance of an actual child.
Sure, you can get any style you like, but /you will pull those little icons lining the list of activities at your county fair from my cold robotic hands/
I've been trying to help someone create publicity images (who can't afford to pay a designer). The biggest problem with AI is modification of input photos. The results are good, but still trying to get it to not "sloppify" the images.
The point really isn't just the use of technology. People don't complain when a hand drawn poster is photocopied! The issue is that it's taken a human out of the creative process _and_ it's using the plagiarism machine that is also making everything worse while enriching a handful of the worst people. It's a sign of how lazy the event organizer is, and how little they care about people, which is especially foolish for an event where you would like "people" to show up.
I like this post. And the comments even more. I've rarely seen such a breath of opinions and analysis on HN. And it's all from a straightforward use case and a few examples. Is it HN tailored clickbaiting? If it is, it is the right kind.
That post has been lying around for a while, and got very little interest when I shared it on BlueSky and Reddit. So I'm absolutely delighted it's prompted a healthy discussion on HN.
Some of the comments I've had rebuttals for, but people have beaten me to making the same point I would have.
That first poster example is exactly how every poster at my kids school looks. If theres ever any carton people they have extra fingers or are reading books backwards.
It all reminds me of when Amazon website used to get laughed at but those who overweighted their design preferences. The first ai poster in the list look fine to me
For anyone here who works at Anthropic or OpenAI, this is the doing of your lovely CEOs and their constant fear-mongering that has turned an entire population of people against anything even remotely touching AI.
Community flyers have been notoriously cringe for a very long time. In the 1990s they were all Comic Sans with cringe Microsoft Word clipart. Then, the design world decided that Comic Sans was the bar for bad taste.
Even if these examples look lazy, someone still had to do the work to prompt the thing into existence and they, at the very least, found it acceptable. So, either way, it had the same amount of effort it always had.
Is there a way to formalize the space of all possible aesthetics a model knows, in a way that you could randomly sample from it?
The analogy in my mind when I read this post was: you are asking a machine to paint a color, but the machine always paints the exact same shade, deterministically; and you'd like to explore different colors, but somehow you don't know anything about colors, don't know any of their names. So you don't have the language to ask for what you can't name.
Random sampling of colors (without names!) is a solved problem, because we've parameterized the entire universe of colors that can be perceived. It's just a very low dimension manifold, and there's even a computable metric on it such that unit-distances in that metric are what humans say are color differences of equal step size.
Are there more general versions of this? Like: "Here's a list of every human art in history: infer a coordinate system that uniformly metricizes every art that can ever exist?"
For your basic words-and-dates-with-shapes-and-shit posters, the AI ones are annoying, but I’m not gonna die on a hill over it. The hill I _will_ die on is restaurants using AI generated images of food. No. That needs to be illegal. I thought it _was_ illegal.
>That needs to be illegal. I thought it _was_ illegal.
Ummm.... I have news for you, pretty much all ads have used fake food since the beginning of advertisements.
Nobody ever cared that McDonald's ads makes McDonald's food look appealing but all of the sudden when mom & pop places can do the same cheaply and easily there's lashing out saying it should be illegal? Wtf?
Sure, yeah, I understand what foot photography is. McDonalds etc. are at least riding the line instead of ignoring it. Using real food to carefully craft a scene, no matter how "done up" it is, is still representative of what's in the product.
Generative AI art is going to fabricate things. Especially when used by smaller shops who won't fact check it. I go to restaurant, look at picture of food, and expect to receive that. Period.
This article is doing the whole concept a disservice. It's still just randomly generating without thought; albeit maybe with a drop more taste than usual. (not a significant amount of taste, just a single drop).
The problem with a lot of AI is that the baseline is already past "good enough" for many folks.
But you can also imagine a very different approach:
Imagine if you start with a vision, and just happen to use AI tools as part of your process to realize that vision, just-like/along-with many other implements. I've seen examples where people put together many layers in photoshop or gimp, and mix with rendering, hand drawn art, photographs, etc. Very much like how some of the better programmers work with AI assist.
Their very first attempt is arguably the best one there. I was surprised they didn't like it much and kept going. Then the "Stamp / Letterpress Style (Modernised)" was the only other good one.
So of the two designs made, only two were good, the rest was quite bad and lost all meaning.
This is one of the most interesting posts I've seen, and that's the way people should work with AI. A brainstorming session, with background and references, with broad knowledge of the field, then with clear instructions on how to proceed, different designs, propositions out of the ordinary, etc
I've been doing that for the last six months and the results are more than spectacular for the apps I build
So no, 'create an inventory app' is not enough, you have to be specific in every sense, every detail of the tech stack, phases, checklists, roadmaps, decisions, everything that makes AI's life easier (less mistakes to make and fix) and yours too.
Next time, start with "Let's have a brainstorming session about an [inventory] app we will create and at the end write a very detailed prompt.md, here is the initial context... ask all the questions you may have before writing any code"
* Replace [inventory] with any other app you may need
And remember one thing, AI is a multiplier of both our intelligence and our stupidity, the outcome will reflect that
Edit: The link at the end deserves some exposure, it's the work of the author showcasing 100 prompts for different designs [1] and some people won't get there because tl;dr or short attention span. Get them, use them, learn from them
The Designers Republic one arguably avoids it. Only one of its five is an icon: three are zero-padded numbers and one is a smudge where someone forgot to stamp the icon.
But more importantly, if you aren’t the kind of person who could make a halfway decent text only poster before, you are going to make the posters at the top of the article. Those are objectively harder to read than something typed up in word.
You aren’t going to know to tell the AI to “ Go for a clean, unfussy, bright layout with a bold striking spring-themed graphic. Avoid pastel/airbrush/oil style art or images of people.”
It's almost like you'll get much better AI generated posters if you're experienced at graphic design and know exactly what you want to create given what the client that is paying you for might want.
Interesting...
(A lot of people end up using Canva for this kind of stuff, btw)
My eyes immediately move away from AI generated graphics. If it does manage to fool me, I get irritated and the thing you are trying to promote gets associated with that feeling. Make a poster with crayons if you will, but spare us from more cognitive polution.
So, I think this article is circling something a lot more foundational when it comes to people’s disdain for AI. If you put more thought, more effort, and more originality into your work, you get something that starts to feel like an actual artistic expression. If you just type in a basic prompt and accept whatever comes back, that shows too. And I think that is a large part of why people feel insulted by this stuff in the first place.
It’s hard to respect a piece of work or take it seriously when it feels like the person who made it didn’t think it was worth giving much consideration. You’re asking someone to stop, look, and care about your poster and whatever it represents, but you haven’t given them much reason to believe you cared about it yourself. If you can’t take it seriously, how should we? It isn’t really about whether it took five minutes. It’s about whether there was any thought behind those five minutes.
So, I read this article as if it had the following title: “If you insist on using an LLM to generate visuals, you still have to put some thought into them.” But then, that starts to defeat the point for anyone who was using an LLM to avoid that effort in the first place, doesn’t it? You can make the process easier, but you can’t just assume that having produced something means you’ve made something worth sharing.
At the end of the day, I think there are valid uses for LLMs and there are uses that don’t add much of anything. As a consumer of content, the ones I respond to tend to be the ones where the LLM’s involvement isn’t the most obvious thing about the work. I want to see the person’s idea come through. A very light touch, not a deluge. This can absolutely apply to creating visuals, but it requires judgment, revision, and a willingness to do more than accept the first thing you’re given.
And it seems like a lot of people aren’t willing to put in that effort. That’s fine. Their work will continue to be distinguished by that lack of care, while people who are willing to put more into it will stand out. The initial novelty only carries something so far. Once you start picking up on the familiar patterns, that sense of something being slightly off becomes hard to ignore.
So, moving forward, I’m not so sure human creativity and input are things that can simply be outdone and made irrelevant. Maybe they’re an additional layer that keeps giving us somewhere further to go. An LLM can imitate what people have already brought to the table, but given access to that same LLM, we can bring our own experiences, ideas, and judgment into the mix. The tool gives us a starting point. I don’t see why we should assume it also determines how far we can take it.
It's interesting how the negative examples all look like mobile game ads.
Which isn't an accident - mobile game ads are tuned studiously on consumers actual preferences and not the preferences of designers. i.e. the people that are likely to spend actual money on the product/service being advertised to prefer the ad being portrayed here as bad.
Bluntly, being able to sidestep the whims and fashions of graphic designers is proving to be a major feature of the AI revolution.
People dont want to write multiple prompts or write a lengthy one. They want to say create poster x for event y. That's it, that's what they get and that's what they take.
If it's a craft festival, you should pay one of the crafts people to craft a poster. Any stench of AI (and in particular, the weirdness of an AI generated punk-ish poster) for a craft event makes me think it's a scam because I know for sure they had contacts of people that could've done a better job, and been supported while doing it... which is the moral pitch of the event. Even if the craft was basketmaking or something totally non-poster-related, use a close-cropped photo of a basket as the background or something. You've got artistic people around you. The outcome is going to be better, universally. (I don't really want to debate this honestly. We can agree to disagree if you think this isn't universally applicable.)
But I'm fine with the beer festival phoning it in. I guess my only issue with the in-the-wild poster example you found is it does look... bland and just aestetically bad. Your example AI poster styles would be a huge improvement! I can't say they're like, impressive in anyway or winning any awards since they're also bland, but aestetically they hold up and IMO, actually communicate the info better than the ez-slop original.
Maybe to put it another way: if it was 2015, and an craft festival and a beer festival both used the same incredibly lame looking Word template for posters, I'd have the exact same opinion.
I’m convinced that almost nobody that is saying to hire cheap designers instead of AI has actually done so.
Think of the absolute worst, dogshit offshore developer contractors you have worked with. It’s the same thing for design. In the 1% chance they can even understand what you want them to do, you then have a 1% chance that they are capable of executing it in a barely satisfactory way.
the ones in the article that aren't complete eyesores are just what you get out of Canva with no changes except busier (which, by the way, is worse)
this is dumb as hell. Instead of feeding it through an LLM just make it plain text comic sans and it'll be better. Word clipart looks more palatable than this
This is one example of how knowledge is still useful, even in the world of AI. If you know about different art movements, aesthetics, etc. you can prompt images using them, and make stuff that doesn't look like the generic slop that uses that recognizable round-corners style.
Slop is slop because people put in zero effort so the LLM just produces the first thing it was trained to do. You can absolutely get good results out of AI but it takes taste and a little work.
The irony is that the less appealing posters would take a human artist much more skill and time to create.
Humans actually prefer minimalist designs with basic flat shapes with flat colors which ironically is trivial to create and can be done without AI or talent. Most people can’t even create anything remotely close to the less appealing posters by hand.
> Go for a clean, unfussy, bright layout with a bold striking spring-themed graphic. Avoid pastel/airbrush/oil style art or images of people.
This seems to be the crux of the issue. It's not that the AI posters were bad, but has all the hallmarks of low effort. And if the organizer can't be arsed to put effort in their poster, why should anyone think it will be an event worth attending? The quoted prompt is not something someone can think of off the cuff. It requires someone who have seen enough posters to know what they would like and what not to put in. That takes effort. It's called AI slop not because it looks bad (though I do think it is), but no effort is put into them.
But if a designer improves an AI design and I feel it's fine, does that make me strange? If you ran a blind test on this, I think it would come out with high preference...
These are still terrible. It's painfully obvious they are AI. And that's the whole problem. AI posters feel soulless and like nobody put in the work to make something nice. I mourn our pre-AI world with its showcases of human creativity.
That post was written by a designer judging designs.
His attention is biased by the practice of seeing and understanding dozens of visual languages. But he doesn't understand that, unlike a painting, a poster isn't the purpose, the end. A painting in a museum exists for itself. A poster in a street exists at the service of a commercial message. The poster isn't the focus or the point, the message is.
He looks for visual languages, but most people would look just for information: what, who, where, when, why. If they need to spend more than a tenth of a second to decode the visual language of a poster then the poster failed.
There is a famous book on UI design whose title defines very well the design principle for things that should face the masses: "Don't make me think".
As a designer, the post author seeks the unexpected. Normal people just overlook and avoid it.
Normal people love the bland and repetitive precisely because it is familiar. That's the reason there are so many more McDonald's and similar franchise chains than fine French/Italian bistros and unique shops. That's why people listen to dumb pop and country music but not Stravinsky. That's why so many people watch Hallmark movies. People choose boredom because that's something they can easily understand.
Most AI-generated art is "good enough" for most one-shot designs by now (though still not [always] as good as a good meat-based artist of course)
The problems right now are:
- Maintaining a consistent and coherent style/aesthetic when you have to generate lots of assets for something. For example sprites in a video game.
- Iterating over a design for more than a few passes. For some reason most models keep degrading the entire image if you keep asking for edits to a specific part of the image. Or, some problems are or become impossible for them to fix no matter how you prompt them.
Well, sometimes AI generates pictures that are not bad. Personally though I am tired of AI slop in general, and I don't want to support it. AI literally kills humans. In some scenarios AI is still useful (e. g. if you write a game, say, in javascript and you don't have any designers helping you out, you could generate images that don't suck, quickly, via AI) but other than that the less I get of AI the better. Google now has that problem with AI - tons of AI slop and fake videos. I realised the AI slop just wastes my time but Google does not offer a simple "do not show me any AI slop" videos. After all they want people to waste their time on youtube, by design. So I now waste my time twice by using Youtube, if I watch an AI slop video.
AI posters are not horrible, they just expose the person who "commissioned" them as trash. In a way, that is a good thing, since you can avoid them more easily.
A lot of people in the comments say that the supposedly better examples in the article are still “horrible” because they can tell they’re AI and point to things that the AI did “wrong” and a human artist would do better.
That may be true if you’re working with a top of the line artist, but in my experience the average freelance designer online is significantly worse than AI. I’ve worked with dozens of budget friendly designers on Fiverr and consistently get way worse results than I’ve gotten from AI models. Will a great human designer produce better output than an AI? Maybe, but a small local event or business probably won’t have the budget to hire them or know where to find them. It’s cheaper, faster and easier to use AI to generate something that’s good enough for their purposes.
People also point out all the little flaws in the “good” examples and cite them as obvious tells that they were AI generated. I think it would be interesting to see if people could reliably distinguish between AI generated flyers and human made flyers. Sure, sometimes it’s obvious like when the AI adds those weird, cartoony people. But if the model is told not to create designs like that and stick to the styles used in the second half of the article, I expect people would have a much harder time distinguishing the human designs from the AI designs.
The biggest problem that I have with most AI posters is that they are too busy, you have to look for information instead of seeing it popping right away.
Amateurs posters of before AI didn't have this problem. White background, the important info in big letters, maybe one clipart or to. So I'm not talking about how pro artists could make a better job, but even the small local non-profit used to produce better posters. Not in the sense of "better looking", but in the sense that they were more readable.
At least the examples of this blog are more readable than what we usually see.
This is very true and after rendering 100 prompts twice for https://john.hartnup.uk/poster-prompts/ I realised that the prompts could be improved by asking for much less clutter. The best examples on there pick out one main visual subject, but many of them are too fussy.
I may do a V2 one of these days.
Clutter comes with the territory to some extent though. I was recently asked to do a real world PTA fayre poster, and the client (my wife) very firmly wanted 12+ attractions mentioned on the poster. Tombola, hook a duck, bar, BBQ, blah, blah, blah as well as date, location, sponsor, ...
To get a really clean design, you need to edit it down to the essentials. I don't know what pro designers do - convince the client to say less?
Unless the prompt says otherwise, AI will try to get a visual element in for every single word too.
Pro designers are generally paid because they’re extremely good editors. And they’re an intermediary between clients and their consumers.
So when you put the capability in the hands of the client without the editing (or taste) and no way to evaluate the result, you get the passable, homogenous thing.
It mostly doesn’t matter because there’s no economic incentive for it to matter, which is why much of our aesthetic world is the way it is.
Designers having that artistic taste, and clients lacking it, is exactly why I don't think generative AI is going to do much to replace (skilled) designers anytime soon. Likewise for other creative professions, and indeed for knowledge work in general.
Taste is a great solution for abundance, so I agree. Also, there's definitely a rubberband effect where products & designs need to differentiate on their design to stand out in a homogenous world, and you truly do need creative professionals having that judgment. Even using AI as a tool, you have to have the sayable vocabulary (at the very least) to agitate the aesthetic status quo.
And low-skill graphic design had already been mostly replaced by Canva, so I don't think AI is really having as much impact on the design industry as people might suppose.
Knowing what is in the realm of possibility can help you get much more out of genAI.
For example, you have to know about a style to know to ask for it or some variation on it.
I think we ALREADY at the point when AI is capable to replace like 99.7% of designers. It is only a question of market inertia and personal brands that prevent it from happening right now.
I think this generalizes to a lot of professional work.
LLMs are very good at satisfying the requirements you give them. They’re much worse at knowing which requirements should be challenged, reframed, or ignored because you don’t know enough about the field to know what actually matters. That’s why they’re such force multipliers for experts: the expert can spot when the model chose the wrong abstraction or checked every box and still produced something bad. A novice often can’t. I’d argue the model mostly raises the novice toward “average.”
“Tell it to push back” doesn’t really solve this either. Too little and you get “aye aye captain!” Too much and you get Opus 5 / claudise, where it seems compelled to find something wrong with everything.
I see this in a Home Assistant project I’ve mostly vibe coded. I can ask Codex to make the kitchen brighter on school days and it’ll happily implement something. But maybe an HA expert would say “you really shouldn’t model it this way.” Maybe they’d even question HA itself. The model could conceivably know that too, but it only sees a tiny slice of my world. There are infinite side quests it could raise, and a good professional’s real skill is knowing which one matters enough to interrupt you about and which 99% to silently ignore.
>It mostly doesn’t matter because there’s no economic incentive for it to matter
Very generous way to say "executive greed has drained bespoke design out of society. I've been seeing more videos on such a topic, but this one was by far the best one I've seen yet: https://youtu.be/HgjXjPP_p3s?is=yVsto8SCnY-SsnVY
(Just in case, don't let the thumbnail fool you. The car simply frames as it expands to general society).
I tried to give this video a good-faith watch, but found myself disagreeing with much of the evidence, conclusions, and research. It seems to be trying to diagnosing cleanslop — the minimalist and flat trend, which renders poorly as being clinical and lifeless. My point was that economics drive aesthetic, and in that framing, I think we both agree corporations will deliver the least amount of design tolerable.
Design-differentiated products still exist (Apple as mentioned, IKEA, Nike, Linear to name a few), but they're outnumbered in the current landscape and arguably still greedy.
>Design-differentiated products still exist (Apple as mentioned, IKEA, Nike, Linear to name a few), but they're outnumbered in the current landscape and arguably still greedy.
I believe that was ultimately what my response wanted to emphasize, and partially the call to action of the video. There is great design out there, but you need to wander through oceans of slop to find it. I had no clue about "Superblocks" until that video.
Likewise, to link the ideas back to Herr; AI is creating an ocean of slop that will make it nearly impossible to find the truly innovative used of AI out there. Curation was already a hard problem pre-AI and this only increases such difficulty by magnitudes. Among reducing said slop (which is nearly impossible now), the call to action is to have proper tastemakers lead the charge and bring out good ideas. Not just ones that generate the most money. Curation by definition almost always lowers view traffic to increase customer satisfaction, and that's not something our ad-based datascape wants.
De-tracked link: https://youtu.be/HgjXjPP_p3s
That's a really backwards explanation for styles that executives commissioned, funded, and popularized in the first place
I think it's in fact forward thinking, in that modern executives lost the taste their older elites had. Or at least they fired the tastemakers for those who pleased them personally, to the sacrifice of proper design. Probably a bit of both, along with other factors.
The more charitable perspective (that falls more important point #2) is simply that taste is different now among the modern billionaire. Someone who can wander onto a stage in a turtleneck and denim jeans simply won't be the type of person who wants a "loud and bold" car. But they might still want to say that they had Ferrari make it. Jony Ive's perspective on design may simply be the product of the people and environments he surrounded himself with.
I can't remember where, but there was an article about the luxury homes billionaires are building themselves. They tent to have he design aesthetic of a bland, but expensive, corporate hotel.
As one of the AI-wielding amateurs, I got positive feedback from an audience member on this Ai-gen poster for a talk I gave earlier this summer https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MaawQcupC5XHqWBiTujSpKOKohx...
The clutter is there yes - it's not a sparse 1970s kitsch cultural event promo or 1970s sci-fi book cover (random example I found in 2 minutes https://www.etsy.com/listing/715136429/david-bowie-moonage-d... ) that's for sure - but I wouldn't want to remove any of mine's elements as each one informs the viewer at a glance their decision whether to attend or not.
Just taking one of your prompts and adding
> N.B. Make sure all the important information pops out (is visible at first glance) like an expert designer would, the information is more important than the design.
Already have me a much better result with the 'Arts & Crafts style', but N=1 so YMMV
I’ve been working on a thing where a bunch of raw content goes through a summarization pipeline and then gets manipulated with a bunch of checks to clean up copy and reduce clutter.
And then the visuals get added with a set of fixed templates. It’s not fully there but is reducing a LOT of the clutter.
Some of the results are even what I’d call good (and I’m a designer). I think a good harness could make non-cluttered results, if one of the AI labs was interested in a “less is more” approach.
Those posters all look pretty damn good to me. Thanks for that page. Super helpful for me and I need that right now.
There is very often a certain softness to the fonts in generated images. Why is that and is there a name for it?
Thinking more, I thinking the softness is actually inconsistency. Because the letters are generated, no two letters will be exact same and if zoomed in some edge might not even be perfectly straight. Another thing we can do these days (I think author should really try out in V2) is to use code to generate the . You may have seen examples of generating Javascript based videos with Claude. Same can be done with posters. Generate a font sheet and use that in code generated poster with image generated background.
Are these "fayre" events some kind of UK thing? I also didn't know offhand what "tombola" is and it comes across like it's part of a collection of standard activities for a "fayre" that have no cultural significance to me.
(Canadian here. Not everything is shared across the Commonwealth, I guess.)
Yes, fayres are popular in the UK especially in schools and small villages. A Tombola is a type of raffle where people buy tickets and the winning numbers are picked from a rotating drum. Normally done to raise small amounts of money for local causes.
Say you want to add an artist or change some information. Regeneration will end up with another poster altogether, right?
A new image at a technical level, but all modern autoregressive image models are skilled at only changing what is absolutely necessary if asked to make edits.
Well, low-stakes clients are usually poor clients because they’re clueless and overly demanding.
Real designers would avoid them in the first place.
And that’s why they want to use AI.
Tangent I guess, it would be interesting to have like a AI/not AI quiz. They still look AI to me but idk if it's because I know
It should be clear in the text, disguising as non-AI is not a goal. It's allowed to look like AI. It's just trying not to look shit.
And that default look - that might not be shit either. Except we've now seen it repeated so many times that we're sick of it.
Am I biased to thinking it looks like shit because I know it's ai though and I think the AI look is overdone?
Suppose you have a budget of $20.
Do you think you will find good artists working for that fee?
I don't think so, unless they are working to prove a point -- that humans can be as good as AI.
And that's the problem:
Humans can be as good as AI, but they are much more expensive.
Maybe you have a friend that's trying to get started in design and could do a favor for a chance to build a portfolio.
Would someone who's "trying to get started in design" be able to make anything as good as these AI posters? And how would they survive in a world where machines can do their job for free?
I suppose human artists will continue to exist, but they will be like chess players: they will continue to exist simply because they love art, but they won't be able to compete with AI.
ETA: less than 2 years.
> Amateurs posters of before AI didn't have this problem.
As someone who made posters in 2000, I respectfully disagree.
Well what's better ? I have so many pictures of posters of old events or storefronts saved on my phone because they were so astronomically bad it'd have been better to not have any poster at all. Today's AI makes it look even worse but I'm hopeful that in five years we'll all live in a world generally more agreeable to look at and not "concrete with pink and yellow fluo paper smashed on top of it" like https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/music-poster-wall.html or https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/france-poster-wall.html?ps... because the cost of making things enjoyable with more colour and detail will have come down. Maybe we can finally go back to Art Nouveau if the cost of making it comes down!
For what it’s worth i think the Bi Nuu poster you share here as reference for something badly designed looks really cool.
Poster design like any visual or artistic field will always cater to conflicting individual tastes - for some it looks great, others hate it.
I like Art Nouveau but a lot of stuff in that style looks kitschy to me.
Your links are supposed to be examples of bad posters? They're awesome!
> we'll all live in a world generally more agreeable to look at and not "concrete with pink and yellow fluo paper smashed on top of it" like https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/music-poster-wall.html or https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/france-poster-wall.html?ps...
Sorry buf I'd take these posters over your “generally more agreeable ” homogeneous slop literally any day.
As I said, "Today's AI makes it look even worse". But the post makes me hopeful than in a couple years, actually good graphic design can come out from AI. It still looks terrible and AI even for the best posters it highlights, but noticeably less than the random ice cream or coffee shop where I live with fully ai-generated interior design, memorabilia and menus.
I’d rather look at the most amateurish indie posters plastered all over a wall than waste even a second looking at machine-generated nonsense.
> too busy, you have to look for information
Have you ever seen a bus schedule, or a parking sign, or a list of events at a local library or an “open hours” sign at a restaurant? Those are 99.9% unreadable, busy, and you have to look for information. And even then it’s not always clear if you got it right. And that was all before the AI.
There is a difference between busy for no reason and busy because of information density. The busy examples in this article aren’t information dense. They just have a ton of different flower types, random animals, background characters, unrelated structures, many different colors and many different shades of those colors, etc. But the information they are trying to communicate is minimal.
A bus schedule or a parking sign is very information dense. It’s trying to communicate a lot in a limited space and as a result require getting used to.
Those examples are filled with real info. The AI posters are filled with meaningless three word slogans, lists of meaningless copy and art where everything is labeled.
None of those are primarily marketing tools, they're things you use after you've already decided you want to use the product. They don't need to grab and hold attention and convince you that they have what you want, they just need to convey information.
Bus schedules are not a good comparison because they have to fit a ton of information into a single page. And I disagree that they are unreadable. Speaking as someone who commuted by bus for years in many different cities, they tend to be quite easy to read because the tabular layouts make them very easy to scan quickly. Once your eyes anchor on the page, you can find what you're looking for without effort.
The biggest problem in my view is: It's not editable by hand. There is no production data I could open in InDesign, Illustrator or Photoshop (Layers) and change things to my or my clients liking.
I am not familiar with the field, but if there isn't a way to have LLM's generate graphics as editable InDesign or Illustrator files (maybe something Adobe will sell you?), I am sure there will be soon.
This is a problem which is entirely solvable by existing and new design/production apps. Instead of working entirely with raster image agents should programmatically edit the target file format.
You could try having, say Astra, use one of these programs via computer use to design it. I haven't tried it, but I hear it is really good at computer use. Might even have more of a dialogue as it creates, so dictating choices at each stage. Would take longer, but does not require someone who has expertise in the tool, just good design notion.
It can probably ransform most to html.
Wait 6 months...
That also reminds me of AI-generated text, which is also (when done without caring) barely readable because of the useless noise mixed the relevant information that a human that proofread the text would have thrown out.
Technically, AI can introduce rounds of fact-checking, proofreading, etc.
But even without that, AI-generated text is already better than what most humans can write -- particularly when they need something fast, cheap and good.
(It might not be "excellent" -- but humans wouldn't be able to make it fast and cheap...)
People act like making a poster is this absurd Sisyphean task that takes a degree in art to produce.
You don’t need to hire an artist, you don’t need AI. Just download Affinity for free, find a nice font and color palate, and put text on the page. I’ve done my own event posters and they take less than an hour to produce with next to zero prior experience and look massively more appealing than AI slop.
Using a tool where you only fill the blanks in some generic templates made by other humans sounds awfully a lot like what AI already does...
There's an amazing viral twitter thread where someone claimed a real Monet painting was an AI generated imitation, and it got an avalanche of comments from people who claimed it was an obvious fake and a poor imitation at that.
It's not tracking a real thing as much as people would like to think.
This is exactly the problem. Most of the time when people criticise the output of genAI, what they’re actually commenting on is the ethics of AI rather than the output of it. And they then attempt to use the demonstration as a proof of their point rather than forming an unbiased opinion of the output based on its own merit.
Now I’m not saying there isn’t legitimate criticisms that can be made about the ethics of AI, I’m highly concerned about the problems that AI brings too. But that’s a separate argument entirely.
It’s a little like people who are pompous about expensive wine, whisky’s, etc and then fail blind taste tests (plenty of studies there too).
I've generally been very impressed with genAI artwork in "impressionist" styles. But thinking about how the diffusion models work, that seems like exactly what you'd expect them to be good at. Things that call for perfectly straight lines and constrained patterns (and explicitly symbolic elements, like text) seem to be considerably harder but apparently very doable now.
There is still obvious genAI slop being put out there all the time, and you can tell it's genAI slop because it's slop: even doing something at that level by hand would be more time and effort than anyone would bother putting in unless it's paid work that then justifies getting it right and doing it professionally. But now that the sloption exists, there's a flood of people taking it.
Prose, on the other hand, is another story. It became possible to produce "grammatically correct, academic-sounding and generally using words to mean what they actually mean" very quickly, but years later it's still rarely if ever good, it just goes through varying different quirks. Maybe part of this is that the training data can't properly reflect what the target audience was for various pieces of text. A lot of it, surely, is that many people are easily impressed by "grammatically correct, academic-sounding and generally using words to mean what they actually mean", and don't themselves have much of a sense for actually good writing.
I don't think this is true. There are people who claim everything is AI – maybe even to bolster their ego.
But for a lot of things I can with high probability discern between AI and human in every day appearance and I know many other people can as well. One of the things I look for is specifically certain types of extreme... not just flaws... just overall atrocity. When I read posts submitted to HN I often realize that something is bad writing before I can specify this to AI text. Pangram almost always agrees with me. Here is a recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49715657
I don't doubt that there are certain scoped tasks that certain models are quite good at. But in my every day life I constantly encounter AI slop that is so bad that I take it as a personal insult that someone thought it would be okay to subject me to it; to presume that I am so tasteless and numb and have no quality standard whatsoever.
I mean just look at the example posters at the beginning of the article. "The problem with these is not so much that they’re bad." Yes, yes it is. They are horrible. I cannot understand how anyone can describe them as anything but that.
> But for a lot of things I can with high probability discern between AI and human in every day appearance and I know many other people can as well.
It’s easy to say that when you already know the answer. But my point is people frequently misattribute stuff as being AI generated when it wasn’t. The GPs Twitter example is proof of this. And you only have to look at the number of times people accuse someone of being AI on HN because they happen to use em dash or an Oxford comma (or any other writing style that was part of the corpus models were trained on), and it’s pretty clear that “obvious tells” are just guesswork.
There was a study years ago where a group of individuals were given white wine with red food colouring, and they were asked to describe the wine. All the participants described plumb and other notes that are exclusive to red wines.
These weren’t dumb people. And the people who claim to spot “obvious AI” aren’t dumb either. It’s just very easy to identify tells if you believe you already know the answer. Unfortunately that’s just how fucked up our human psychology is.
> One of the things I look for is specifically certain types of extreme... not just flaws... just overall atrocity.
So, please forgive me, but this means that you are good at finding out some patterns in AI output. There are always a lot of false positive and negatives, and I haven’t found a convincing study showing that people are good at finding AI in general.
What helps is that the market is very concentrated so if you know GPT-isms and Claude-isms that’s basically the current situation covered. It does not mean that you can reliably identify AI in general.
How do you know you can discern AI vs human with high probability? You need some external source of truth to judge that, otherwise all you know is that you can discern bad, obvious AI. See also https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/toupee_fallacy
I can say that my false positive rate is very low which is enough in this context.
I’d expect false positives to be low. Bad AI has a distinctive style and is easy to pick up on. Just like bad toupees are easily recognized. The false negative rate would be far more interesting.
The false negative rate would be interesting but is irrelevant in this context. I was replying to a comment claiming that most people take issue with the ethics of GenAI rather than the quality and that people have a high false positive rate. I raise myself and my experience with people I know as a counter example.
There might be AI generated things in my every day life that I do not recognize as AI, but that's not what's being discussed.
“I can tell because I judge that my judgement is correct.”
How did you check? What was your oracle when you thought something was AI and when you did not?
I mean, this situation is a textbook case of ground for a lot of common fallacies, starting with confirmation bias. We need to remember that our brain wants to be tricked. If you think you are special, you are not. You’re just not aware of it and even more prone to falling into these traps.
How do you know that?
I trust Pangram's stats to be a good baseline.
Hey Claude, re word this until it passes pangram as not AI written.
As I explained in another comment the false negative rate is irrelevant in this context.
They are pretty shit, but the main problem is that they are the generic style of the model. So that’s what everyone gets by default. If they were a one off they’d still be bad, but at least unique.
In my world view, the phrase "People are stupid" explains almost everything. Very few people are actually able to think for themselves. The vast majority are basically just sheep, they think whatever the media, their colleagues, friends etc tell them to think. They don't fact check, they don't think critically, they can't understand a well reasoned argument, they basically just believe things based on how much they like whoever said it. They won't accept evidence that disproves those beliefs.
They don't care about the truth, it's all just about being part of the right herd.
This just sounds like an im14andthisisdeep rant. Everyone is stupid, except you, of course, who are enlightened and detached from "the herd."
No, it's not just me. There's a lot of people who are much more intelligent than me, in many ways.
But if you grab an average person off the street they're overwhelmingly likely to be pretty daft and not know much about anything.
Just look at how many people in the US vote for that orange clown even after the complete farce of his previous term.
The problem with this mindset is that it isn’t very useful or actionable, regardless of how true it is.
Maybe try differentiating a bit? You could see if there certain scenarios that leave room for a better outcome for both you and a less intelligent person. You might even learn something interesting.
Right now, I’d say you are painting with an overly broad brush.
P.S. Have you done any soul searching to see if this is largely a comforting thought that helps assuage the frustrations of dealing with the BS of life? If you are open to the idea, might be valuable.
Yeah, it's not actionable. I can't fix the fact that most people are stupid. But it does provide some minor amount of comfort. It explains why the world is as it is. It explains why the most powerful nation in the world is currently lead by the world's biggest fucking clown. It explains why we can't deal with climate change - the people who make money from it simply use their puppet media to tell all the idiots what they want them to think, and here we are.
It explains why religion is so prevalent - anyone with any amount of critical thinking ability can see that religion is a bunch of bullshit. Yet most people in the world are religious, because all it takes is someone with a little authority to tell people something and they'll just believe it and that's that, you can't reason them out of it because they didn't reason themselves into it. They were just born into this herd and that's where they intend to stay.
It explains why big "green" organizations are and have been against nuclear energy - even though nuclear energy has been the obvious answer to climate change the people who want the world to take climate change seriously have been against nuclear, despite the fact that nuclear was the obvious answer to climate change. They simply don't/didn't know that nuclear was clean energy, and they never took a few minutes to learn some stuff to realize that in fact nuclear energy is clean energy. Obviously it doesn't solve the entire problem but it would have been a huge improvement over all the coal we've been burning. But they didn't know, because they're a bunch of idiots who don't know anything about anything, they just parrot whatever they've been told and that's that and here we are.
And that's the explanation for everything. Politics is just a popularity contest. Whoever says the shit the hordes of sheep have been conditioned to want to hear, get elected. If you grab a random person off the street they most likely couldn't even tell you how bracket tax works but you can be sure as shit they'd have strong opinions about taxes. And those opinions will most likely be straight up factually wrong, based on an incorrect view of how taxes work.
Everyone's just wrong about everything, nobody knows anything about anything. A few people have a decent understanding of how things work but nobody listens.
And again yeah, it's not actionable. There's nothing to be done about this, it's just the way it is. I can't stop the entire human population from being a bunch of religious cultist morons. That's just what they are. But at least knowing that and accepting it helps me keep my sanity in a world where everyone makes the wrong decisions at every turn and everything is clearly going to shit while everyone's acting like everything's fine. Except of course all the inconsequential bullshit the sheep bicker about like immigration and taxes windmills and data centers and whatever else the media has them bickering about to distract them from the shit that actually matters.
> Yet most people in the world are religious, because all it takes is someone with a little authority to tell people something and they'll just believe it and that's that, you can't reason them out of it because they didn't reason themselves into it.
Yeah, we simply should not forget that there is very different types of religions. Some religions, for example has it main belief that climate change is a big problem for the Earth and Humanity.
> It explains why big "green" organizations are and have been against nuclear energy - even though nuclear energy has been the obvious answer to climate change
Exactly. I mean my model explain that, not yours. Like in any other religion generally churches exists not to solve the MAIN PROBLEM, even if the religion says otherwise. Because churches are hierarchical structures, and on the top will end up pretty SMART people, who mainly focus on solving their personal problems, and not the MAIN PROBLEM of their religion. Often they even does not believe in existence of the problem at all.
> Whoever says the shit the hordes of sheep have been conditioned to want to hear, get elected.
I don't know. If we look at the elections of the "world's biggest fucking clown", it was more describing of his opponents. But he still got elected, twice.
Nobody has time to fact check every single fact we need to act on.
Have you read every single study about the last vaccine you took and what the positives and negatives are and where potential problems are and so on? Of course not, we trust that the experts have done enough. Same with learning physics or driving over a bridge and so many other things.
Yeah, exactly. But many people vehemently believe vaccines are dangerous and so on. Similarly, a common talking point right now are data centers and their power and water usage. Just yesterday I was told that AI data centers pollute more than anything else. Yet when I took 10 seconds to Google it I found that data centers represented about 0,5% of power consumption and I know that electricity in general is less than half of all pollution so clearly data centers don't pollute that much. But people will parrot these types of "facts" without even taking 10 seconds to double check.
Such a world view will justify any belief, because the internet will give you ample supply of the dumbest, most ill-considered opposition to any belief you hold.
Doesn't guarantee there isn't a steel version of their straw out there that you're deliberately ignoring.
If I had seen the steel version I would have considered it. But all I see is strawmen, as far as the eye can see. An ocean of strawmen, with a few steel islands here and there.
I agree completely.
I found this very funny until it made me very sad.
Yeah, it is extremely sad. It's why we're currently in the process of going extinct. We, as a species, know what we should be doing. But what we should be doing is not what we are doing, because what we are doing depends on the popularity contest that is politics, and politics has absolutely nothing to do with what we know we should be doing.
https://youtu.be/KHbzSif78qQ?si=xWprUIdcae2uo1jd
Exactly the video I was expecting it to be. Same herd.
You've been here 8 years, so... you're just as much part of the same herd as me :-)
Yes, I think this is exactly right. The labelling of a thing as “AI Generated” or “AI Assisted” makes the viewer perceive it as worse in quality. And they really do think it’s worse.
It’s similar to a well known finding about price: people value things that are more expensive more, and tend to think they are of higher quality. You can give people the same thing for a high price or for free and they’ll say the high priced one is amazing the free one is lacklustre.
It’s like an optical illusion driven by labelling.
By many people’s criteria it automatically is worse, because part of what they value in art is thinking about the artist and their intentions behind their creation.
Similarly people may view an IKEA book stand as worse quality than one built by hand even if the hand built one has flaws. Or they might view a microwaved meal as worse than that created by a home chef.
People value the human intention and care that goes into creations. Without that it’s worse even if the output is fundamentally the same.
A drawing by my young niece may not have the same finesse as an AI generated one but I like it a whole lot more
>By many people’s criteria it automatically is worse, because part of what they value in art is thinking about the artist and their intentions behind their creation.
I think that's true enough for what it is but, as the other commenter also noted, a bit of a different topic here. The Monet example shows that people work backward from AI to direct conclusions about the quality of the work itself, which isn't the same as agreeing a work is by all appearances equivalent to Monet but lacking in underlying deliberation.
One can inform the other to be sure but that conversation exists in parallel with another conversation that's a straight one-shot assessment of quality.
> By many people’s criteria it automatically is worse, because part of what they value in art is thinking about the artist and their intentions behind their creation
That’s a bit separate to what I’m talking about, but I don’t think there are many of these people. I think this whole thing is about AI anxiety coupled with American social norms, and as soon as one of those things changes the artists are going to be left out in the cold again.
> I don’t think there are many of these people
I think there are lots of people who value art for the ideas of the artist. There are also lots of people who think that they value something like quality of brushstrokes, and these are the same people, mostly. I mean they don't know what they like it for, but the raw graphical data is what's in front of them, so they ascribe their preference to its (supposedly) measurable qualities.
Hence this thing about I can tell it's AI because its graphical quality is bad. In a way that's correct though! The artist's ideas are hinted at in the brushstrokes (or whatever other graphical aspects). In the gen AI picture you get hints of a phony mind. It becomes hollow when you know that, or when you think you know that. It's not delivering the cultural experience, if the hints you pick up on are false.
I think you’d be surprised by how many people feel that way but it’s hard to say for sure.
What did you think about my other examples? (The bookshelf and the microwaved meal)
There’s the idea of preferences and revealed preferences. People say their preferences and then their actions show what they really prefer. I suspect AI generated content, if curated by a human, would end up being people’s revealed preferences. There are a lot of bad artists and writers and whatever out there, AI would handily beat them.
I think at least for your niece’s drawings example, you’d probably prefer AI art if you had to choose one or the other until the end of time, not just one or two drawings that go on your refrigerator.
Thats part of the issue. People prefer human made art and then people feel tricked when they find out it’s AI art.
I would definitely choose my niece’s drawing for all time. Do you have young family members? That seems like a bizarre perspective to me.
I do! And goodness no, nice and all as they might be I’d go mad if they were the only art I could ever consume ever again!
But of course with the gen-AI stuff you are getting put in touch with the real ideas of real artists (e.g. Miyazaki), it's just that they've been anonymized and put through a blender.
Ahh I misunderstood the hypothetical then. I assumed I was picking one piece to keep and display forever but I could still enjoy other art.
I’d go mad if the only art available was AI art as well!
Revealed preference is a very real and useful phenomenon. But it seems to be increasingly overapplied as a convenient cop-out in scenarios where it's unclear any authentic preference is being revealed (e.g. due to confounding factors or active manipulation) and to exaggerate the extent to which real agency exists (externally predetermined outcomes).
Such as with RLHF-boosted writing from LLMs, where side by side comparisons of human vs. AI writing have been used as proof of revealed preference for AI. But an A/B test of a few sentences doesn't mean that someone would enjoy reading a 5000 word blog post in the same style, as the densely packed rhetorical flourishes become exhausting and repetitive tells start to jump off the page. Nor does it capture the signal/noise problem where despite technical ability and incredible verbosity, realization sets in that nothing in 2000 words has said anything at all while continually stringing the reader along. A side by side comparison with a few AI posters might be preferred in a five 5 minute test, but seeing the same visual elements from three frontier models in a loop on every surface for your entire life could quickly become actively repulsive.
And the problem with agency arises when limited freedom exists to truly make a different choice because the available options are externally determined. I've seen the argument made on HN that people's revealed preference is for AI maximalism, pointing to the fact that consumers keep buying products with AI, hundreds of billions of dollars are spent building new datacenters every year, workers (including creatives!) and students report using AI for daily work, etc.
But consumers aren't really given true choices that could reveal a real preference. The tech giants behind the phone duopoly have crammed AI features into both OS choices. With few exceptions every large company made an "AI strategy" their main focus since 2023 and competed to put chatbots and GenAI features into every inch of their product lines. Hyperscalers started a bidding war on datacenter buildouts in the expectation of future demand back when really only ChatGPT had any real market penetration outside the tech industry. Students and workers feel pressure to keep up with their peers by using AI to avoid getting fired/worse grades, artists struggling for work worry clients will go elsewhere if they take the time for their normal process.
Revealed preference when used haphazardly could be used to come to absurd conclusions like "people want to get scammed", "people like to be overweight", etc. Broadly and incautiously applied it just becomes a way to justify any given status quo as inherently optimally and reflective of collective will. With a creepy paternalistic implication that regardless of what you think you believe, forcing you do something against your will is secretly what you really want, and will make you happy even if you pretend not to realize it.
It's pretty questionable if a preference truly exists as "revealed" for something like AI art when it's preconditioned on active deception. An AI art-hater who gets tricked into picking AI doesn't mean they're lying/confused and actually love it. That sort of reasoning can get uncomfortably close to an anti-democratic argument for mass manipulation of people who can't be trusted to advocate in their own best interests.
Yeah, but the issue is we are getting constantly exposed to a barrage of really low quality obvious AI generated content. Except a lot of people seem to not know that it's AI and interact with like it's real. The people posting it are being reward by monetization platforms.
Low quality baiting content was a problem before but the barrier to entry has been significantly reduced and the.amount of content is growing quickly.
You can see it here in the discussions for about half the stories. It gets sidetracked into people talking past each other.
The thing is, people are really bad at judging this, except for the most stereotypical cases. You have people crying wolf the moment you use "genuinely" or a dash. Different people use different criteria for their personal heuristics and the result is threads full of tedious, completely irrelevant comments from people in a crusade. People don’t seem to realise that we are very good at tricking ourselves and that a lot of the patterns we think we recognise are actually just noise.
I've seen two resdit threads where people insisted the hands were wrong, and people took photos of their hands in the same pose.
But, then, people did this for digital editing before. Insisted there were "clear signs of photoshop", from people who never opened that app.
Earlier HN discussions about it (both got flagged):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48158110
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48134400
Unsurprising that they're both flagged. HN commenters really, really don't like to think about a world where they can't tell the difference between real and AI.
One commenter really nailed it[1]: "We didn't get worse at judging art. We just got better at doubting everything."
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48158160
I’d say it’s more about confronting the ways in which art is just posturing, hype, and status games, and what it’s like to find out you’re in an “Emperor’s New Clothes” situation.
Not all HN commenters; it's only a tiny extremist faction, which unfortunately is also the most vocal about it.
Makes sense, no? That’s a pretty terrible world
Did you think the same thing when Photoshop became mainstream?
Did you even realize basically all commercial images you've seen for the last 30 years were already heavily modified?
There is a big difference between a real image or video that has been modified and one that was created out of thin air via AI
Can you articulate those differences?
Most people aren't aware of the prevalence of stock imagery during the 2000s. AI is just synthetic stock images, which I have zero problem with.
Artists with taste are the ones creating the best AI images, just they were the ones who photoshopped the best things out of stock images when that was the main mode, and just as they created the best stuff when everything was manual typesetting and dark room photography.
That assumes that AI is only used in place of stock imagery.
In reality it is seeping into our lives at an alarming rate which I worry is disrupting our shared sense of reality (which was already tenuous.)
AI has capabilities that were impossible (or very difficult before.) You could easily generate a realistic video of me saying terrible things or kicking a puppy or doing a pornographic act. You could clone my voice and call my grandma asking for money. It’s very hard to tell what is real now and it will get harder as the capabilities improve.
These tools are also much more accessible than photo editing software. Before, few people had the skill to create realistic fakes. Now anyone can do it. This has led to a flood of fake images, videos, and text online. This crowds out real humans and makes it hard to know what is real. My older relatives especially have Facebook feeds filled with fake content they think is real.
The capabilities combined with the scale make it hard to know what is real in a way Photoshop never did.
In fact it’s only tracking the quality of the produced image
Every single person I’ve asked, and I’ve asked hundreds, say that knowing it was AI irrespective of anything else was enough to think it was bad.
There’s millions of genai images that people aren’t commenting on because they don’t know it’s AI.
> knowing it was AI irrespective of anything else was enough to think it was bad.
That's prejudice.
The definition of prejudice requires the judgment to be unfair.
Do you think it’s unfair for people to dislike AI generated art based on their principles?
Unfair in this context is judging the art without even looking at it.
You don’t think it’s fair to factor how art was created into your judgment?
Factor? That's not what was described: "knowing it was AI irrespective of anything else."
And no - I don't think it's fair to call the art bad when in fact what you mean is you don't like the way it was made. Saying "I don't like AI art" is not the same as "This piece is shit", which is how it is almost always framed.
Which is extremely socially acceptable currently and I don’t see that changing anytime soon
HEH. Well... so long as you agree it's prejudice... that's a good start.
Biased evaluation is the default human behavior so it’s not saying as much as you think it is
All I'm saying is that it's prejudice. And it is.
As GP perhaps implied, "prejudice" is "biased evaluation" with a negative tone — if you are looking to be fully objective, a different term might be better.
Monet got Seinfeld Effected.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/seinfeld-effect
> claimed a real Monet painting was an AI generated imitation
This is like the transvestigator creeps who think they can tell with 100% accuracy who is trans but they are regularly fooled by pictures of cis women when seeded with the notion that they might be trans.
Some AI is obvious. Some much less so, and a lot of non-AI content is being caught up in the amateur dragnets.
One version of this I really loved was some viral clip that I believe was like a local newscast where one guy who really seemed to dislike vegan products was challenged to tell the difference between a real meat product and a vegan alternative, I think sausage or something. And he made a big performance of how instantly he recognized the meat in comparison to the vegan product only to be shocked to learn, after he confidently declared that one of the two dishes was meat, that both dishes were plant-based.
If nothing else, simply as a matter of self respect you've got to make your peace with a certain amount of healthy uncertainty if even just to avoid making a fool of yourself.
But more importantly, it's important to be honest with yourself about what you actually know versus what you're very motivated to believe. Because I think AI equals bad is poisoning some people's ability to talk about this in a healthy way.
I've worked with some of the top designers in the world. I don't think that AI will beat them (for now), but the examples in his sample page[0] beat the junk that I've seen a lot of non-top-designers do.
As he states, he isn't trying to make stuff that doesn't "look like AI did it," he just wants to introduce variety, and has proposed a disciplined way to do that.
[0] https://john.hartnup.uk/poster-prompts/
can you please list some of the people you worked with? I really appreciate good design and am always looking for great artists that I don’t know about yet, thanks.
Pentagram and DDO.
Kinda pricey, though.
Going through pentagram's site, their shakespeare in the park posters do give me that AI vibe. Perhaps AI has been trained in many such similar posters, but as a layman, I'd be hard pressed to be able to distinguish these from AI generated ones.
On a side note, I wanted to link that collection here, but unfortunately there's no hyperlink, it just opens in a popup. You'll have to scroll down to the bottom of their home page to find it. I hope for their sake they just overlooked this one thing, because if designers don't see the role of hyperlinks in user experience, I can't take them seriously.
[1] https://www.pentagram.com
If people were not lazy enough to "introduce variety" to begin with, AI wouldn't have the slop reputation we know it to be today.
But any UX designer/engineer will tell you defaults are important. And on social media we're seeing a ton of "default". Which explains the disparity in reactions. "Default code" isn't bad in most contexts. "Default art" is bland by definition; pre-AI it wasn't exactly kosher to use stock art by itself either. It's designed as a placeholder.
It sure seems like, while LLMs and diffusion models won't completely eradicate the middle class, the bar has now risen significantly to actually contribute in a lot of areas.
For programmers, sure SV startups and actual software-first shops are probably only augments with LLMs and not replacing. But what % of software engineers are employed in such shops? Well, from my graduating class in CS, approximately 30% of grads all went to the same contracting shop whose business model seems to be, take the bottom 30% of each CS class, underpay the fuck out of them, bootcamp them into something vaguely usable + teach the house style of CRUD/LOB app framework, then throw them at clients. And this seems to still be a step above "offshore to barely baseline capable (or worse) body shop for extremely dubious results."
That entire bottom 50% is probably about to be eviscerated. The "offshore + pray" approach is probably going to be completely zapped, much easier to just vibe code for probably better (or at least not worse) results. And the onshore-but-cheaper contracting shops are probably going to need a lot fewer people whose main contribution is translating low-ambiguity tickets into syntactically valid java spring code.
Similarly, for artists, disney is probably not going to use AI in a way that substantially speeds them up because they won't tolerate the quality loss at all. But how many artists work for disney? And how many make anime waifus for the gacha apps? The latter of which I can only assume has already switched substantially to AI assets.
I'm not sure about coders but for artists I don't think a massive number were making anime waifus, but instead were making graphic designs for advertisements, publications & websites.
Currently AI is actually replacing some of these jobs. But there's kinda a hitch there - when you target me with ads or show me your company's website and it has obvious AI art I tend to think that you're either selling me something very low quality or are a scammer. If you show me the novel you've written and it has an AI art cover I assume the contents are also AI generated garbage writing. So I wonder if those jobs will really be replaced? It all depends on society's acceptance of AI art and if AI art doesn't get any better. I thought it would get to the point that I couldn't tell it was AI by now, but so far it hasn't.
I think AI waifus and porn and memes and browser based zynga type games will be a place AI is going to be accepted because nobody cared too much about the authenticity and quality of those things before either. But an advertisement selling me a car? The cover of a book on philosophy? A website that I'm going to give my credit card number to? I'm not sure about those things.
> I'm not sure about coders but for artists I don't think a massive number were making anime waifus, but instead were making graphic designs for advertisements, publications & websites.
There was an old joke among designers that their biggest competitor was the boss' nephew playing with photoshop.
Now they need to compete with the boss' nephew playing with AI.
Cars feels like a bit of an odd one out because there's basically no low end. If you have the money to produce even a single car from a Camry to a hummer, you are probably going to not try to pinch pennies on marketing because a single car sale pays the salary of a designer for a year.
That's true. And car commercials that get people to buy fancy new cars are really well figured out and seem to seriously work. Why fix something that isn't broken?
Real estate is interesting because they seem to be really getting into using AI to stage individual houses. So I guess on the same vein maybe someone will try making an add with AI that shows some car driving down your local mainstreet or at some scenic location nearby your ip address that you might have positive associations with. Or maybe even your own home-street and parking in your driveway and you (or facebook you from 10 years ago when you had that hipster-moustashe because you haven't updated your photo) opens the door with a big smile on your face).
Seems crazy, but who knows.
We really should start being more precise when we say "replace". Are we talking about replacing 90-100% of that particular job? Or 50-80%?
Because it feels like people argue as if they were talking about the former, but if probed it turns out they admit it's the latter.
There will be still people making car advertisements, but they will be using ai tools and will get asked to produce X times faster. Effectively, some of them will get replaced, or rather have been replaced.
If 1 person of AI will be able to replace 5-10, we can expect a replacement of 80-90%.
But I don't see why it couldn't replace thousands, with design/content factories.
So it could be 99-99.9% (leaving all the money for the top 0.1%).
>But how many artists work for disney?
Given their empire these days: a lot. Mostly because outside of Disney there's really not much such thing as "modern salaried artist". You work for any of Disney's 50 subsidiaries, you work at a games studio (because Disney gave up its expansion early in that medium), or you're likley freelancing/commissioning and grabbing whatever gig comes along.
I'm exaggerating, but less than I care to adnit. Disney makes up that much of "normal" full time artistry these days. And it's no secret how little respect artists have had in the US, even before AI.
>And how many make anime waifus for the gacha apps? The latter of which I can only assume has already switched substantially to AI assets.
In America? Less than you think. Asia has plenty of cheaper and more talented artists to exploit. AI adoption is interesting there because it's already such a sweatshop that you need to consider if AI really saves that much time for its cost. Larger studios are dabbling, smaller ones use sparingly.
No, North/South American slop is fully focused on the hyper-casual market. It's fueling thousands of asset flips for quick mobile games or copying indie games into Roblox/Fortnite. That's where the effort (or lack thereof) is going.
> a human artist would do better.
Except we have all seen really awful human made posters long before AI. People are just upset just to be upset at this point.
Code was nosediving before AI badly.
> Code was nosediving before AI badly.
What? What are you comparing this pre-AI 2020s code to? 90s and 00s code for sure was worse.
2010s to 2020s code has been bad. We used to have 100% natively compiled apps, now everything is a Chrome browser wrapped JavaScript abomination, and before anyone assumes I hate JavaScript, I love doing front-end web development, and backend, and automation... and an unhealthy number of things (my GitHub is a mess). My point being, software quality has been downhill before AI, we just have nonsense rosy eyeglasses.
>People are just upset just to be upset at this point.
Despite this being a technical community we seem to be really bad at understanding scale.
A bad artist is at worst like a fee pieces of trash littered in your lawn. Bad AI art is like a dump truck tipping over into your yard. And you see 10 more dump truck coming in at 90mph. It doesn't matter if it's a recyclables truck and all the bottles are individually cleaner and more Eco friendly than candy bar wrappers. The magnitude is still overwhelming.
You can ignore a few bad artists you don't like. You can't ignore swimming through slop day in and day out. Friction in a previously smooth environment angers people, and AI creates a lot of newfound friction.
There's a theory that when everyone can access some "good", then the rich and powerful will automatically differentiate themselves by switching to a different good that has a visible contrast to the common one. So for example, if the common people can afford only wool, the rich will wear cotton. Once the price of cotton drops, they'll switch to cashmere, which is... a kind of wool. It's not about the specific material or category of thing, it never was, it's just the contrast that matters.
So if everyone has "too busy" AI slop art, then the rich will switch to very plain art, even downright minimalist.
I'm betting that up-market stores will soon have hand-carved wood signs out the front just like in the 1800s to show off that a Real Human(tm) made their signage.
It's not that plain wood is better, it's just that it's not commonly available.
Very interesting idea. And I see some historical support for such actions and trends.
I think modern day life has had two major paradigm shifts that will make this potebtisl "real human(TM)" marketing not emerge among corporate, though. Definitely among smaller business (I'm already seeing it in my field), but not larger onesexcept that generally instead of realising we all have enough of we share, we raise the threshold of what we consider to be enough comfort and stuff.
1. Despite the legal insistence, corporations are not people, and they do not have "taste" to adjust to. Nor do the ways the leaders act and behave make it seem like they feel the company's actions and reputation reflects onto them. This is surprisingly a huge contrast from characters like Trump who traditionally place much importance on legacy and image and use that to shape their mannerisms and actions, aiming for a positive reaction (at least among his audience).
So there's no point in a new marketing scheme that will likely cost a lot more to not receive a lot more. Serving as cheaply as possible is too big a draw, and there's little human(TM) factors to divert from that. Which leads directly into the 2jd point
2. The modern hundred-millionaire/billionaire no longer "participates" in society. There's a decent video that gives an overview of this phenomenon, but I don't think it's a huge revelation to suggest that a billionaire who can be anywhere in the world within a day will truly feel like they are a part of their community the way, say, a Hollywood star would have personal ties to keep LA functional for them. And their social circles are so tiny that they are willing to travel a lot in order find such people.
In this lens, why would such people care about the taste and culture of the common citizen, Unless it's PR to get them more money? They don't go to the same stores (or go to stores at all themselves), they aren't participating nor hosting community events in town, they aren't (usually) performing the same kinds of recreation as their non–rich neighbors. They've already managed to completely divide themselves out from such people, so why care about standing out among them?
If the AI makes a “better” poster that everyone hates because it’s AI, and a person makes a “worse” poster that everyone likes because it’s human, isn’t the business better off with the “worse” poster?
I think the issue there is that, in the absence of the AI poster, people will still dislike the "worse" poster.
Since this is idealogical, a business owner's choices are: * use AI and some people hate it on principle, don't use AI and don't pay enough and some people hate it because it looks cheap, don't use Ai and pay a bunch more and people don't hate it...maybe, depending on style and skill of the artist.
As a business owner, it's not an encouraging situation.
Do people really care much about how beautiful a human made poster look like? I don’t think I’ve ever seen that as an issue, a poster doesn’t have to look fancy. Though if I love any art piece then learn later it was made by AI I will for sure update my judgement and dismiss it as if I was tricked in the first place. You’re way better using Word art for your poster than delegating to an AI if you don’t want to receive negative attention
An AI generated poster signals low effort. If you're too lazy or too cheap to make a real poster it makes me wonder what other corners have been cut.
None of the AI haters (or haters in general) are willing to put money where their mouths are. None of them are willing to pay for better human artwork, yet have the audacity to criticize as if top artists owe them free output.
You think that no one who criticizes AI pays for human artwork?
That is a bizarre stance
Do you think the vast majority who criticize AI pays for good human artwork? Now that is a bizarre stance.
You think most people don’t pay for movies, music, games, clothing with designs, art, etc.?
Unless they've been in a coma all their life until 2022... Yes? You think only pirates are anti-AI or something? What are you getting at?
Motte and bailey; "none" -> "vast majority"
I know plenty of people (including myself) who pay for good human artwork :)
> yet have the audacity to criticize as if top artists owe them free output
Literally nobody is saying that, what are you talking about
Which critic is proposing funding better artwork, made by good human artists? Sometimes, silence says more than words. Non-decision is also a decision.
So you can't criticize something without coming up with some fantasy plan that will only exist in whatever corner of social media you left that comment, to make that criticism somehow now valid?
Why are you making such wide assumptions? I pay for art constantly. Where's this blatantly wrong suggestion coming from?
You could, of course, prompt the AI to produce a poster in the style of the "worse" human poster, and see where that gets you.
I suspect it would do quite a convincing job.
Though it's fairly unconvincing at handwriting.
No. There is a limit. Most non-trained people don’t know how to draw a straight line or layout type. If you go to a restaurant and see a poorly laid out menu you often think of the food more negatively. I think that the opposite is true too. If you go to a hole-in-the-wall restaurant and see a menu that looks like it was generated by a top New York design firm you will also think negatively because is it inauthentic.
It's not everyone though.
Honestly, the business would probably be best off if it showed whatever poster had the biggest and most exposed tits regardless of where it came from. Humans be humans and sex sells.
There aren't small problems in these posters though. They're huge, obvious, and an indicator that the one who made the flyer didn't care whatsoever.
When it includes an American Flag with more than 50 stars + the bottom row is cut off, you know they didn't even bother to proofread it.
This is the kind of garbage we're suffering with.
Those are, comparatively, small problems for the medium of a poster.
You have to understand that 99% of people who will see the poster will view it for <5 seconds. They wont sit there and count the stars.
And, of the people who do examine the poster closely, they’re looking at the text. They want to see the date, time, event details. The background is background.
But what is the point of the background then? I mean, it seems like we're admitting that the design doesn't matter, then why keep up the ruse? Let's drop design, and keep just plain textual information. There is no substance to it, it's just performative, a simulacrum of design.
I would think to catch people's eye so they look in the first place, sort of similar to an ad. Which is also why we see AI slop work well in ads. And before AI slop, we had corpo slop. Just bright colors and wacky animated characters who all fit that archetype where their limbs are too big. So I do think the design takes a back seat, at least for the common case. Of course there are exceptions, and those exceptions are exceptional, but for most purposes slop works fine.
You should try typing "American flag clipart" into Google and see non-AI images with the wrong number of stars.
Aren’t those ai generated too?
Why you making me check for you?
The first one I clicked on is at a stock photo site that says:
Every visual at iStock is crafted through human expertise, creativity, and ingenuity. We do not allow AI-generated visuals in our library.
Are you aware we don’t all get the same results from a google image search? Or do you seriously believe if I search the same keywords we will be looking at the exact same images?
That's not what I said. I said the first one I saw was not AI art via simple inspection. I wondered if you even looked.
Did you even look?
> They're huge, obvious, and an indicator that the one who made the flyer didn't care whatsoever.
Remember when this sort of ascending tricolon was supposed to be a dead giveaway for LLM-written prose?
Not every poster has that issue as you can see from the posting. It is a simple matter of caring enough to look at the output in more detail. These are issues that can be overcome.
Sure, but the basic value proposition of AI is that you don't have to care. These issues could be overcome, but they aren't, because the whole way the technology is promoted and sold guides the user away from caring.
Disagree. The value proposition of AI is that you can focus your caring on the things that matter, and let the machine do the dirty work.
One of the things that keeps circling in my mind when it comes to LLMs and similar transformer architectures is they are technically very impressive, and some of the things they can do are amazing, but there seems to be a compulsive need by the executives of corporations producing them to lie about their capabilities.
I suspect that what drives the compulsive lying and exaggeration is that they know what LLMs can actually do is not worth the development and operating costs (at least for now), so, like Bernie Madoff, they pretend that they're more capable than they are in the hopes that the next round of investment will somehow bridge the gap and let them actually produce what they've been falsely promising their investors they can do, and make the whole thing worthwhile.
This is the important part. Right now, AI is a tool. You can use it to generate high quality output, or you can use it to generate slop. If the output is slop, that is a reflection of the person using the tool, not AI.
I get AI slop from employees sometimes. If they provide poor quality work that hasn't been proofread, that is an employee problem, not an AI problem.
You know the saying where a million dollar company failing is "their" problem, but a billion dollar company failing is "our" problem?
We're going to quickly approach that problem in the conning years at this current rate, like the obesity epidemic. At some point you can't just dismiss things as personal responsibility when a significant portion of society suffers from it and need to instead look at the underlying systematic issues empowering bad incentives.
Of course, the US is awful at the latter. So I'm not holding my breath.
These are small problems. Details, even. You can be quite successful and get all that stuff wrong. Not that I'd recommend it.
https://www.theverge.com/gadgets/931347/trump-mobile-t1-phon...
People really will take any possible excuse to derail a thread and talk about political figures they don't like, huh?
Step 1: develop a cult of personality, to the point of becoming president 2 (even after openly failing to coup a lost election)
Step 2-3: sell anything to your cult followers, doesn’t matter how good or bad it is
Step 4: profit
Simple recipe for success
True. But an organizer who doesn't care, will also not be willing to pay for good artwork. AI haters should put money where their mouths are and fund human top artwork.
Posters for small events, a well known space where you will find „top artwork“… you really just need to spend 1h in Inkscape to get something decent
You're really overestimating how many people can draw something "decent" in Inkscape. Most likely they will take a template. That's not necessarily better than AI either.
A template is perfectly fine to use
I don't claim to be an artist and a template is still done with the caring eye of a professional. It's way better than an AI generated poster. Or at the very least, there's many less instances where I've seen overly used templates than I have badly designed AI generated designs.
Not to mention that I can also tell when a poster has been generated using Photoshop and not real artist tools, like brushes and pens. I've seen a lot of these Photoshop-generated posters, and they are in no way comparable to something DaVinci or Picasso would create.
> not real artist tools
Nice no true Scotsman fallacy. PS is a "real" artist tool.
Wouldn't say that, there is a huge shift in art style between what we got before Photoshop and what we got after. Just look at book covers in the 1970/80s and book covers in the 1990/2000s. The old stuff was full of custom illustrations, while the new stuff is often just copy&paste of generic stock images or some rather hideous early 3D renderings. Even the bad covers of the 80s (see /r/badscificovers/) still have some personality to them that is lacking in a lot of more modern ones.
It's not that you can't create good art with any tool, it's just that the economy and expectations change with the tools available, and the tools being faster/cheaper doesn't translate into better art.
I believe that comment is satire. Look at the last six words.
I agree.
To be precise, the tool and the artist are two different things. You can make crap with brushes or PS, and you can make art too.
AI is a tool too. What I build with it is orders of magnitude less important/interesting compared to what a talented artist can build with it.
This bullshit disingenuous false equivalency again.
In both photoshop and painting, the human using the tool decides what strokes to use. That isn't true with AI art. It's not "just another tool" for doing the activity when it does the entire activity for you.
> In both photoshop and painting, the human using the tool decides what strokes to use.
except for the million posters and album covers unironically made with a real photo passed into one of photoshop's "Artistic" filters to make it look like some impressionist painting
It is exactly “another tool”. Just like Abelton with an automated drum machine is another tool for creating music. As the posting shows the tool isn’t doing the entire activity for you. The author is reprompting the tool to generate a result more inline with their vision.
It's not "creative" in the sense of incorporating a drum track or photograph into a composition you're developing, it's "creative" in the sense of asking for a vague style and getting it, which is pretty much exactly the tool doing the entire activity. The author explains in detail that it's not their vision, its just a list of styles returned when asked for a list of styles, and they don't actually know what the Memphis Group even is...
Would you consider me to have "created" Billie Jean if I type "eighties music" into a music search engine and select "Michael Jackson" from the list. Or to have "designed a logo" if I pay a human to design some logos for me and pick one.
You can do that exact thing with Ableton if you want. If you want to put in low effort you can do that. You can find beats labeled “1980’s pop” and use presets from other people. You can put in high effort using AI tools and fine tune every aspect of the result if you want. It’s just another tool. You are conflating effort with the tool.
HEH. It seems like you don't remember the early days of Photoshop.
The analogy holds perfectly well. We can "no true Scotsman" this all day long.
Any "real" artist could dunk on PS: "Oh, you didn't have to go out and buy a canvas and paint and brushes. Hell, you probably don't even know how to properly mix paint on a palette! Not only do you not to clean your brushes, you don't even have brushes!"
And the right response is: "Who gives a shit?" The answer is "Some folks, but their opinion decreasingly matters." And the same exact logic applies to AI. You might as well be complaining that Google doesn't pay cartographers to hand draw Google Maps.
> when it does the entire activity for you.
This is total fiction, and has spawned an entire cult of "just give me the prompt" folks that think using AI requires no skill, and anyone using AI is just a "meat proxy". But that's not true, at all, as evidenced by years of commentary on this site with people getting radically different outcomes using AI. We've gone from "stochastic parrots" to "gonna destroy humanity" in 2 years.
AI will do jobs that we used to go to Fiverr for -- it'll eat the bottom of the market, just like automation does elsewhere. The bottom of the market is blog art, clip art, menus, commercial signage, event posters, and the like. That's completely natural, and hating it is shouting into the wind. The local cafe owner was never particularly incentived to have their menus crafted by some local artist.
If the hole in the wall teriyaki restaurant’s menu wasn’t hand painted by Monet I turn right around and walk out. I want nothing to do with an eating establishment that can’t at least spring for a realistic rendition of chicken yakisoba hand painted by Michelangelo himself.
Photoshop basically destroyed a centuries-old artistic tradition of depicting six gyoza on a white plate. Now with all this AI nonsense, you might as well just make your food at home rather than stare at yet another “six finger hipster eating a vegetable spring roll” cranked out by ChatGPT.
You forgot the /s.
Sadly, if it hadn’t gone on to DaVinci, I wouldn’t be sure.
If you can convince Chat GPT to stop putting icons next to every single thing, it would be loads better. 1940s cubist style seems sort of there, then bam a tiny cake icon next to the word cakes and drinks. Why? Each of these posters, including the original would be so much better without these tiny stupid icons. No one at the Bauhaus ever made a poster with tiny icons! Chat GPT just cannot drop the icons. Like just have it read a graphic design history book. These secondary attempts might pass more people's AI aversion filter but they would all receive an F in a graphic design class.
Students in a graphic design class are expected to create something that graphic designers like; but that's not the same as what other people like.
Absolutely. I've had the identical experience hiring artists for game art/UI. Every once in a while you find an artist who is stellar but most everyone else is not that good.
The TFA is pointing to a prompting skills/creativity issue, but I get equally frustrated with hired artists as with genAI image models. Even with skilled human artists (remote/offshore), I find they're best at copying a particular style so I end up having to google for images of the look that we're targeting, then spend hours painstakingly describing the changes needed. Then iterating many times, and with artists in remote time zones that means each iteration takes a whole day. The process is ironically very similar to using AI image models but can take much longer due to time zones.
Well that's why and how we got the current model. Lots of noise, so tools were made to curate and figure out the most consistent artists But it goes both wwys; artists that stand out get ebough of a reputation to boost their prices. Unless you get very lucky with budding taletnt, you generally get what you pay for.It's not much different from how you'd run your gaming team.
True, but whats even dumber is that 99% of the use cases people are getting angry at would never be given to a real designer anyway (too low value).
The funniest genre of AI backlash imo is normies yelling at small businesses for using AI on social posts.
There's no world where your local flowershop has both the time and money to brief a design agency to create a flyer for Fridays social post.
Yet, in the mind of the mob, they imagine some designer is losing a job due to the existence of AI...not realizing that every social post they've previously been looking at from the same flower shop was just a 1-click Canva template.
The only person losing a job due to AI design is Canva, which itself was hated for taking jobs away from Photoshop designers, whom in the 90s ended up taking jobs away from the phototypesetting industry, who took the jobs away from the manual typesetters, etc etc etc. Meanwhile the economy and living standards grew each time.
The blog also mentions, several times, that it wasn't the goal to be indistinguishable.
I think it's actually a feature when people can recognize it as AI.
Why would someone want it to be unrecognizable as AI? What is the reason people want to hide AI usage ? (other than when "cheating" in studies or examns or such, obv)
AI generated visuals are becoming a signal of A) low-effort, B) and/or unwillingness or inability to spend resources to genuinely present your product or brand.
Both of these communicate that I will probably not get a good value for my money when buying your product or service.
> Both of these communicate that I will probably not get a good value for my money when buying your product or service.
This is where I stop following. Businesses should focus on where they differentiate, and I really don't care how they generate signage if I can read it. I don't get anything by them paying Banksy to make their menu instead of having Gemini generate it. And if there is any connection to getting good value, it's the inverse: I'm more likely to get good value when I'm not paying for fancy advertising. See: every drugstore that puts generics alongside brand names for cheaper.
Yes, generics are better value, but at least from the big drugstores and pharmacies they still have clean design - they just make it clear what their active ingredient is in what dosage, mention the branded equivalent, and then put the standard drug label on it, and that's about it.
The worst generative AI posters and restaurant menus I'm seeing from newer small businesses do not instill the same feeling that I'm getting generic-like value. To keep with the drug analogy, they feel like the combo pills you find somewhere in the back of a gas station which combine 10+ random supplements to help with 20+ different symptoms. Especially for new restaurants where real reviews are limited, menus with terrible AI generated food drawings really give me the same ick - that they might not be providing any good value at all.
However, i do admit that part of this is also that i live in an area where there is tons of competition for most cuisines I'm interested in, so I can use menu quality as a differientiating factor in the first place. If enough places around me were using sloppy AI menus i would probably ignore it.
You're free to ignore signals of cheapness if you want, as well as not care about quality. If you want generic restuarant food I guess you can go to McDonalds instead of a burger place; it's all the same value to you I guess.
You're using rhetoric to try and change the subject -- you're making a jump from "good value" to "lack of quality", and painting them with the same brush.
I'm saying I don't particularly value businesses that focus on things that are low impact for me. I'd rather my barista focus on sourcing good beans and making good coffee than paying someone to do a fancy custom menu for them. We see this all the time when we visit new areas. It's considered naive to follow whatever looks most glitzy -- every seasoned traveler will tell stories about all the tourist traps, and how the real quality is the hole-in-the-wall place all the locals gather.
What I'm saying is we shouldn't conflate quality with marketing and advertising, which is what posters are. You seem dead set on doing so anyway, and I'm not sure why.
There’s some level of irony around the fact that McDonalds spends quite a lot on branding and design.
You are conflating the use of AI with effort. It does not need to imply low effort or low care. I’m hoping this tired narrative dies out soon.
"AI = low effort" is becoming a heuristic regardless of the assertion's absolute accuracy. It's probably not going to die soon as long as it keeps appearing in scammy or low-margin business places.
AI-generated visuals aren't the first to go through this. I'd say the early-to-mid 90's "desktop publishing" went through this too - as soon as everyone could make ads and flyers cheaply with Word, everyone did.
> "AI = low effort" is becoming a heuristic regardless of the assertion's absolute accuracy.
If you can tell that it's AI, that's probably because it is low effort. Higher-effort attempts pass more easily.
(Of course, that also requires an understanding that there are ways to apply effort to making a short request; and believing that it would make a difference; and noticing for yourself that the first output is bad; and trying. Quite a lot of people seem to lack at least one of these.)
>I’m hoping this tired narrative dies out soon.
It won't die off until AI stops being used with low effort. Which it is the majority the time used for.
The AI art is also a class/status marker.
If a business markets itself with these AIgen posters, you get wildly different responses from different groups.
boomers that spend all their time on Facebook will think “this is such a nice pretty poster” and be oblivious to the fact it is even ai. Even if they knew it was ai they don’t care.
Young people will think it is low class/trashy. Some hate it because it’s ai, others hate it because the poster is ugly/busy/confusing.
Because there is a big anti-AI movement and some people will think you're destroying the planet and putting people out of a job if you make one prompt to a chatbot.
Maybe if there were fewer people foaming at the mouth to enrich themselves while destroying the planet, and putting people out of work, there would be less pushback.
So it isn't really about art?
It's also about art. AI is a multi-faceted problem.
If we're being frank: we've been in a low trust society for a good while now. Grifting is rampant and blatant, all the way up to the federal government.
Among many other things, it's about "am I getting scammed". So my mind needs to develop called ID in some sense. Not a perfect indicator, but enough to protect me. That can open me up to criticism as being overly cynical. And my response is: yes, that's what a low trust society does to people. That's the point.
While this is a side comment on a somewhat frivolous topic, it did make me reframe a lot of my justice, transparency and reason (as in being reasonable) complacency I am seeing around me.
Yes, the fact that we are in a low trust society makes us behave we do. Can we change this? Should we even try?
I've seen societies band together in the face of (acute) natural disasters (floods, wildfires...) or big disasters like wars, but how do we get to — if not high trust — not-low trust society when all is good and is it even worth pursuing?
It's all of the above. The unreliable empty garbage they barf out, threats to destroy jobs for oligarch asshat profit, and the resource hungry pillaging of neighborhoods. Oh, yeah, and also the crappy mush up of stolen art.
Hyperbole much? When I see this type of low-effort, low-care response I ignore it. Perhaps take more time to express your thoughts.
> Perhaps take more time to express your thoughts.
bit of a problematic argument in this context given that the entire usage of generative AI rests on people's unwillingness to do just that
Seems these things about genAI are fairly well established at this point. Hence the vast majority disapproval of genAI being forced on users and broad rejection of AI data centers. Did you have a substantive response for any of the three major negatives, or just your own low-effort, low-care dismissal?
I believe rejection of AI Data Centres is nothing but "local" protectiveness (a bit like NIMBY); like lithium mining, nuclear plants, and any other "dirty", destructive activity.
I want the products of it (how many phones with lithium batteries in those protests), but not the side effects.
Which is not to say these are wrong perspectives to hold, but it's important to understand where the root of the complaint is before you try to come up with generic solutions.
Your comment gives strong "temporarily embarrassed oligarch asshat" vibes. Is that intentional?
> Why would someone want it to be unrecognizable as AI?
If we operate under the assumption that the AI generated posters are bad (which this HN thread is), then making them not look like AI generated posters would be directionally toward making them not bad. That doesn't necessarily mean it's good though, it could be average and fulfill that constraint.
> Why would someone want it to be unrecognizable as AI?
Because the reason for any given AI work being "recognizable as AI" is considered inherently a quality issue. For the suspicion to arise, there has to be something that someone considers "wrong" about the work, in order to point at that thing and say "this must be the work of an enemy 「ＭＯＤＥＬ」".
> Why would someone want it to be unrecognizable as AI? What is the reason people want to hide it
Because a lot of “everyday” folks really strongly dislike AI. I’ve lost count of the number of AI generated Instagram ads I’ve seen where the comments are filled with “AI slop!”.
It’s not a positive signal for anyone who wants to persuade someone of the value of whatever they’re advertising because it’s associated with being cheap and lazy.
I think "a lot" is very subjective. I can also say "a lot of people really like AI-generated arts" and that would be true as well. HN is a place where a lot of normally objective, informed, and probably very nice folks in the real life come to engage in endless of debates that go nowhere.
> Half of U.S. adults say the increased use of AI in daily life makes them feel more concerned than excited, according to a June 2025 survey. Just 10% say they are more excited than concerned. Another 38% say they are equally concerned and excited.
> About half of Americans said in the June survey that AI will worsen people’s ability to think creatively and form meaningful relationships with others. Far fewer said AI will make these things better.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/03/12/key-findi...
“about half” surely objectively qualifies as “a lot”.
> I can also say "a lot of people really like AI-generated arts" and that would be true as well.
Yes but without the corresponding negative. If someone who likes AI generated art sees some human created art they don’t think “gross, why didn’t they use AI to do that?”. So for something like advertising using AI will alienate some potential customers. Not using AI will alienate no one.
People aren’t feeling the benefits of AI. Where there are any benefits, they aren’t causing prices to decrease or supply to go up, instead the excess value is being absorbed by profit taking.
If most people aren’t shareholders but instead workers whose jobs are threatened by AI, we should expect this response.
It has nothing to do with artists, it has everything to do with trying to mount a collective response to the apparent threat, poorly expressed as crowds tend to do.
I bet those poll respondents are worried about their jobs, not seeing some random AI art on a bus.
Why not both? I didn’t lose my job in 2008 but watching people all around me lose theirs made it clear that my own economic situation was not a safe one.
Maybe they see the random AI art on the bus and they realize that meant a real human artist probably didn't get paid to make it so society is worse off. Maybe those poll respondents have empathy, in that they are worried about their jobs and feel bad for other people who have lost work to AI too
they realize that meant a real human artist probably didn't get paid to make it so society is worse off
This is a form of the broken window fallacy. Society is not worse off when production requires less labor, any more than it's worse off when someone uses an open source library rather than paying someone to reimplement it.
> This is a form of the broken window fallacy.
I’m not sure I see it, can you elaborate?
The broken window fallacy is the idea that it's good when your window gets broken because you have to pay someone to fix it and it increases their income. If that were true, then it would be bad if you could easily repair windows without spending time or money. It's false because we're better off if we can spend our resources on things we actually want rather than constantly maintaining our windows, even if that means some window repairmen need to find other jobs.
What do we do when former window repairman can't find other jobs? Just fuck em, right?
The narrative we're seeing around AI and current automation isn't "we're going to automate one category of jobs". If it were then sure, we could be relatively confident that the excess labor from that industry would be absorbed by other segments
But that's not what the future looks like to me. The future to me looks like "we want to automate a large majority of labor"
So what then? If tons of labour is displaced then the Broken Window Fallacy doesn't really apply, because it is based on the assumption that there will always be something for displaced labour to do.
Call it the Excess Labor Corollary. If there's no way to absorb excess labor in other segments, then what.
When there really aren't any jobs for the former window repair man to do, we are in a "post scarcity economy", which could be a utopia where everyone lives in comfort and has more leisure time.
Or of course, a few billionaires could hoard the wealth.
There's a Wikipedia page about it.
We could be in a post scarcity economy now, except that generally instead of realising we all have enough of we share, we raise the threshold of what we consider to be enough comfort and stuff.
>could be a utopia where everyone lives in comfort and has more leisure time.
It definitely could be. With current trajectory as of now, do you think it will be?
>except that generally instead of realising we all have enough of we share, we raise the threshold of what we consider to be enough comfort and stuff.
I see the opposite sentiment. I see previous basic necessities further out or reach then they were last generation. People aren't raising their standards, they are sinking towards poverty.
But then their worries are dismissed because they can get a flatscreen TV for 200 dollars. A TV that is likely feeding your data back to corporate to make thousands off you.
You're going back one generation, and I'm thinking further back.
Like, if we all settled for a 1950s British living standard, using current manufacturing technology, we could achieve that while everyone works a little bit less.
But, we'd prefer to keep labouring and have nicer things.
The supposed goal of "Make America Great again" is to invoke that 50s era of American exceptionalism. So surely there's something there people miss.
And your theoretical implies we have choice in the matter. I'm sure many would in fact take a smaller home with less amenities over a modern home with cheap appliances. Not that I'd actually be given that choice given my family lineage, but the general living standard of the 50's was quite high. I doubt the act of AC and the lack of knowledge of abestos are the things that made housing skyrocket over the decades.
Sure, but if we run AI all the way to its endpoint, it’s not just about window repairmen anymore. Our current notions about economics assume there’s always another job class for people to move to, here eventually there won’t be.
So here you never have to pay anyone to fix your windows, because they fix themselves, but conversely nobody will give you money to fix their windows! And then you have to pay your self-fixing windows a rent in tokens without an income.
> here eventually there won’t be.
That's a pretty big leap.
I don’t think so, even if the whole “AI exponential” idea is wrong, that’s just the shape of the curve. There still is a curve. Even if these things take 50 years to happen instead of 5 (which would be better and which I doubt will be the case) it still happens eventually. I think the current capabilities of AI are enough of a heuristic for us to assume this is going to happen.
It is a stated goal of several prominent AI business leaders. Altman, Amodei, and Musk at the very least have had mask-off moments where they said as much.
> Society is not worse off when production requires less labor
Society is definitely worse off when people who exchange their labor for capital have no opportunities to do so
>Society is not worse off when production requires less labor,
Not objectively in every situation. But that does seem to be the case and objective here.
AI thumbnails outperform human thumbnails on YouTube by a lot, I've seen click-through rate spreads of 4%+ (~5% -> ~9% in AB tests). Yet people will do drive by comments trying to excoriate creators for using AI thumbnails. It's really quite ridiculous.
"Since I've added gambling and pornography to my old niche hobby website, my profits are up 4% - how can anyone criticize me?"
Not a perfect analogy, but adding some bait that does indeed work for grabbing attention can of course be criticized.
And of course those criticisms can and should be dismissed if the creators goals are purely to maximize engagement
No that _is_ the criticism
You can dismiss criticisms of theft if you look at the goals of the thiefs
The goal of purely maximizing engagement should itself be dismissed.
Lying, grifting, and promoting conspiracies online also maximizes engagement and drives revenue. I guess we should go ahead and do that too.
This whole conversation makes me want to throw up
This does make me wonder if I'm being disillusioned or if the community has genuinely shifted in the past 2–3 years or so. Or of this merely a greater societal shift as "history culture" takes off. You'd think sentiments like "clickbait is bad" would be a common sentiment here, but now I'm not so sure anymore.
I feel very similarly. I would’ve assumed we all obviously don’t want all this chaff in our lives
A lot of any real gain will be due to novelty, and that will wane once you've been doing it a short time (or once other people in your field are doing it so you all go back to looking the same).
I suspect a lot of the gain isn't even that useful to the channel: it being people clicking to complain. You might not see that mean actual complaints because many will see the existing ones and either just upvote them or move on without doing anything (their chance to repeat their regular comment to get a few upvotes having been taken by someone already having said it).
So you’re saying it boosts engagement, advancing the creators primary goal of putting something on YouTube to begin with?
I'm saying that it at best drives a temporary increase in engagement, then you look even more like everyone else than you did before because everyone is doing the same thing with the same AIs. And while that engagement counts in the immediate stats, it might result in a drop overall as some mark you as a channel they don't want to visit again. Then again, I don't think many youtubers are relying on discerning viewers so maybe they will get a boost in the hollow attention the crave.
> the hollow attention they crave
It’s their job, their source of income (or they’re aspiring to it). Making bait thumbnails is a necessary evil. If they don’t they’re leaving money on the table for no reason.
If they AB test some thumbnails and the AI ones get more views/engagement then of course they are going to do that.
I think the overall premise of “if AI thumbnails are even getting more engagement, it must be from haters” is faulty to begin with. It just fits your personal narrative. We simply don’t know.
Peers Morgan's source of income, and hence his job, is being rage bait in (vaguely) human form. A pound shop Alex Jones. It's being his job doesn't mean I have to respect it, or him. See also: loan sharks, living statues, influencers generally.
Who said anything about you personally respecting anyone?
>> the hollow attention they crave
> It’s their job, their source of income
You seemed to be reacting to my low opinion of the practices of attention dredgers, as if I'm bad for holding that opinion and a should respect all career choices and income generation attempts. Perhaps I read that quite wrong.
> as if I’m bad
I didn’t say anything like that, you pulled that feeling out of yourself.
I’m just pointing out that they are doing it for money. Most white collar workers are using AI as part of their job these days.
Shitty engagement that's not good long term human flourishing.
Shitty engagement will just get them recommended to more people because of The Algorithm though.
Yes, and this is a bad thing. It's bad that it gets rewarded and it's bad that creators whose main content is good feel compelled to do it. And I would watch all of this stuff just the same, based on the topic matter and the channel's reputation, without them doing these things, as long as YouTube had put a trial of that content in front of me in the first place. And I get no way to actually give that feedback on YouTube.
There are plenty of channels I'll watch semi-regularly that have god-awful thumbnails. But the same is true of almost everything that I immediately click "don't recommend channel" on.
Do those rates hold across multiple videos over a period of time? I've seen at least one case where someone did an A/B test of an AI thumbnail and the reason his engagement went up because everyone hated it and was commenting to say as much.
> Yet people will do drive by comments trying to excoriate creators for using AI thumbnails. It's really quite ridiculous.
That's just a loud minority. Most people really don't care about using AI in what you do as long as it is entertaining. The real world ain't Reddit.
Maximizing click-through rates leads to garbage clickbait and often misleading thumbnails, it is not a good metric. Those kinds of thumbnail, and channels built on low effort but high engagement content, were widely derided before AI came along.
Novelty is a significant driving factor here. Gen Thumbnails are eye catching because they are new and viewers haven’t adapted to skimming over them like they do with everything else.
Thumbnails, same as everything that is supposed to attract attention, have styles that change over time due to saturation and fatigue.
It’s the current iteration of the red arrow with a (staged) surprised face and as you’re saying we will all learn to just skip it as well. These things are always an arms race, and given LLM’s can only generate facsimiles of things I don’t see how it can stay ahead of it
Maybe.
I don't think clickrate on Youtube is a meaningful metric if all you want is for the right people to show up at your event.
There are channels I watch regularly because they cover topics I want to see covered and I've seen their previous videos and they met my expectations. Then they'll use AI thumbnails while focused on finding the right topics and thinking about how to present them. Some of them are clearly letting an AI write the main part of a script and reading it off (while still being clearly a human doing this and not some weird TTS monstrosity). It annoys me to think that I'm incentivizing people to do this, or letting The Algorithm get the wrong idea about the quality of these shitty thumbnails that don't matter now that the creator is in my feed and I can read the video titles.
(I also end up watching a fair bit of stuff where the thumbnail is literally just a random frame from the video, which lets me know the subject, and the title is some clickbait nonsense that I don't care about. There are a lot of ways for this stuff to work.)
I watch a lot og gaming videos on youtube, often of new indie games to see if I want to play them. Some creators will use AI-generated thumbnails that look nothing like the actual game, and before I recognize them and ignore that creator, they'll get clickthroughs. And then I'll see that I was bamboozled and exit the video.
I don't care if someone uses AI to "style" their thumbnails, but if you use it to completely misrepresent what the video is about I'll leave in protest. That has nothing to do with AI, and everything to do with the fact that it's clickbait. I don't like human-generated clickbait either.
What's ridiculous about that?
You’re comparing the sub-minimum-wage offshore template jockeys to average designers, not “high end” designers. A high-end designer making a one-off poster for a local fair is about as likely as a senior engineer at a FAANG company making a website for it.
It would be like someone paying for a simple website for their small business saying off-shore fiverrrr Wordpress hacks are average coders, and anyone making anything close to a reasonable dev salary in this job market was a high-falutin’ luxury option.
An average graphic designer would ask what unique, non-informational things about the event the poster should portray, do a little bit of research and exploration, and then figure out how to communicate that in pure visual terms. It draws people into the vibe of your event, and hints at the visual impact of experiencing it. You get the nice type work, information hierarchy, attractive layout and color scheme, etc. for free because those are the tools average graphic designers use to visually communicate. This is not expensive compared to the expertise required. With both AI and the Fiverrrr designers, at best, you only get nice type work, information hierarchy, attractive layout and color scheme, etc. You’re not paying for design — you’re paying a graphics software technician for a graphic, like you would at a sign shop.
An average designer is who you’d want to make your posters and maybe a few other types of advertisements, such as postcards, or bus shelters or billboards or banner ads. Someone in a country with a minimum wage of less than a dollar is who you get on fiverrrr. A high-end graphic designer is who you’d contract to do a complete branding and identity overhaul.
The alternatives are not horrible, but look like I’m being lured to a Spring Fair by an alien. It makes no sense to associate with Japanese imagery or 90s computer graphics for an event that has nothing to with these topics. Design is a language and these speak gibberish.
The Spring Fair is a lorem ipsum, here.
They asked the AI for a list of different styles.
The author then picked them out, not the AI. For curiosity I assume.
I love the idea of using unexpected styles. I think it can be very creative. I appreciate it if someone does that deliberately as a humor.
Anecdotally, I was reading https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematicians-build-long-awa... from another HN post and I could have sworn the image was AI generated but https://www.pangram.com/ said was legit human created. Sad that my new default is assuming everything is AI created or vibed nowadays.
This is my experience as well. I run a bootstrapped business, so we don't have a ton of backing. We can't afford the top design firms, and Fable can do better than those within our budget. So it's not that we prefer AI over human designers; we just don't have the money!
This technology is super new and I've only seen AI posters really proliferate in the past few months and suddenly... people don't know how to live without it?
They're not saying they can't live without it, they're saying it's helpful. If you've been walking to the well for years to get buckets of water, and suddenly have running water in your kitchen, going back to trudging buckets doesn't sound very appealing.
Well, no. Before genAI, I used fiverr, and I was also shamed for hiring those humans.
> we just don't have the money!
You don't have ANY money? Plenty of students would do a great job for a little money and a professional reference. Now you just helped the workforce, helped the local economy and cost you little.
Have you ever tried doing that? In my experience, art students don't like to work for "little money" and "professional reference" and stablished artists don't like when you try to pay "little money" to students.
Just a note about language: when folks say they "don't have the money" or "don't have the time", it's almost never the case that they don't have any of the resource in question...it's about priorities. What they are saying is that there are far more effective ways to spend their money than incidentals like this, especially when cheap alternatives exist.
In year 2026 you are likely going to pay for a meat proxy who would still use the same model just without you controlling the prompt.
What is your experience with design done by students? Because mine isn't great. It's not bad either, but it's just... mediocre.
These days a cheap designer is just going to be a meat proxy for AI anyway.
AI, at least for now while it's still free/very cheap, enables producing a lot of very low-value content that in the past you never could have justified spending money and human labor on. The cost or time needed to make a poster or a flyer acted as a value-based gatekeeper. Today, it costs nothing to make an AI slop image and blast it out on social media, so we're drowning in it.
Depends on which economy the buyer and the seller respectively come from.
the problem is that AI does better than those students, especially if you don't know what good design looks like... which is most people
but of course this means the entire market will dry up because no one pays students anymore
Creativity does not have to be expensive to be good. Yall just dont want to bother dealing with it.
I was the person who "had to bother dealing with it" many years ago before we had AI, Canva, or even Adobe cloud.
I volunteered and designed a good amount of posters for student organizations.
Don't enjoy it but did it to help my peers and friends out.
I find it ironic that back then we had a lot of trouble finding people who were willing to design posters and promo media on print.
Now the comment section on this post has people mourning AI taking over poster making in 2026. Where was the help back then?
From the perspective of someone who had to burn the midnight oil to do it for years, trust me, I would rather not do it and spend that time with my family and friends. And judging from how hard it was to find others who were willing to do it, I think its a reasonable argument that most people were not actually willing to do the work either.
So mourn away but I wouldn't cry if I "missed out" on making posters. If we had AI back then, I would not take on any of those poster making requests.
One of my best memories from an art class in high school was that a student organization came into our class and asked if any of us would be willing to design a poster. I ended up designing and silk-screening their poster for them and it was a fantastic experience.
I can totally see how doing more than a couple would start to feel like work, but having one or two experiences like that was awesome.
oh my. from my perspective, this is the most useful comment on this post.
we should have asked the arts students! (and find a way to return the favor) i did not think about that.
that being said there were some intense rivalry between various studies, my presence may not be have been well received.
and judging how i am here, you can guess what i studied :-)
thank you for this. really feel like i got a missing piece of a puzzle reading this.
Back when? The 1970s? I don't believe that you couldn't find poster making services in the last 10-20 years.
You missed the “I volunteered” part. They were working for free.
"I find it ironic that back then we had a lot of trouble finding people who were willing to design posters and promo media on print."
I don't see the word free here. Of course you'd have trouble finding people to do anything for free.
They said: "I volunteered and designed a good amount of posters for student organizations." What do you think how many student organization have the excess money to hire a professional designer for a one-off poster? Of course they needed someone to do it for free, or else it wouldn't have been done at all!
That doesn't even make sense. If you volunteered, then you did find someone. Yourself.
Are you being intentionally obtuse? Try reading their comment in its entirety, and not just as individual fragments taken out of context: They most likely didn't have the budget to hire a professional designer and no one else would do it for free, so they had to do it themselves. They didn't enjoy it, and they would've gladly passed that work to an AI, had one existed back then.
It's not that hard to understand. Here, I've linked it for your convenience: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49765890
For every human good art that is cheap I can show you ten that are not. The problem is you don't know which version you'd get. Someone charges less because they are unknown. Fixing AI art is much less hassle than human one.
This is like anything. If you want good and inexpensive it's going to be a pain in your arse one way or another.
Exactly. Sad to see another industry getting decimated by AI just to save a bit of cash.
A bit ? A lot.
Because people assume u need to actually hire someone to make art. Just let your kid draw something for your small restaurant. It's more pleasant to look at for people who didn't yet sell their soul to AI.
> Just let your kid draw something for your small restaurant.
Wait, we've gone from "pay the local artists" because AI shows you're "lazy and cheap" and "don't care about your brand".
And now whatever my 7-year-old draws is good enough.
My only conclusion reading these threads is that folks come in with their mind made up, and will argue absolutely anything so long as it amounts to "AI bad".
the point of advertising is to communicate something. If your kid draws your menu, you signal family values. If you pay a local artist, you signal investment in the community.
If ChatGPT churns out your ad you've signaled nothing. And that's obviously why you can criticize AI for every imaginable reason. That's indeed the difference and why people, regardless of how 'good' your AI art will be, will attempt to hide it, because it defeats the purpose of advertising as such.
Then you get Chick o' Fish.
It is not, in fact, more pleasant to look at.
These people just doesn't have a good taste, imo.
Damn, how did businesses survive decades without being able to pay some intern or someone in the office to quickly put up a poster? Like come on, claiming 'budget' is the issue here when I can see indie bands operating with twigs and some chewing gum figure out how to put together a poster for their band is embarassing.
You have the money, you just don't have the contacts or skills to find a good designer which charges you a fair price. Big design firms will rip you off. Their job is to get corruption contracts from the public sector or big enterprises, and then reward their insider later with a nice fake job.
Saying you don't have the money for a designer is a bit like saying you can't go on business trip because the company can't afford to purchase a jet airplane right now.
You said it - and the same is true for many of the other talents from Ai. I've worked with gobs of artists, accountant, MBAs, developers, appliance repair techs, and so on. Ai does a better job than most of them, but not as good as the best of them.
This is an excellent point, and it doesn't only apply to art/design.
In almost any intellectual domain, including coding, the models are already ahead of the average human. But instead, we compare them to the very best humans, which almost no one on the planet has access to.
$20 for a lot of access to better-than-average is a world-changingly good deal!
This reads like the opening scene of the Monkey’s Paw. Doubt it will feel like a good deal in the long run.
> they can tell they’re AI and point to things that the AI did “wrong” and a human artist would do better.
Pretty much all of the designers we contacted recently were using AI to draw. Especially on those kinds of cheap work. They are just a bit more professional in the prompting and can do final touch in Photoshop.
You’re absolutely right! (See what I did, there?)
I mentioned something similar, in a previous comment.
The sad part, is that the same thing is likely to happen to design, as is already happening with software development.
The junior training track is going to get the bottom ripped out. Established outfits like Pentagram will do fine, but lesser ones, like small design shops, are likely to get run out of business by AI image generation, which will improve quickly.
The problem is that these are the shops that train the designers that end up in companies like Pentagram.
Or only Ivy-League sheepskins will get junior jobs at the big studios, which will be the only ones left standing, when the dust settles.
If taste is all that's left you can't fault people for discriminting on taste
Totally agree. Opinions are cheap. People can be drawn to “horrible” art, and small artists - especially social media managers - right now are creating intentionally bad mspaint.exe 1994 aesthetics because AI art looks like it was created by real artists, and it’s the only way to differentiate
You can’t even differentiate it that way. AI generates perfect MS paint aesthetics
My take is most users (who generate these posters) are not aesthetically astute and/or care enough to put in more effort.
>I think it would be interesting to see if people could reliably distinguish between AI generated flyers and human made flyers
i think people can point those out pretty consistently for in-the-wild cheap posters, since the 2 types are often bad in different way
> I’ve worked with dozens of budget friendly designers on Fiverr and consistently get way worse results than I’ve gotten from AI models.
That makes sense given they're on Fiverr. However, Fiverr freelancers are now just AI prompters :) doesn't matter whether it's code or art.
To me, they look very much like Canva style designs. Some pre-existing design template that someone took and then smooshed their own dates and information into.
Yea these look bad you don't need to be a pro designer to see that.
This misses the point about complaints of AI slop. It’s not about “worse”, it’s about “distracting”. It’s about AI fingerprints overwhelming the consumer. It’s not too different from hiring a freelancer who does a blatant stylistic ripoff of a popular artist in an unflattering way: the consumer of the work sees the ripoff first, focuses on the ripoff, is unable to appreciate the message being delivered. AI slop is overwhelming and distracting to the consumer in that it communicates messages of laziness, disinterest, disregard for the underlying message. Whether this is true or not in every case, we’ve seen enough cases where we have to start by considering it. It’s the vehicle for scams and spam. It’s like sending an email that starts with “FIVE TRICKS TO HAVE BETTER SKIN” or any other meme spam line.
A human freelancer might do work that is technically worse. Worse can be distracting in ways that are, well… worse. But it’s different, it doesn’t tap into a collective cultural understanding of “AI slop.” It may communicate even more poorly, but it’s not the same problem.
Have you considered looking up designers you like and asking them instead of "budget friendly designers on Fiverr"?
It doesn't have to look "cartoony". Harness issue. Your 2026 models are trained on a sufficiently broad set of images that style is almost a solved problem.
At least for me, the enumerated svg-like icons give it away, but that's merely a prompt fix.
>but a small local event or business probably won’t have the budget to hire them or know where to find them.
And yet, somehow, up until what maybe 2024, every single small event or business in every local market around the earth managed to figure this out. I guess we've lost that ancestral knowledge of how this was possibly done and afforded in a few dozen months.
Maybe it's just me, but even on pure aesthetic reasons I would take a Comic Sans and clipart poster made in Word over the slop.
At this point I have some kind of a physical repulsion to the generated posters, and it's always easy to tell from the fontwork and the iconography, let alone illustrations if there are any.
Nah, AI cant design prooper pages, and posters. Period. Even someone with basic aesthetic skills and a knack for illustrations will create a much better postan, than these. Because you'll immediately recognize the human in them. AI has no soul, no experiences, it's just a primitive neural net.
The problem’s not so much that the posters are AI generated, but that they’re too crowded and unfocused. Their individual elements seem fine and look good, but when taken as a whole they feel wrong.
This may be a failure mode similar to juniors using AI and making it much harder for seniors to find the bugs, because the code actually looks good at first sight.
I don’t think the blog author actually has any design skills based on the prompts and the AI obviously can’t nudge them in the right direction or help them clarify their brief, like a real designer (i.e. not random online freelancers) would.
I’ve been diving into Ink Master highlights on YouTube lately. These are typically all excellent artists but they don’t always produce excellent work. I’ve seen some hands that could have come out of an early gen ai model permanently inked into someone’s skin.
I sure hope it’s better than some random person you paid $20
i would never go to an event that cares so little about people buying tickets they can't even put a pen to paper or just use a photograph. it reeks of laziness.
>Maybe, but a small local event or business probably won’t have the budget to hire them or know where to find them.
This is funny to read given I am currently on a Japan trip with 3 friends and we actively avoid every small restaurant that have AI generated images of their food. Using AI generated bullshit just shows that you really dont want to put in the work to produce something actually charming. Hell, we've seen a food menu drawn by a toddler and it was infinitely more sympathetic than all the AI generated Wagyu images.
You reminded me of this tweet I came across recently
https://x.com/tylerglaiel/status/2099382887045108154
This is exactly what I meant.
That'll be a real debate at the moment in Japan, I'll bet. Because the law is pretty strict when it comes to accurate advertising.
Given that any advertisement with AI generated food would be illegal there I don't imagine you have to avoid very many!
I just got back from a month there and recall perhaps 2 posters that may have been AI. I actually ran into several public art exhibits as well.
>Given that any advertisement with AI generated food would be illegal there
So you never actually walked the streets ive been in recently lol
I was in Japan in Spring, I didn't notice any AI-generated ads/menus (not implying you're lying, just curious if it's become a trend since then, or if it's a particular area).
But I recall this simple looking promotion: https://imgur.com/a/fbM8Akb . The photo looks professionally done, and not AI. Then again, maybe they googled for "cheesecake photo".
I just image searched for "cheesecake", I didn't find this photo in the results, but there are a few results where I now have to wonder "Is that AI?"
Cool man, how good of a job would you do at your craft if I only gave you $5
To me if you ask to a 10 years old kid and give him a PC with Microsoft Paint on it it will you will have a much better result than any AI-generated option in the post. If there are graphics designer that produce a worse result of what AI creates, it's because they probably use AI as well.
The problem of AI generated stuff (we see the problem of manifests, but I'm a software engineer and with computer programs it's exactly the same thing) is that they immediately look non-human, and our brain trained itself to detect, and thus get irritated by, AI generated content.
It looks fake, it hurts to see, it seems fine at first glance fine but it's not, everyone seems identical because the AI is not, despite of the name, creative, it just a hyper complex copy/paste machine, and obviously the result just looks copy/paste as well.
> To me if you ask to a 10 years old kid and give him a PC with Microsoft Paint on it it will you will have a much better result than any AI-generated option in the post.
FWIW, statements like this are so patently ridiculous that it actually hurts your cause.
> To me if you ask to a 10 years old kid and give him a PC with Microsoft Paint on it it will you will have a much better result than any AI-generated option in the post.
Sorry, if it's a joke it doesn't land very well.
Before AI, if a 10yo did these posters for a school project, people would just tell their parents to not do the homework for their kid. These are far above what 99.9% 10yo can do.
> a 10 years old kid and give him a PC with Microsoft Paint
You'd run afoul of child labor protestors. I'd just prompt the AI to generate a poster in the style of a 10-year-old with Microsoft Paint.
Sure but why?
Outside of a small joy of the organizing committee, is an incrementally "better" (which is almost entirely subjective anyway) worth the trouvle?
AI irritates people. This is fine if you're making political cartoons or racist memes, but not so fine for ad copy.
A lot of posters or arts in general are to be seen once and never again. If you put pre-AI arts together in an exhibition like at the top of the article are you sure it wouldn't irritate people?
I walk past countless of such arts everyday, none of them registered after even 15 mins. Maybe you have better taste, but don't try to project your opinion as that of the majority.
Read what I said again. AI art falls into the uncanny valley range and solicits disgust, ire or suprise in most people.
Sometimes that's okay, but probably not in ad copy.
This is provably false. AI YouTube thumbnails trounce human thumbnails (often nearly doubling the click-through rate according to A/B testing), and people rate AI art more highly than human art on average when they don't know that it's AI.
Just admit that you are scared of the future that's coming and it's eliciting irrational hatred, and that's causing you to lash out. At least that'd be honest and we'd understand where your coming from even if we didn't share your views.
> trounce human thumbnails (often nearly doubling the click-through rate according to A/B testing)
That stat sounds more than dubious. Do you have a reference for it that isn't published by someone with a vested interest in people using AI?
Not engaging with your second argument, it's just trollbait. But for your first argument, there is a big difference between info graphics trying to convey information and video thumbnails trying to trigger a click
I find it kinda funny that even "smartest", most capable models often have a very hard time going beyond surface-level, top-of-mind associations, when faced with creative tasks.
Of course, a "Japanese Minimal Poster" has a sakura and a stylized flag of Japan, duh
A human designer would probably think that "Japan -> sakura" and "Japan -> Japanese flag" are way too obvious, too banal, too stereotypical, and, most importantly too boring. And then they would probably sit for a while and try to think of something fresher and less clichéd.
But AI has absolutely no problem with going with the cheesiest, most overused trope.
Author here.
Well of course Spring + Japan = Sakura. In a way the model would be faulty if it didn't reach for that cliché. That's what it's meant to do.
If you want originality, you need to supply it. AI fills the vacuum with the obvious thing.
And in a way that's a feature. If I was creating a poster myself I'd think "nah, can't use sakura it's too obvious". AI gets you past that hurdle. "Yeah, we used the cliché, it looks nice, let's move on".
This is if it's for a school fayre, village fête, etc. - brilliant originality isn't the goal. But it's nice when your poster doesn't look the same as three other posters on the same noticeboard (I have seen this).
If brilliant originality is needed, a human has to bring it. Although an LLM with the temperature turned up can offer some nice seeds.
If you need pseudo-originality I have a skill for that: https://github.com/iandanforth/force-associations
Nice! I use an old madlibs library I built for D&D: https://github.com/gavmor/Dunmanifestin
that's very clever
Thanks, it introduces a little "jitter" that keeps the egg from rolling down the same face of the ridge every time. Possibly, the same could be accomplished with a judicious application of the temperature parameter.
But how to tell the model which section is supposed to be populated with spicy tokens?
Tyty I was thinking about something similar
Association clouds.. Routes.. Whatever this is..
It is a prime example of esoteric LLM incantations, if not -excuse me- nonsenseOff topic and a little whimsical, but LLM incantations is a really fun idea.
In a world where one hyper intelligent AI controls everything, hackers work tirelessly in secret off-grid, doing extreme math by hand, finding the right series of tokens that magically coerce the AI into carrying out certain actions. Spell books are copied out by hand and distributed in dark alleyways. Itinerant wizards travel the land on horse drawn carriages, travelling from town to town, casting spells on people's devices to bend the AI to their will.
I love it. Entropic prompt injection
"AI fills the vacuum with the obvious thing."
I like that a lot.
It literally is how they work. They look for the next most probable token. Always keep that in mind when writing a prompt or reading output. If you don't supply it, it will fill it in with the most obvious stuff.
Personally I think if you were going to make a poster for a Japanese themed spring festival, and you did NOT include some sakura, you completely misunderstood the assignment.
Your promotional poster for a community gathering should not be subverting the western gaze on Japanese culture, or any other concept from art criticism 101.
It's supposed to get average people in your neighborhood to glance at it for 5-10 seconds and say, "cool looks like a good time"
YMMV but my experience tells me that the more cliché something looks, the more likely it's bad/cheap.
I've never been in a cliché-looking restaurant that is actually decent.
Meanwhile, the best restaurants I know have, at best, a flag or some kind of small drawing to give a clue about their nationality, but otherwise they look like a regular local one.
> I've never been in a cliché-looking restaurant that is actually decent
You either have an absurd standard for "decent" or this is one of the weirdest comments I've ever read here.
Right, but the best restaurants are not most restaurants. The best high end events are not most events. Most events and restaurants could be improved a lot by AI already
Artist here. I'd rip off Kawase Hasui 100 different ways without using sakura or subverting anything.
More like 100ms or less as their visual field coincidentally sweeps over wherever the ad is posted in the physical world. In this regard, it's even more important to use something people subconsciously associate with your thing.
That's a prompt problem.
If you named a Japanese artist or style rather than giving an adjective derived from a country, you might get something that wasn't national wank.
Yes, a human might do this step for you. A mediocre one might not.
> Yes, a human might do this step for you
An artist (even a mediocre one) almost certainly would do this step for you
Yeah because... AI is a tool, not an artist. In other words water is wet.
The reason it isn't obvious is because the tool is marketed as replacing the artists, and that's how people are using it.
Also what the author of this post did could easily be added to the training/harness/skills of ChatGPT in a future version.
Of course they have ulterior motives to push the message that it can replace high quality human artists, even though that would be ridiculous under any serious analysis.
That doesnt mean you have to believe them.
Ah yes they should have gone with that one wave
Isn’t the most overused trope the most statistically weighted to be chosen from a group of options? It makes technical sense but as you say leads to boring outcomes
If given an underspecified option, yes. Which is why it's good to specify options.
I see what you mean, but I think you can draw (no pun intended) a distinction between trope following and having a skill, or at least should notionally be able to.
> But AI has absolutely no problem with going with the cheesiest, most overused trope.
Considering your prompt fits exactly that description I think the AI delivered perfectly. Try using some actual design language and see how well it does.
The thing is, they aren't creative. When I ask an LLM to go beyond the mean, it has no idea what to do and returns incoherance. Its responses seem to have N latent dimensions of information. But, the value of each of those dimensions is always the midpoint. With creative prompting, I can push it to respond in ways that go beyond the mean, but it can't tie them together cohesively. It doesn't have anything in its training data to fill the hole in space. No ability to extrapolate.
My point is that those kinds of prompts are dumb and I actually expect the model to produce slop. In programming we write these huge prompts that go into a lot of detail, and when we do that, it actually works. I've never asked a coding agent to go beyond the mean, that just sounds like a dumb thing to do. Apply this rule in design and I'm sure you'll get better results. Kinda what the blog post is all about.
> But AI has absolutely no problem with going with the cheesiest, most overused trope
I genuinely wonder if this can be addressed (at least partially) as simply as prompting: "don't rely on overused tropes", or something to that effect.
The masses love clichés and stereotypes, which is why these "artiste" designers frequently miss their target audience.
That's on the prompt, not the AI. You could be specific about what imagery to use like a torii or a Japanese castle, and so on. Whatever you leave to the AI you're most likely going to get the most generic version. If you're low effort in the prompt yet get low effort results, if you put some effort into the prompt you can get better results.
If you understand how curve fitting works, then it is a very predictable outcome.
Sure, but what's interesting is if you tell it to "behave unpredictably" or "don't use tropes" it usually fails down the same curve. Which is predictable, but telling.
I remember seeing a poster for Chinese New Year years ago, and someone had included the kanji for Japan on it (日本). Obviously they just wanted generic looking characters without bothering to see what they meant. I couldn't resist writing a comment on the poster about it.
It showed whoever did it had no clue about East Asia or Chinese script...
Are you insinuating those 1970s fonts takeout fonts aren’t actually how Chinese people communicate? I knew they were AI!
for the price you pay ai you would 100% get a cherry blossom tree from an inexperienced designer
Ai costs under $10 though, you wouldn’t be able to hire a human for that
Pretty sure 90% of the posters of the type at the top of the article are made for $0. I bet for $10 you could get real artists from non-Western countries to make a simple poster, but these days people would probably claim those $10 jobs and then have AI generate them anyway.
right, even worse... if you paid 5X that you'd still be getting whatever was the first idea that came to mind
You're easily in 10X territory to get something pretty basic with a round of feedback and maybe 50X to start to get something good
the low to mid range of any visual design market has essentially been destroyed
Destroyed or democratized? I'd question the financial judgement if a local fair actually paid a designer for a poster and revisions, versus just literally typing something in Word and adding some clip art.
I like his still of prompt creation "Give me a list of styles to choose from" then choosing one of the available options. SKILL.md files seem to be built upon assumptions of what the language model already knows and understands, I am not sure that most skills are not tied to a particular LLM vendor/version combination and if the same prompt might not be interpreted differently by different language models.
Here the author is asking the machine about what it knows, so there is less of an element of doubt.
As somebody who made a poster for an event just few days ago... I find it funny that this probably took just as long as without AI while probably going through a less rewarding process with little control and very limited learning.
A non professional design would probably take few hours doing it the very first time, discovering the software to do it, maybe learn some shortcuts, few key principles e.g. using a background then putting things above, etc. The next time though they would probably take 30min with a better result, the time after that maybe 5min with complete control.
It's really not such a demanding process if you rely on existing building block, namely dedicated software, assets like imagine banks, fonts, etc.
I had to make a poster for a music event recently. Downloaded the free version of Affinity, scrolled instagram for event poster inspiration, learned how to use the program and make my poster in 2 hours. I could do it much faster now but I had to start from scratch.
Sent my poster around and people loved it. Had I put out a slop poster I may as well cancel the event for how much backlash there would be.
I have very little sympathy for the sloperators here. The tools to make a poster are free and viable for someone with zero skill.
It’s not complicated - the default style signals low effort. Why should I get excited about the village fete if the organizers put in the barest minimum of effort?
But there’s another reason it drives people crazy - it’s low effort trying to present as high effort. If the sign was simple Comic Sans then it would at least be charmingly honest.
> Why should I get excited about the village fete if the organizers put in the barest minimum of effort?
Because there's no correlation between the ability to organise a village event and the graphic design skills. (Apart from "it's been so successful we can splash money on a design agency") Maybe someone actually liked it and thought it's enough. I've seen groups overthinking posters and it felt similar to groups at uni overthinking funny names instead of doing the work that actually mattered.
To be clear, I'm not saying those designs are good, just that most of the time the design is not the point and minimum effort above "Times New Roman 12pt" is what many people always wanted to do.
It feels particularly bad for a local arts faire. Like maybe ask one of the local artists if they could design a poster instead of defaulting to the plagiarism machine? If I saw this ai poster for a local crafts faire I’d immediately dismiss it.
Do you offer to pay them in exposure? Or do you offer them actually money commensurate with the work and skill they provide?
Because if it’s the latter we’re back to money being the barrier. And if it’s the former you should go and check with your local artists how much they love working for exposure.
Yes, running an event has work and expenses involved in it. An AI slop poster is a sign the event is not serious and has other more major issues under the surface.
I assume you haven’t lived in a village before? These fairs have absolutely no money, and often not even much time as it’s fully volunteer led
Making a poster is free and easy. Literal children do it in school.
I’ve made posters for events. Affinity is free now, it takes you like an hour to learn it from scratch and make your poster. If you couldn’t be bothered doing that, then that’s a signal the event itself is low effort slop. I'm not sure why people are acting like it's impossible to run an event without AI tools that literally didn't exist until right now.
It’s a local craft fair. By every reasonable definition of the word, it’s not serious.
Graphic design skills don’t correlate with effort. I’ve seen terribly designed posters that the makers clearly put a lot of effort and love into because they loved whatever it was they were promoting.
I’ve also seen people put a lot of effort and love into poster and stuff because that interests them (doesn’t mean they’re good at it either), then the event is utter crap because they didn’t spend much time on the actual event.
> Apart from "it's been so successful we can splash money on a design agency"
Which could be an important signal for you to decide if that's the kind of event you want to go to. Maybe the comic sans fayre is preferrable to some.
It's a village fete, what kind of signals do you want from the poster?
That's why the "Look here's a 100 identical village fete posters" memes are kind of missing the point, it's actually not a bad thing that I can tell from a glance what it is, I don't actually have to read any of the details to know it'll have a tombola, because it's a given.
My bigger issue is all the posters calling it Fayre, not Fete, which is the weird part, particularly the "Craft Fayre" which should definitely be "Craft Fair", but misspellings and greengrocers apostrophe's are part and parcel of a good hand-made poster too.
its an antique (english) spelling for "fair", it's basically the event equivalent of "ye olde shoppe" which is just "the old shop" in a very antiquated phrasing
Except "ye olde" was always "the olde", but for a time printing machines were produced outside of England and lacked the thorn "þ" character, so the y was used as a substitute.
The last paragraph in GP’s comment is the key. Nobody would care about a low effort poster, what they care about is the deception of pretending you put a lot of effort into the poster. It’s dishonest, and it would make me subconsciously question what else they’re being dishonest about.
Tech people seem to have a really difficult time grasping that the average person is not a utilitarian.
People are really bothered by perceived inauthenticity and injustice. And care about more things than the utility of the end product.
On top of that, we have a very out of touch political system that has continually ignored the will of the electorate. So then the tech people will say “see, the masses voted with their feet, they love the utility of AI generated art!”. Completely ignoring the perverse incentivizes and regulatory capture that led to that outcome.
If you were to poll 100 people on the street, they would be very against replacing human artists with AI.
The thing though with deferring to AI slop though is that it signals to me a sort of negative effort now being put in. I mean don't these people also recoil at this stuff? No? They have some screw loose I guess. I don't need to give them my money.
1000% agree.
If I’m looking for a handyman on (the Dutch equivalent to) Craigslist, either very short text with spelling errors or something obviously AI are both a positive signal. These are people too busy doing actual jobs, to fret over smoothly copywritten ads.
I think this (low effort posters) rather signals to me that they have the right priorities. A true professional poster would tell me that it's some commercial cash grab instead of real local enthusiasts making something normal.
To me it's the opposite. If the poster is something typed up in Word, I know the Farmer's Market is the real deal. If it's AI generated, I immediately get Temu dropshipping vibes.
But neither is an actual signal. The Word-market can just be selling fruit from a wholesaler at a mark up, and the AI poster could be coming from an established "real" farmers market who's organizer has tried to promote it with the tools and design knowledge they have access to.
The factors behind branding (or a lack of) are multi-causal and not correlated to the actual quality of a farmer's market.
I am inclined to agree. Small community organisation cannot afford to pay a professional designer. They might be lucky and have a talented volunteer, but in general its a waste of limit resources.
But nobody needs a fancy poster. A small org doesn’t have to pay for a designer. They can literally open Word, and make something in half an hour that communicates the details of the event. You’re all acting as if the choice is between AI slop posters or paying a professional who will make the most fancy art. A poster really just need to show the brand/name of the org, maybe a logo, and info about the event
They like how the AI poster looks better. They have no visceral anti-AI reaction to it because they don't spend their lives in online bubbles where AI is the new heresy.
Have you spoken to a young person recently? Like at all? Say what you want about thinking that an AI-gen poster actually signals high competency to you, but acting like there's not a huge swath of people that hates AI and trying to dismiss them out-of-hand as an extremely online fringe just seems irrational. No, there are a lot.
I would class something quickly run up in a word processor as much the same as the AI "slop" in comparison to a professional designer. I would prefer it but the basic signal that its not professional work is the same.
The difference between them, as pointed out elsewhere in the comment thread, is authenticity. A basic, unassuming poster made by an amateur conveys a simple, grassroots event with no frills. A professional poster made a by a graphic designer signals effort and attention to detail. The average AI-generated poster says that the organizers don't have time or money, but really want to seem like they do. It's like how people tend to perceive someone who wears or owns an obvious knockoff of an expensive status item - it's seen as worse than having the real deal and worse than having nothing at all, because that person is trying to create an appearance of something that's not true.
Low effort signals for recognizing effort in creation have all been scrambled. Now it's high effort just to identify real effort, not to mention most people in most cases would not have the expertise to recognize real effort anyway. I don't think this is entirely new from AI either, we already had so much media vying for attention that we could scant attend to more than a vanishing sliver of it.
Also just because someone used AI doesn't mean they didn't put in effort, so I don't think reflexive rejection of any AI smell is the answer. Sure, at work in a corporate white collar job where you have so many talentless strivers looking for any shortcut to climb the corporate ladder, raw AI smell actually is a highly valuable negative signal. But when it comes to local event organizers for example, there's a realness and human factor there that goes beyond anything a programmer or designer in a "scalable" context does with or without AI. We need to give our local humans grace, because humans are what it's all about.
You don't have to get excited by anything. You are welcome to boycott the village fête because you think they didn't put enough effort into their poster. Your choice, my friend.
Personally, I’d prefer people who get upset about “ai slop” to just stay home and complain about the fliers. It’s a great filter.
> Why should I get excited about the village fete if the organizers put in the barest minimum of effort?
Beer? The first example is about a beer festival. People go there to drink beer, not to see posters. A blank piece of paper that says 250 kinds of beers would get more excitement than any AI or handcrafted poster.
I literally saw that poster today in London and had this conversation about AI posters with my wife. I had no clue it would literally be a post today.
Making a good poster is bikeshedding. Organizing an event is hard and making better posters than this is a waste of their limited resources.
Bikeshedding at an event is something like arguing about where to put the snack table. Raising awareness in the community about the event is vital, because this is what decides who will come. If you spend your time solving other problems and then few people come because they were put off by posters that to them signal "This is something we don't really care about", then it did matter after all.
"Organizing an event is hard..." Not with AI. You could use AI to organize it and make some AI posters. Ask AI to design everything. Make it digital and have only AI's come.
>If the sign was simple Comic Sans
I remember the days when people would make fun of a sign like that. Then people would make fun of Wordart, then Canva. It appears that unless you spend $1500 on a graphic designer to create your poster, people will shit on your effort.
You’re almost there.
People shit on things that are low effort, and especially low-effort trends. And especially especially when the low-effort trend involves something that offends them in some way, for example if they think AI is taking jobs, hurting the environment, etc.
Of course people are shitting on low-effort AI. It would be more surprising if they didn’t.
There were lots of tumblr blogs (now defunct) that ridiculed Comic Sans used in signs and posters. Later on the same thing happened to the Lobster font.
Reasons were the same as now: low effort and overuse.
I live in a village with lots of local events and I do not care about the design of the posters. I just care about what the event. I just want some information.
Well, that's you. A lot of people like posters to be designed by real people, no matter how rubbish they look, especially if it's a cultural event or something based around people and human connection. AI posters, with AI stall signs, with AI flyers, with AI descriptions. Fucking depressing, man.
I agree.
This week, I created a video for a personal project using AI.
And, as the creator, I honestly can not say if it's "slop or not."
So I created a "behind the scenes" page that shows the process I went through before final cut, warts and all. You can find it at https://alexisrondeau.me/mosey-site/making-of/
Do you think this helps you decide if it's slop or not?
You might be a little too close to the work to judge, but to me it still looks off. I suppose I might not immediately think it was AI, but there's something not quite human about it. The video contents are a little too sterile and clean, lacking character. The room is quite empty and the composition doesn't cause me to focus on any one thing. That said, you could probably improve a bit of it with some prompting.
The making-of post itself also is clearly LLM generated, probably by Claude, judging by the language used.
Standard Claude typography :(
I mean this page kind of looks like AI slop. If that’s the case, making more slop explaining how you made the original slop seems…misguided.
Gotcha, that makes sense. Thank you very much for the feedback.
I asked Claude to go through all the previous commits, the chat history and the 100 or so intermediate assets and create a timeline of sorts, the current page as you see it.
It's AI-generated as are the assets, the process and decisions depicted are human.
And still you're reaction is "it's slop". Noted!
> And still you're reaction is "it's slop".
The text on the page sounds really AI written so I can see why people think it’s slop.
I have to agree with @fleshdaddy. The explainer page itself looks like slop. I haven’t seen the original project but I’m afraid this makes me less interested, not more.
Thank you as well, just wrote below to the same point.
And I agree with your impression.
My goal here is to understand how can I demonstrate that I did in fact put work and care into the "thing" (video in this case).
Basically show that I did spend energy over time, that the final product took a few dozen iterations with a lot of dead ends (as opposed to a lazy one-shot "make good video, no mistakes")
So I do think this route can have merit given there is actual work, but how would a page like this look if the current one is not yet giving you a trustworthy vibe?
Idea: Just show the full Claude Code transcript on the left side and the incremental outputs (images, clips, videos) on the right side?
You'd definitely see some raw and embarrassing stuff there. Like frustration, anger, greed, ignorance, incompetence, creativity, curiosity.
Is that maybe what we need to see to believe that a human (me n this case) was involved meaningfully?
Love this. This is exactly the dilemma I had with fiction I had created with AI. Am my I the author? Did I just commission it? Something in between?
So now I don't say. I show my workings and the reader can decide. And to be poncey, I made a manifesto. https://kladde26.org/
Behind the scenes is unbearable.
No one cared about shitty posters before (and yes they are shitty) and no one cares about them now.
No one is praising or collecting them. We just accepted that shitty poster exist.
Now some few people complain about ai slop at situations were no one cares and no one cared /shrug
I mean let’s get real. You probably were looking for a reason to smugly not go to the village fete and this gave you one.
Otherwise you would be excited about going to the village fete and realize that the poster doesn’t make it a bad event.
Ok, don’t go because of the poster. Miss out.
The only ones that aren't horrible manage that because they're so bland there's nothing to go wrong. Look at an example with some detail, the "Now please make one in the style of a 90s drum n bass gig flyer, with early 3D/fractal computer imagery" poster.
At the top of the page we have a deformed wireframe sphere. A wireframe sphere is stylistically appropriate, but the incorrect rendering is not. The "CGI" aesthetic requires obviously computer generated lines, which in the 90s meant accurate and regular lines.
Next we have a messed-up stellated polyhedron, and a messed-up dot pattern. These also fail for the same reason. The main 3D rendering is also obviously broken, as are many other small details.
But the biggest failure is the complete misunderstanding of the culture. 90s DnB was absolutely not about "good vibes". The smiley face logo is completely inappropriate; that's associated with late 80s/early 90s rave culture, pre-DnB era. 90s DnB was much darker and edgier in tone. The scene was almost exclusively male, and it maintained a aggressive vibe carried over from jungle.
A 90s DnB event would never advertise "bringing communities together". Audiences would be repelled by such messaging. This is despite it actually doing just that, as the scene was racially integrated in a way that mainstream music at the time was not. If there's going to be pro-social messaging on the poster it has to be there only implicitly.
Ach, idk. On average people have horrible design aesthetics, yet are now so arrogant about it, because they imagine their a newly found ability to spot design generated with AI equates to them being able to spot bad design.
No, you silly geese. What you are able to spot is somebody using AI poorly. That's not you developing taste. It's the equivalent of being able to tell something is photoshopped because somebody used a default brush poorly, or masked something poorly and then confounding using Photoshop with using Photoshop poorly.
You have absolutely no way of telling when a good designer created something entirely using AI (unless they are fine with you knowing that) and that has always been true.
Your message is right that you can't spot AI, but from what I've seen professionals by large aren't using AI for from-scratch design.
I do have one way of telling: my wife's a designer, and she has many artist and designer friends so I see how they work first hand. AI is largely used for edits that need to be done quickly rather than from-scratch generation.
You talk about aesthetics but that's very secondary to communicating the precise thing you want to communicate. AI just isn't there.
> No, you silly geese. What you are able to spot is somebody using AI poorly. That's not you developing taste. It's the equivalent of being able to tell something is photoshopped because somebody used a default brush poorly, or masked something poorly and then confounding using Photoshop with using Photoshop poorly.
Speaking only for myself, that is absolutely accounted into my despair when I see an AI poster. Not just the fact that we're having a wide range of cultural and regional artifacts being stamped out and homogenized by the convenience of AI posters, but the fact that I'm only able to point them out right now because the public backlash is somewhat limited to the online sphere, so most people are okay with the default result it spits out. And we're one default ChatGPT/Claude "curated diversified aesthetic selector" feature away from making my current discernment completely useless.
Of course there's an argument of "if it's so good you can't tell, is there really a problem?", but here I'm responding specifically to the argument of a negative reaction to AI posters not taking the above into account.
> they imagine their a newly found ability to spot design generated with AI equates to them being able to spot bad design.
Who is imagining that?
> No, you silly geese. What you are able to spot is somebody using AI poorly. That's not you developing taste.
Again, I'm not really sure that the 'spotting AI' endeavour is always supposed to be a flex of someones own taste.
> You have absolutely no way of telling when a good designer created something entirely using AI (unless they are fine with you knowing that) and that has always been true.
I have trouble parsing your entire comment, but you have lost me completely at 'always been true'. I don't know how many hours your 'good designer' would waste on creating only with AI something able to fool everybody 2 years ago. It would surely be too many to be practical.
Something, not anything. 2 years ago AI tools were much narrower and there were more things that you could not have done, but still plenty that was possible.
(Granted, given that you always needed some way of steering the AI and a harness around it, defining "entirely" in this context is a separate, debatable exercise)
I think I'm going to call this "no true slopsman"
This is sometimes called the "Toupee Fallacy": https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/toupee_fallacy
It doesn’t look that bad. You can ach all you want, but that’s decent. It doesn’t have that AI look and it’s better than most posters I see for small events that are probably human designed.
One thing I've noticed with AI posters is that they're all "flat" in terms of attention. For whatever reason, they result in a post where every part is on the same level visually, and your eye does not get drawn to anything. You can't immediately see what is and isn't important.
The bad posters are absolute disasters in this regard. (And completely irredeemable in general! They are not "OK" in any way.)
But the better-stylized examples in the article aren't much better! Most of them have the same tendency. Only the minimalist Japanese and 40s Cubist styles do much better, and even those aren't structured amazingly. If you tried to add more information, I bet even the minimalist styles would become a flat and confusing.
This is the same problem I have with stock Claude prose and code. It's verbose, sure, but worse is that there's no quick way to tell what is and isn't important. In good code, you can understand the shape of the code at a glance; AI code is pretty much the opposite of that. And so are AI posters.
I work in a copy-print center where we take orders for business card, posters, flyers, invitations, and all sorts like that. Lately, I have been getting more and more AI generated artwork for these flyers and business cards, and they are not sized correctly. I can tell it's AI generated not from style, layout, or even hallucinations, but just the size. The background are a full color, the customer insists that it's the right size, but I have to tell them that if I print what they gave me, there is going to be large white borders on the sides, tops, or all around. I have had to explain to too many customers that AI doesn't know what an inch really is, as the reference images it has are different sizes. AI flyers could be the best design ever, but it will never be sized properly and will still piss off the print employee.
And I have found that if you are paying for an AI service to get these generic, wrong sized designs, you could have spent just as much going on Fiverr and gotten something that doesn't need to get a full style revision.
“The ai told me it’s right” is actually probably my biggest problem with AI being freely available. Yes I know karens existed before AI but even then I feel like the excuses were more… thoughtful? IE my dad is a designer/it looks right in the photoshop preview whatever.
Well, yes - those AI tools output images in aspect ratios which are not those of a typical sheet of paper (16:9, 2:3), which indeed wont't match. "Inches" etc doesn't matter.
You just need to offer the customer either the options of scale-to-fit / fill / stretch (white borders / crop on two edges / stretch), you probably already needed to do that before AI (such as people wanting to print letter-size documents in A4 land).
You dont have borderless printers there? Scale to cover full page and go!
>The problem with these is not so much that they’re bad. They’re OK, I don’t love them. The problem is that once you’ve seen that style 20 times it starts to irritate just from the sheer repetition.
This is one of the better statements of the issue right here. I think because people dislike the actors and economics surrounding AI they also feel a need to categorically reject any of it's products, but it's not necessarily bad in the sense of poor aesthetic taste as it is bad in it's lack of a appreciating that being novel as a style matters almost as much as the actual style and direct repetition teaches us not to like the style itself.
It's the same thing with EM dash, load bearing root causes, and emoji bullet point lists. It doesn't matter what the style AI uses, it ends up showing up so often it becomes actively repulsive.
The author claims that the AI posters don’t have to be horrible, but fail to see that the dozen variations generated are not distinctive - they might have somewhat different typography or imaginary, but still have the same AI uniformity and smell as the crappy restaurant poster you see on the street. The core issue is not only technical, but also the lack of vision and imagination when creating art or even infographics.
The alternative is WordArt, or just black on white Comic Sans with some bolding and font size variations with bad ClipArt. These small scale events would never hire a professional.
I'm old enough to remember that people also complained about WordArt and Clipart and too many fonts etc.
I see the chatgpt poster style on many small-scale local village events also. But again, what they replace wasn't any better. It's not replacing some beautiful craft that existed before.
But still, they were nice because you knew someone took the time to create them to promote an event and share the important information about it, and each person was producing their own awful posters.
Now with gen AI we have something filled with trash, everything looks the same, the important information is hard to find...
Sure, the variations offered in the article are a bit better and more opinionated, but they still reek AI conformity and I feel sick looking at them.
> they still reek AI conformity and I feel sick looking at them
I bet you would not feel sick if you didn't know ahead of time they were AI-generated. Some really are quite good.
It's saturation.
If I saw an Images 2.0 flyer in year 2020? In a world where Images 2.0 didn't exist? I'd be impressed. But if I see it now, today? I'm not impressed at all.
It's the same image, produced by the same AI and seen by the same person. So, what's the difference? What changed over time?
Saturation. "I've seen it all before." AI made that specific flyer style plentiful and omnipresent, and that made it "derivative" and "cheap". What used to invoke "cool" and "wow" was turned into a dreary cliche by repetition. Flaws that were easy to overlook when overshadowed by novelty stand out like a sore thumb now that you've seen them before in the same patterns many times over.
The image is the same - it has the same strengths and the same flaws. But your focus is shifted by familiarity.
It's the same mechanism that drives trends and fashion. AI just supercharges it.
Naturally, you can avoid a lot of it by using careful prompting and steering to guide an AI away from the "cliche" style-space. You can get something with both good quality and good identity that way.
But that requires: being aware of the problem, being really good at prompting, and putting in a considerable effort. It's hard to steer a model away from "AI cliches" if you don't have the eye to spot them in the first place.
Most AI-generated content doesn't have that kind of skill and effort applied to it - it simply uses the "model defaults", and gets the "model defaults". For all the good and bad that comes with those.
The activities being perfectly aligned and normalized is the big tell here to me
Idk how to express it exactly, but I don't see how a human would have come to something like this
If you think about whether it is AI, are good at recognising those tells, an thinking about whether it is AI, then its probable you will spot things like that.
Most people are not that good at spotting those tells, and when looking at a poster they will not be thinking about whether its is AI or not. If its not obviously AI they are not going to even think about it.
At least in this case I can't pretend I have some kind of super power since I knew beforehand that it was gen AI.
And also it's not like I'm saying I love all the man-made posters. Or that I never been "fooled" by gen AI content.
It's just that as soon as I start seeing some gen AI tells on an image, I can't unsee them and I feel disgusted by it.
If there's nothing to think about they may well not think.
That's the problem.
Like how if you bought a box of chocolates, and it was actually filled with rocks, you wouldn't dislike it until you found out.
Immediate glamor followed by gradual disappointment is AI output all over.
No, it's like if you bought a box of chocolates, and you couldn't distinguish if they were handmade or factory-made, even after you ate them.
And it took them telling you before you knew.
And then you decided you didn't like the ones made by the factory as much anymore.
Chocolates and rocks are different things.
Pictures and pictures are the same thing.
If they were the same thing nobody would complain about it, would they?
Haven't yet seen anyone here claiming to be a customer or visitor to this fair so we cannot say that.
> if you didn't know ahead of time they were AI-generated
You can't be serious... Are we looking at the same posters?
Yes. That's the issue: we are looking at the same posters.
It's just that "seeing this poster for the first time, unaware of the workings behind it" is a very different experience from "seeing this poster after you already saw dozens of other AI generated posters that used a similar style and had similar issues, got canny at spotting both the style and the issues in it, and came to associate them with cheap low quality work".
The former impression is "wow that's a good poster". The latter impression is "ew, it's posterslop". The poster, in the meanwhile, remains the same.
AI can often win in art contests - images, short stories, design. But that requires either sharp prompting, or an audience that's not familiar with "AI cliches". The quality is, if removed from the context, fairly good. If embedded in context, it's utter slop. The work is the same. Funny how that works.
> The quality is, if removed from the context, fairly good.
IMO that doesn't fully explain AI hate, triggered by simple exposure to AI generated images, unless you'd include all standard educational programs until introduction of AI - which is arguably a part of the context, but if so, IMO, "fairly good" is part of context and is devoid of meaning in absence of context and cannot be said.
Yes, context matters. The greatest painting in the world is just crushed materials smeared on a canvas, it's nothing too special without the context.
A computer (not even an LLM, just something generating random pixels) could randomly generate the exact same pixel pattern as the greatest painting in the world, and it would not be the greatest painting in the world, because context matters.
Because of what?
Context.
Is it the lack of hate? I could put all the hate I have into a person or group I hate while composing an AI art piece for instance.
No you couldn't, because you can't compose AI art. The AI composes it, and it can't feel hate.
I don't paint physically with paint when I use photoshop either. Photoshop doesn't feel hate.
The sentience of AI is also an open question.
If you read the article at all, the "everything looks the same" is easily fixed with just a tiny bit of effort.
It's not AI causing the sameyness and hard-to-read nature of these posters, it's people being lazy. I personally think there's a few nice looking ones in there (the punk fanzine style for one).
Sure it's not some 9/10 hand made poster, but considering these take 30 seconds to make, it's impressive.
> Sure it's not some 9/10 hand made poster, but considering these take 30 seconds to make, it's impressive.
It's not impressive. It would be impressive if a human did it, but a human did not do it. Is it impressive when a printer prints out 10 perfect copies of the same flyer, because it would be impressive if a human could do that? No, of course not. It's similarly not impressive when the copying machine makes a plausible copy of something a human once made.
> But still, they were nice because you knew someone took the time to create them to promote an event
Unlike a gift, "it's the thought that counts" doesn't fly with me here. I don't care how much effort the secretary took to cobble some shitty poster together - it still looked terrible. I'd rather look at something clean and polished produced by AI (no matter how "generic" people here claim the OP's posters look).
Prompt1: generate random poster
Polish: make it nicer
Some level of uniformity is fine and indeed the norm. It was uniform back when posters were hand painted, eg 19th century world fairs or zoo openings or theater posters. They look pretty similar. Carneval posters looked similar.
The expectation of some kaleidoscope of styles is not really grounded in how things used to be ever.
Also, it's just nostalgia, just like how some young people now think audio cassettes and discmans are "cool" and have some revival, some are nostalgic for the back-in-the-day Word posters because "at least back then", but "these days" it's decline etc. Pretty sure in a few years people will be nostalgic for crappy AI slop of 2025-26 because their shittiness will feel like some charm compared to whatever the AI will be able to do.
But sometimes I also purposefully made myself some Comic Sans stuff, exaggerating them in every possible way, as a joke. And it was well received because people knew it was my own work and understood the joke.
If I made this today, it would not be seen the same. People would thought I'm trying to fight gen AI trash or I'm nostalgic of the past. While I'm just trying to make a joke by making something awful on purpose.
And I couldn't do the same joke using gen AI. The "on purpose" cannot be conveyed. People would just see gen AI trash.
I was one of those "skilled friends" that people go to, to make those posters in times of need back in school. And this was many years ago. Didn't enjoy it, but just did it as part of volunteering, or help the student community or a school club out.
Some people enjoy doing that work, but most people did not, and I was often the last resort because a random club or activity could not find suitable help in time. So had to step up when a friend or acquaintance asked.
I think there is some misguided view where in "the good old days" people designed everything by hand. From the perspective of someone who had to make 10-20 of those a year as a volunteer, I can say it came at personal cost, often caused distractions from the actual event, and there was not enough people who stepped up to get it done. If it was so enjoyable we would have no problems finding people doing the work and that was not the case.
The posters and designs were often rushed out late night by the closest person you can find who had a copy of photoshop on their computer. If we had AI back then, I would bet you 100% it would be the preferable solution and no one would bat an eye. It wasn't the type of work a lot of people wanted to do, could do properly and is willing to do for free, at their spare time, rushed for a deadline.
I'm sorry you keep bad memories of those times.
I could be mistaken but in my case I never forced anyone to use their artistic skills, it was actually more often voluntary from them.
Basically everyone was doing their part using their skills if they had some useful for the project, or just their time/sweat.
The relationship we had (still have, actually) was healthy enough so they could just tell us to piss off if they didn't want to do it. I particularly remember one such instance, because I ended up doing an ugly poster but when asked, I said it was the work of our skilled friend.
On the other hand I've been spending at least an hour per week doing sysadmin work for various groups/clubs, it's not the funniest thing in the world, particularly in the evening when I already spent the whole day doing it at work, but it's just me doing my part for the greater good!
Making stuff that's bad on purpose is annoying, like acting retarded ironically. Make good stuff or just spend little effort. Putting in effort to look low effort is just trying to be special when you're not.
Sorry, but Walkmans and Discmans were considered cool... At the time.
Personally I like simple designs. I always remind people who make posters that whoever looks at them will only do so for a matter of seconds. If you want extensive detail, put it in smaller print. Put the main hook in large letters and a brief description.
But they became uncool when the iPod and mp3 players came out. Nobody felt sentimental about VHS artifacts either, and now it's a genz aesthetic or something. These things cycle, like I'm sure some old folks miss the radio hiss and listening to football matches with just audio.
I am somewhat tired of all the AI posters, but I have to agree with what you are saying. The alternative was not any better. I think there's a persistent and very vocal segment of the population that just want to complain about anything to do with AI with a take no hostage approach. Some instances are understandable but if a local small town event or a low budget restaurant using AI to make a poster draws so much ire, I feel that it may be likely misplaced personal frustrations projected towards others. The response don't seem to be proportional to the offence.
I know this is an internet forum, but do you have any experience with posters? There are many great tools to create posters from templates. You can make something in canva for example in minutes from free templates. You upload a photo, play around with it. You can also search the old internet for some tutorials. You know, like a human would do.
> The alternative is WordArt, or just black on white Comic Sans with some bolding and font size variations with bad ClipArt
??
The alternative is people just taking some markers & a sheet of paper, or chalk and a blackboard.
If you travel around east Asia you’ll be delighted by the variety and creativity of these handmade signs. Way better than anything produced digitally.
But of course their relationship to handwriting is completely different there compared to the west.
One of my favorite local ice cream shops uses Comic Sans (white on navy blue) on all their signage and this is one of the main reasons I frequent it. If they were to switch to some AI slop I wouldn't step my feet in there again.
Sounds like you could go to a different shop right now, that stands out for its ice cream instead of its signs. :)
> But again, what they replace wasn't any better.
I would argue otherwise.
whereas before I'd take a glance and go "hm interesting" or whatever, with these its just "oh look, it's AI slop" and that's all I will notice
In the examples above, that’s really your own loss? There will only be one or two events in your local village, it seems self defeating to ignore what they offer because you don’t like the medium. At least these posters are well laid out and easy to read.
I can't help but like the posters for the sheer reason that they annoy some annoying people who have a visceral reaction to the concept of AI.
Same mentality as people who voted for Trump. No wonder he's become such an AI booster.
> who have a visceral reaction to the concept of AI
why do you think this is the reason?
should I be cheering and clapping when someone goes on chatgpt and say "make me a poster" and they think they're a genius when this slop comes out?
People take photos with their cell phones instead of painting a scene like Rembrandt. They don't think they are a genius, and nobody cheers and claps. The photos look fine, they get the job done, and everyone moves on with their lives without projecting insecurities online.
God forbid some overworked volunteer make a poster in 30 seconds instead of taking a college course to please some huffy internet commentators with an axe to grind
> t still have the same AI uniformity and smell as the crappy restaurant poster you see on the street
You have really try hard to see that. It is good enough to not give immediate annoyed reflex of seeing something in the same ubiquitous default chatgpt style.
For goodness sake - these are just a fair posters.
I don’t think the bauhaus one is horrible, nor is the cubist one. They’re not great works of art, but if I saw one out in the wild, my reaction would not be: “bloody ai art making everything visually putrid again” nor, do I think they’re worse than the clip art and badly taken digital photograph agglomerations they would be replacing.
For me what always gives it away is not the posters themselves, it’s the context. These are all overdesigned for a local community fair. There is no way they’d be paying for a professional designer for this, therefore it’s AI.
On the other hand if it had word art, grammar/spelling mistakes, images with wrong aspect ratios or clipping issues, that would immediately convince me it wasn’t AI.
Context is everything.
A twee handwritten sign for free range eggs at the roadside is likely to do well.
A handwritten sign for flying lessons on the other hand..
And anyone selling flying lessons could probably afford a graphic designer, it sounds like we agree.
Now that you mention it, I'm pretty sure I recall a hand-painted "Skydiving" sign at some small rural airport...
Prompt: make me a poster in the "looks like garbage made by someone who doesn't know how to use Microsoft word or what aspect ratio is" style...
It doesn't fail, it actually demonstrates how the model can improve the output if the prompt is better. AI generated websites look like crap because developers don't know any design language so they have no idea how to prompt the models to get something good and more unique and creative out of them. This shows that you can actually achieve that with just slightly better prompting. Just like with programming, actually.
They look absolutly well done.
Well maybe not that, it would have to stop almost aligning text to make it good instead of usable.
Idk, those are more than alright to my eye. Surely they won't win any design awards, but as a throwaway poster for one time event these are miles better than any amateur work.
> but fail to see that the dozen variations generated are not distinctive - they might have somewhat different typography or imaginary, but still have the same AI uniformity and smell as the crappy restaurant poster you see on the street
Hard disagree: every single example TFA gives is way better than the horrible generic ones that are polluting every shop and LinkedIn post.
It's not even close.
That's not what OP is complaining about. The issue with AI art isn't how the individual piece look, but the similarities they have in aggregate. One image can look perfectly fine, once you seen a hundred they all start looking extremely similar. Human brains are great pattern recognizer and lock on to those similarities, even when they are covered under different styles.
When all your art comes from a single source, it's difficult to create real diversity and novelty. That's still the big issue when it comes to genAI in general, without a lot of hand holding you'll just bound to end up with slop, since the AI won't get creative on its own.
Did you look at the examples? They're almost ridiculously diverse, and the prompts show very little handholding was required.
They're not novel, but a poster for a spring fair isn't supposed to look like a de Kooning.
These arguments are almost completely detached from reality. Most artists aren't diverse either - they're told to find a style and stick to it, and that's what they do.
Commercial graphic designers are more versatile, but the set of standard looks is still relatively small. Hollywood movie posters and book cover designers are notorious for reusing the same tropes and colour systems, and that's been true for years, long before AI was a thing.
> They're almost ridiculously diverse, and the prompts show very little handholding was required.
The structure is identically to all of that, big title, graphic, list with icons. As said, they look fine on their own, the problem is only becomes apparent when you had to look had hundreds or thousands of them. It's the em-dash or the "load-bearing" of the AI-art world, the more you look at this stuff, the more apparent the similarities become.
> Hollywood movie posters and book cover designers are notorious for reusing the same tropes and colour systems, and that's been true for years, long before AI was a thing.
Exactly, but with AI that issue becomes even more drastic since the models don't create diversity by default.
> Most artists aren't diverse either
They don't have to be, since there are millions of them, all coming from different backgrounds, with different art styles and all. While there are only a handful of big AI models, who all come with a pretty generic default style.
There was some upgrade in tech where the posters had legible text and all used that paint brush text highlight thing. The first time I saw it on Bambulab makerworld I though, "huh thats a neat image". Then I saw it on every low view count youtube thumbnail, and then the exact same thing at the failing sushi business menu and I was no longer impressed. I'm actively repulsed when I see that style of image now.
I am not sure. If something is not in the usual AI style its not going to leap out at you that it is AI the same way. Maybe if thought about it, but when someone looks at a poster they typically focus on the information, not the style.
Only at the first derivative. What you're observing is an additional layer of 'but, in genre X!' and then same slop, different prompt.
You're complaining about what happens when people don't even supply the additional layer, but just go 'make me a poster, no mistakes, it should be a great poster'. When you give no direction at all you get the purest of slop. You start giving directions, you start narrowing down the area you're digging through the slop of, and possibly you ask for something that people aren't familiar with and they're only able to identify that you asked.
Hence, Chinese posters with a cherry blossom and the kanji for 'Japan' and such. Someone went 'make it Chinese' and the slop associated it with 'Oriental' and what came out was collective unconscious, such that people who weren't thinking and didn't have experience might not look twice, but the meaning turned out tainted.
Sort of like food depictions that more closely resemble a pile of maggots. Those glisten! (well, I suppose they must.) There's a whole uncanny-valley thing that happens on every level and inspires revulsion. I'm suggesting that is still happening in the other examples but you've not got the experience to register their problems. With the food depictions, all animals eat stuff so we're hardwired to bounce off unsafe foods even if they glisten…
The variations the author generates are night and day better than the "piss filter" era slop in the first batch.
Some of them would have passed as intentionally crafted by a graphics designer before AI.
And let's not forget that before AI, many of these would be word doc printouts with clip art. The alternative wasn't hiring a designer - the alternative was doing nothing special at all.
I was honestly ok with the silly looking posters. Where I'm from in italy it's common to have sagre, sort of cheap food events sponsored by the municipality/local shops. Before ai the posters looked like each other (as in, poster typically looking like sagre posters). Now not even that, they're just slop ai that could be everything before you read. Nobody needed better looking posters in this case...
Before ai example https://www.sagretoscane.com/sagre/fi/rignano-sullarno/sagra...
Post Ai example https://www.instagram.com/p/DZiKFZgIwcY/
Here's an article by the biggest online Italian newspaper, worth reading translated https://www.ilpost.it/2026/07/26/ai-locandine-sagre/
Yikes. The old posters had an austere beauty
And the old fluo ones are more effective than decorated new ones, since they're mostly on road sides and you need to be able to tell at a glance what they're about. I unironically went to a sagra recently because I spotted a similar fluo advert while cycling in Tuscany
I've seen this trend in India very much . Every new poster every new shop banner or heck even the new led signs are all that red and yellow lazy chat gpt design. People can spend extra two to three minutes to get a proper one.
There's a similar problem with AI-generated video, but it's in the time dimension. There's a huge genre of Asian vertical dramas, and now about 17,000 a day are being cranked out by AI systems. But there are maybe ten major plots. "Lost daughter of rich family comes home" appears over and over. There are longer videos where the plot gets lost. I was watching one where it seemed like the "save the world" goal scrolled off the history buffer and the hero was off on side quest after side quest with the main goal forgotten.
This probably comes from a lack of intermediate level structure. To make a good dramatic story, you usually start from a plot summary, add character sheets, develop a plot, then a storyboard, then detail the storyboard. That way, you end up at the desired end. If you just let LLM-based systems free run, they go on forever, which is real life but bad entertainment. Unless the goal is a soap opera.
There's good stuff out there, from people who can plot.
"I was watching one where it seemed like the "save the world" goal scrolled off the history buffer and the hero was off on side quest after side quest with the main goal forgotten."
That's hardly a problem unique to AI-generated low budget dramas. That's a problem that literally derailed the latter seasons of Game of Thrones, a show with a huge budget, massive human writer's room, drawing from award winning source material.
People ascribe every problem to AI, instead of just recognizing that people can make crap with any tool you put in their hands, be it Seedance, Houdini, or a typewriter.
The goal for most of these vertical shorts is soap opera so this is a feature and not a bug. Also, in order to maintain engagement, they often need to have continuously escalating plots which makes for bad writing (typically in good plots you have dips in action before the next climax). The problem isn't what AI can generate and rather what people are asking for (both the audience and the producers).
> it seemed like the "save the world" goal scrolled off the history buffer and the hero was off on side quest after side quest with the main goal forgotten.
This is pretty standard for a JRPG.
I wonder how these videos have ‘asian’ cultural values encoded in them. What models do they use? Trained on what? Etc.
Putting aside the question of "why consume any media," and even admitting that I myself have seen hundreds of hours of General Hospital (don't ask), why consume this media specifically? Are people seeking this out or is it just TikTok algorithms?
Is it reductive to ask what the point is? Do fans get together and discuss plot developments? "I can't believe X did Y!" Maybe it's the future of media but to me it just rings hollow.
Social media algorithms have increasingly promised to replace self-curation, an effort consuming higher thinking activity, with an automatic optimization of limbic responses. AI just proved to be an effective tool for stretching the base motif into an infinite series of stimulus, fulfilling that same function and winning over by volume.
I think that lack of variety is a strong signal of how much slop we already had. There's no other way for this to happen in a statistical model.
Borrowed the same idea to create distinct video styles for videozero:
https://videozero.ai/styles/
As a guy who used to do art direction and was a creative director i can with some confidence say that: “most “designs sucks balls” and 95% of the worlds population DO NOT CARE.
I wish it was different but estetics, color sensitivity and for a lack of better word “taste” is a skill that needs training - the kerning alone on those make me sad - but the dirty secret is that meticulous design and craft is a dying breed - why spend days on designing whitespace when you can get something the client likes in 10 minutes from a prompt?
For the type interested - get this: https://amzn.eu/d/09z7Mut8
I think this is an unfair comparison. The "better" AI-generated posters in the article are all much more minimalist.
Minimalist designs have much less opportunity to insert "personality", be it that of a designer or that of an AI. No wonder they look less AI-generated, and when they do it is because some "AI-baroque" slipped through. Fancy unicode characters no human would think of are the salient one in OPs examples.
It'd be much fairer to compare AI and human for the same desired style, and yes a lot of AI-generated stuff is immediately recognizable because no one bothered to tell the AI about the desired style.
At a certain point, pottery that looked like a child made it became the high end, because well-executed pottery was coming out of machines.
We've officially reached that point with advertisements. Save your tokens. Hire your 9-year-old niece to draw the poster by hand and you'll likely get a far better reaction from most people. Nobody goes to a fair because the poster had a "modernist / Bauhaus-influenced graphic style".
I think there are sadly a huge number of people who don't care about art or creativity at all. They like the idea of AI and sterility and everything else. Increasingly these people dominate the economy because they are the most willing to hurt their fellow man in pursuit of status.
These people don't go to fairs, it's true, but they do bulldoze the fairgrounds to build a data center. To build a semblance of consent, they need to host brainwashing events like "fairs" and so on where they can propagandize and threaten citizens. They can't hire a local artist to advertise it, because literally none of them will do it. AI comes in handy when you're absolute evil.
I would be interested in the income percentile of people visiting fairs, and the prices of items there vs commercial items on a grocery store or mall. I have a feeling 'fairs' are a very different demographic today than 200 years ago.
I mean it isn't wealthy people coming to eat fried chicken on a stick or see the show hogs. Sure its a bad and exploitative deal where you probably are out $25 for that fried chicken on a stick but it doesn't mean the underlying demographics have changed from the "people of the earth" as they've always been. If you have to guess, close your eyes and imagine the sort of people that live in the rural townships 40 minutes outside your nearest major city. That is who you will find at your state or county fair, those people and their teenage kids smuggling in booze in gatorade bottles.
Local farmers market, now thats a dramatically different clientele than the county/state fair. Bread is like $9 a loaf there so you can imagine what sort of individual that selects for.
People of the earth don't seem to care much for ai art or not. What I was trying to say is that fairs aren't places targeting the lower classes trying to sell the cheapest items possible. The lower classes are served by industrialized mass production today: injection molding, factory farming, etc. So I don't see why they want to hate one businessman (the builder of a datacenter) over another (the fair shop owners). I also do not understand how he says these people hate fairs or don't go to fairs in a thread about fair stall owners and small business owners using AI to make their shop logos/posters themselves.
Those people run stalls at fairs. The amount of slop I see at fairs is really on the upswing.
The people making AI posters are the same ones selling Ali express bulk buys as "hand made jewelry" or selling 3D printed dragons.
But the thing is, all have that icon+text style in the "tombola, cakes and drinks..." part. If I wanted to be distinctive, this is what I would have tried to get rid of at first, not the "visual style" (it's sort of like Windows XP visual styles, no matter how different they are the overall layout is still recognisably Windows).
yeah
although I guess it's that the author used the same context with the original generated image and thus it just reused that icon+text thing
but in general, these models do seem to be kind of just go for an information-dump type of style where its just listing everything and putting as much stuff in that is associated with the words, which is what these LLMs do
so you'd probably need to steer them heavily with explicit instructions on what to do and how to get rid of it, which I'd bet nobody will actually do when making these posters
Buried at the end of the article the author linked a library of different art styles applied to the same poster content. Found some new cool art styles to try out in the future. https://john.hartnup.uk/poster-prompts/
that's great, worth trying
Generative AI is actually pretty good at giving you rough concept sketches and iterating on top of existing renders.
However, you must retain control over the scene graph and its composition. Use the output of the AI to guide how you work it. Do not assume the AI system has the ability to simulate world space with any meaningful fidelity. You can move transforms around in Blender and Unity with floating point bit increment/decrement operations if you wish. LLMs will never have this level of control.
Lighting systems are an entire universe of reasons you should do it the hard way too. Being able to iterate light placement and intensity with nanometric precision starts out looking like a brick wall, but it turns into a superpower once your scene is halfway decent.
I can usually tell when someone used AI to do things like generate steam store art because their camera doesn't change in a physically plausible way between the horizontal and vertical layouts. When you have access to the raw scene you can place the same camera in multiple orientations without altering any other aspect of the scene. The header capsule and vertical capsule are very difficult to make look coherent if you are using an LLM to generate these assets. Your best bet with AI art is to render something so big that it can be cropped for both, which is also quite obvious and ugly. Being able to instrument a scene as if it were a real place is way more productive than an LLM once the scene is ~done.
I think we're in the 'early digital camera' phase of AI art gen.
The real photographers knew they were shit photos. They were grainy, bad lenses, and ugly. A lot of people still liked them because they were much more convenient for a lot of uses than the film ones.
Well, I guess there's still a lot of film people. But film had a ceiling. Digital cameras kept getting better.
The adaptive film photographers eventually adopted the tool. A lot of their skills transferred well to the new medium. Most waited until the cameras got good enough, though.
I'm not sure when that'll be with AI art gen. Seeing scenes broken up into layers in the latest gpt image generation, though, made me think we might be near.
Incidentally, the "early digital camera" aesthetic has been back in style for a couple of years now.
I saw the coolest bunch of kids in giant pants on the subway taking photos and looking at them on what was essentially my old Olympus and was transport back 25 years.
No, it hasn't. You're confusing digital cameras with Polaroids.
Early digital cameras had larger pixel sizes and different spectral characteristics. They often have deeper blues and such. They have some own charms. Modern CMOS images tends to be less saturated. It's definitely not as big as Instax, though, which I suspect has been effectively kept alive by maid cafe culture[1].
1: They charge $10-20 per a quick autographed shot for a parasocial irreplaceable memory with an absolutely random female cafe employee, which justifies quite a significant range of film costs. Crazy, but it means they industrially consume medium format reversal films! I'm not complaining for that.
No, I’m not. Old digital point-and-shoots, and the harsh direct flash aesthetic, have been very popular. Some specific camera models that some random popular TikToker happened to recommend have been selling at quite a mark-up.
Two-ish decades is the standard length of a trend cycle. 00s is now retro in a cool way. Gen Z/Alpha, who have grown with phone cameras, want a different look, and having a real flash is particularly attractive because it allows taking reasonable photos in night clubs etc. Just like we did back in the day. (browsing old Facebook photos)
How do you quantify that as a trend? Prices change all the time. How many people actually bought it?
The stuff about "generations" and trend cycles is nonsense.
Ok, think what you want. I have zero interest in arguing about stuff like trying to quantify qualitative things.
Polaroids are much bigger but I've also seen a resurgence in crappy early digital cameras in young adult spaces. There's been a slow rise in all things Y2K in some spaces and getting a crummy digital cam from a thrift store or ebay is a sick find.
Quantify this. What constitutes a resurgence, or a slow rise?
No one is compiling sales charts on second hand cameras at thrift stores. But I can tell you from personal experience going to parties that more people are taking photos with old digi cams or modern old style digi cams like the kodak charmera than phones.
When gen z does use phones they end up running the images through apps like 1998 cam to make it look like digicam photos or using effects to turn video in to VHS camcorder style video.
It’s the same cultural response as the analog movement. The collective sense that everything Covid on stole our future, and AI is only making it worse.
Did digital take over because of quality or convenience?
A 35 mm film camera is still much better quality than my smartphone's digital camera, especially more than a few meters away or in lower light conditions. But my smartphone is the camera I actually have with me, I don't have to buy film or wait for it to be developed, so that's what I use.
Also remember the days of the first color printers.
People were so proud to show off their colors that every single word was in a different color.
What's interesting is that you can't do the same with long-form AI prose. You can ask any given LLM to write in different styles, but it will always fall back on the same rhetorical and structural techniques, so the "new style" is strictly surface-level. In fact, it's getting worse over time -- especially in Claude from Opus 4.6 --> Opus 5.
I suspect that the same thing is happening here -- as other comments note: lack of distinctiveness, uniformity -- but that the low information content of posters prevents it from becoming immediately obvious.
You can't really do this with images either. The least AI-looking images in the post are ones that have the least amount of content, the fewest things to mess up. Once you introduce more detail, it starts converging on the same flaws you usually see, just covered up by a thin veneer of a different artstyle.
It's a thing inherent to diffusion models I think, a kind of uniformity of content across the image.
The similarity may be partly the image model's fault – especially if it's been post-trained/distilled towards performance, correctness and "quality" (for some value of "quality" anyway) which inevitably occurs at the expense of creativity and variation.
But I think it might be more about the LLM's lack of creativity in coming up with the prompt for the image (or "embellishing" a user's prompt), or directly the embedding vector if the LLM is itself the image model's text encoder. Then whatever the image gen outputs is simply an instance of the GIGO principle. It would be interesting to test whether similar cliches and motifs also occur if you ask the model to create an SVG rather than a raster image.
The examples all look off because the author keeps using "Spring Fayre" as a lorem-ipsum for styles that do not match the vibe of "Spring Fayre at the brewery". Distant second is that they have this sterile "Microsoft Word Template" feel that needs to be sanded off another way.
I guess you can justify ignoring such "advanced" techniques if it's aimed at the literally-zero-effort crowd, but who from there is reading this?
The original posters were better than any of the mockups.
Not because they looked good, but because they used a design language that "at-a-glance" said what the event was. Sure, the designers republic/etc looked less commonplace, but if I was looking for a fun local faire I would absolutely never notice those posters and if I went i'd assume it was a completely different type of event than it is (e.g. some sort of modern art faire).
Every one of those posters didn't fit the medium idea at all (local faire event) except the child's drawing one could maybe pass.
In fact I can almost guarantee that all the posters in this article would perform worse than the originals if you were to test them on the street or in a facebook group.
If you are an actual production/commercial designer, your first goal is to understand what the clientele wants and converts, secondarily make it beautiful.
This failed both, zero understanding of the purpose of commercial art (to speak to the actual clientele and bring in more people) and ugly within their own design language (but yes, less common).
Would have been interesting to try and make designs that actually make sense for this product AND are a bit less generic.
my exact thoughts. i clicked on that fb post and someone in the comments linked their non-ai poster and i was just like, oh..that event seems way less exciting and fun and spring. i want to agree w the premise of the article but all the examples are worse and spark no desire in me to go to the fayre
To be honest I’m surprised, I actually like them, even though they are obviously reductions to the average, bland repetitions of stuff that’s been done over and over again. That’s not necessarily a criticism, I know that’s what AI is and we should not expect more. And of course a small event with little budget does not need more than that (although of course you could think of something more unique if you wanted).
What scares me is what happens after we park on these ideas for years/decades because they are cheap and fast and just good enough. Will anyone take the time and effort to continue being creative?
Everyone's sick of seeing the same default ChatGPT style on posters for everything from village fetes to coffee shops to school plays.
But I'm convinced that just vetoing AI is to throw away the baby with the bathwater. So I set out to prove it.
What do we loose when we ditch generative AI? Easier poster making? What good does that do? So now pop&mom can have a poster in their shop that looks as if some graphic artist was paid for it, but wasn't. Will that drive the economy up? Improve poverty? Halt the war? Make life more tolerable? No, it just adds the pretense of having a professional designer, something that will quickly loose its added value when everybody does it.
You seem to think design is mere flourishing, nice colors to make something pleasant to look at, but ultimately superficial and useless. I would strongly object to that--visual presentation can carry a lot of additional information, and improve the transmission as well. Giving more people the ability to present information well leads to more efficient communication, which I wouldn't just dismiss this easily.
But there isn't any extra information in AI posters. It's necessarily either something that can already be conveyed in writing (that is after all, what they're prompted in), or something the AI pulled in based off of the text unintentionally, at which point no actual information is being conveyed by the added visuals.
I think you need to remember that most people have no eye for design, and that includes even just presenting the essentials of an event in text.
And AI can actually do it much better than the average idiot. Of they ask.
Like, if you ask - "here's the event details, let's make a poster" in the right way, it's going to come back and say "you've supplied the venue name but not the street address, do you want to include that?".
And then it'll lay the info out with generally sensible relative sizes and positions, better than the average idiot would.
And, probably about equally as well as the average "I'm not a designer but I know a bit" amateur - and a lot faster.
The catch there is that the idiot only gets this if their prompt is right - and since they're an idiot, it probably isn't.
I think there's a gap in the market for a service with system prompts that make it work for people who don't think very hard.
(That might be what, say, Canva Pro does with its AI features. I don't know because I'm not paying for that.)
So you want to reduce entropy by “fixing” semantic mistakes and hardcoding some design decisions “by the book” and end up with what exactly? The exact same poster everywhere?
That's true. Since ornamentation is effort-signaling, it may get dropped once it's cheap. Same thing that happened with clothing and home decor. The functional part may be beneficial though, even on utilitarian grounds. But yes, a lot of design is not about function but social signaling of taste and money as well as fashion.
If you ditch generative AI you go back to needing to pay an artist/designer for their work, and they likely charge more than ChatGPT because they might have rent/bills and that sort of thing to cover.
The sort of use cases I was think of (village fête etc.) would never have paid for a professional designer. We're talking about an event that's delighted to raise £500 for the church roof repair fund. Even £50 for a poster is 10% of the fundraising lost.
If it wasn't AI, it would be Comic Sans and some clipart.
every one of them still reeks of AI. especially the trend of icons next to the activities (tombola etc). its just a reskin but they all look AI, just not that triggering minimum effort AI look that is everywhere.
For some of them if you weren't told they're AI I doubt you'd be able to tell, as they look like normal graphic design posters I've seen pre 2022.
exactly. Hindsight is 20/20.
Have you considered making the model leverage computer use via Work/Codex?
I'd imagine making the agents use the same tools that people utilize would greatly dial back how AI-generated these things look, and it would provide much better control too.
With Astra being genuinely much better at this, it should be more viable than ever.
If you break out more sophisticated tools - give Claude Code some skills, let it work in SVG or PDF, create bitmap assets and composite them with real fonts and vector assets, I'm sure you can achieve a lot.
But the point of this blog post was to demonstrate what a PTA mum can achieve even with just ChatGPT, if they just prompt a little more creatively.
The proviso though is that you don't get many tries on free tier. Or if you pay for more tokens, you can fall into a rabbit hole of iterating where it's no longer a quick task.
I agree. AI is here to stay. It isn't crypto. There's real utility behind it.
Trying to deny it is just going to end up fighting the tide, but the future belongs to the folks that learn to harness it properly.
I enjoyed the post, and I have already sent it to some friends that I think will find it useful. Thanks!
What if AI becomes really expensive to use?
It will (for a while). We are already seeing the groundwork being laid.
It’s unlikely to stay that way, though.
I believe the point is that there is no baby in this bathwater
Removing as many possible steps to a craft makes it far less personal. Disconnecting the human from the end product.
I would never attend an event with an entirely generated poster becuase that tells me you didn't care enough, and that attitude is probably permeating into the rest of the event.
Similarly, back before these models existed, I'd never attend an event with an overly stuffed "marketing" feel to it. It's the same crap just with a different tool attached to it.
I'd rather attend an event with a poster made of stock clip art, but a human decided the composition, and added doodles in between because that at least gives me the impression that SOMEONE is caring about the event.
Basically, it feels detached from the actual point of an event: community.
>I'd never attend an event where they simply generated a poster in Word or Photoshop, because it tells me they didn't care enough to carve the woodblock for the print, and that attitude is probably permeating into the rest of the event.
the organizer cared enough to make and distribute a poster, and they were small enough to not hire a marketing firm
those are the hallmarks of the community events you claim to want
AI poster signals that this is a cash grab temu dropshipping operation. A human made even if shitty poster signals care and effort.
This is not about AI. This is about human taste. AI generated the posters. But then a human looked at it and said “this looks great, I’ll take it”.
The same person would have taken the same design from a “designer” if they could afford it. So it doesn’t matter if it’s AI generated or not.
People who complain about this, should build a product that will use AI to develop human taste. That’d be a better use of energy.
Leaving aside the quality of the different posters here, I think the interesting question is where did the default AI generated style come from? It's certainly not one of the styles listed if you interrogate chatgpt, it's not something it seems to be choosing to do.
I think the signature noisy, crowded, HDR-y look shows these posters are being spat right out of a diffusion model. They always have an image background with the classic light halos around text.
When I one-shot a poster out of Gemini or whatever, I can't make anything nearly as bad as the ones I see every day. What on earth are people even using to make stuff that bad?
ChatGPT, which seems to be the "Kleenex" of AI right now, has a very distinct default look to it's generated images and I am almost certain OAI did it on purpose to avoid regulation.
The models are totally capable of producing undetectable AI images, but abuse/missuse/outcry would only hurt them.
Much better to just leave obvious tells in the default generations 99.99% of people use.
>Leaving aside the quality of the different posters here, I think the interesting question is where did the default AI generated style come from?
This is what I find interesting too. Claude’s writing style too. It’s quite unique and really bad. It’s not just mimicking something and it’s certainly not trained (intentionally) to write like that. So how does it converge there?
I suspect if we were small business owners then we would be inundated with facebook ads for whoever makes those horrible signs.
I was wondering that too - presumably they are all from the same image generator, but which one?
They are definitely all ghastly - way too busy for me to want to give a 2nd glance at them. Of the block of examples shown, the bottom right one on off-white background is a bit less visually objectionable than the others, but still gives me that AI slop vibe.
> "Avoid pastel/airbrush/oil style art or images of people."
I would also suggest the AI avoid trying to make realistic-looking musical instruments, because I've never seen an AI poster with a correct musical instrument. The uncanny-valley of an attempted instrument that has clear deformities hurts my brain and gives me the creeps. If you want a real instrument, just copy-and-paste a real instrument. Alternative maybe let the AI generate a cartoonish or clip-art-style musical instrument, so my brain isn't bothered by the disconnect between something that is trying to look real but isn't.
Contempt for art is what this is.
For example, Sure, you can make a craven facsimile of punk art for your poster. But that art style signals to punks that other punks are going to be there. You would never reproduce that style using traditional methods because you are not a member of that artistic tradition.
You should keep the originals. They signal to AI slopsters that this is a great place to meet other slopsters.
I see, across my city and others I visit, every bar/restaurant/etc now has low effort one shot posters, menus, etc, some with old chatgpt nonsense text / errors. It's everywhere. All that brown-ish hue food 'pictures' etc. I mean 'authentic Pizza napolitana!' and then an AI generated picture of said pizza... One of them (an Italy born Italian restaurant owner here) and he just said; people come in with the very expensive pictures / menus I had before and the same amount of people come in with these free ones. And he actually likes these better as photographing (real, not mcd/burgerking plastic props with poison paint to make it look better) food is hard, even when paid for.
I'd rather not see photographs in the menu then seeing fake images.
The funny thing is, 10 years ago, people said photos on menus was a sign of extremely poor quality.
TBF the food places here that have photos on the menus are either chain restaurants or really bad fast food. In the latter case, the photos are flat, grey and unappetizing. (Because food photography is hard.)
Good restaurant in my locale do not have photos of their food.
I suppose the AI possibilities mean that the bad fast food places will start having decent (fake) photos which doesn’t really make that much of a difference to me.
Here in Bielsko Biala (southern Poland) I see the same in few pubs, never seen on menus though. Shops seem to be creating lots of marketing images as well with AI and it just looks...off. In any case doesn't make me want to enter the place.
This feels like an AI trap almost. A lot of the badness comes from people who don't want/can't put effort into it, so we all get a deluge of the sameyness.
Or is it? Could it be the well established low-effort tendency when the dominant culture is shopping centers, vehicles, similar eating establishments, and the style of suburban housing to a large extent? That would surely encourage the LLM to emit in a similar manner. That sameyness provides a signal of comfort and familiarity.
I think this is a misdiagnosis of the problem. The AI posters are just fine, perhaps even pretty good.
The problem is that using AI to create the posters show a lack of willingness to put in effort, and it makes you question whether the producer cares about the product and whether they care about the large scale societal problems related to the usage of post-2022 transformer based neural networks.
How much effort was put into these things pre-AI? None of these are big professional things, just local events. Those never had professional posters.
Deception is certainly part of the problem. Imagine if your friend sent you a paragraph personal text message on your birthday. Then imagine you find out they didn't write it at all, their AI agent just went through the contact list, saw your birthday and generated a message based on previous conversations.
The message you received is the same either way, but it's clearly different.
Or they would pay a designer to do it for them. Also no effort but just cost more.
> lack of willingness to put in effort
Do you only buy hand-churned butter?
Most fliers put together for community events pre-AI were Microsoft Word or Google Docs plus clip art.
The world is getting better, but before everyone realizes it we have to complain first and reminisce about the good old days of Wingdings and Comic Sans.
You at least had to think. Let me put a winging here. Let me choose this clipart and drag it over there. This looks alright I think, I'll go with it.
Now people just shut the brain off. Prompt AI. Get thing. Done with task. Ugga gugga.
I mean isn't it a known thing where older people get more senile when they stop intellectually challenging themselves? And now we are doing it for ourself for all these low hanging fruit mental exercises we used to bake into our lives where we did have to, gasp, think for a moment, even if the task was unimportant or stupid.
It’s actually very amusing to me comic sans is being referred to as “charmingly honest” on this forum, of all places. Shows how much this is all just aesthetic judgement and doesn’t have any connection to reality, just opinions. Before, comic sans was so low effort it earned scorn and derision. Now, it’s charming. Meanwhile, it’s actually the same amount of (low) effort as always. But for some reason now it has been elevated. Seen people say the same about MS paint drawings, and that’s when realized this isn’t serious at all.
Everyone is suffering and not getting what they want to some degree. Life is short, and opportunity runs out. People turn this into bitterness and direct it at external things that are going well that they're not a participant in.
It's not just AI, it's everything. Romantic rivals, celebrities, sports teams, fandoms, choice of IDE or programming language.
It's a social evolutionary strategy to neg and gossip about people and things you don't like or are jealous of. It's low energy, has little downside, and can reduce the fitness of rivals, especially when done in group settings.
The algorithm has co-opted this part of our primate brain and turned it into ad dollars. It's also twisted discourse to be sour and negative by default because it activates these perverse reward pathways.
Designers republic and memphis were the only designs i couldn't immediately see were AI generated.
The only reason i couldn't tell memphis is because it's aping a known design language already, it's just a perfect copy so me not being able to tell it wasn't AI isn't a free pass in this case.
I think if there was a little less "grid" feeling to the layout details then i wouldn't be able to tell on a few of the other designs either.
Edit: the designers republic version is quite a lot different than the others, it's not just that it's the only design to avoid pairing every feature with an icon, it's the whole layout variety - there's different font sizes, the positioning of elements is very well done to my eye. I'm gonna say this has to be another case like memphis, there's some pre-existing design language that i don't know of and it's just aping that. It's much more human than the others which i can believe are straight ai.
What is the tell on the punk one?
I'm not the GP but if you look at actual 1980s zines the difference is obvious, even if it's not easy to put into words. The absence of photos or hand-drawn graphics in particular.
The origins of the punk movement are in counterculture and DIY, so there's something particularly perverse about using an AI model to generate a poster in that style.
Something horrible I've noticed with a lot of AI-generated design is the size of the typeface.
There's a menu for a place in my town and it's completely illegible. They printed the same thing in three sizes, and you need a magnifying glass to see the text on the smallest two.
Accessibility matters, and is part of the job of a designer. The problem with AI tools is that by skipping the expert, you risk making some horrible mistakes.
I went to our state fair recently, and there were so many advertisements for their food that was AI generated, and I suppose if the food looked anything like what was depicted maybe I wouldn't have had a problem, but I felt "tricked" into buying something that appeared good, and turns out, looked nothing like what it was. I overpaid, and didn't even end up eating 1/4 of it. I'm not sure if this quite falls in the same vein as the og post, but it definitely made me feel that way.
I should be fair (no pun intended) there was one booth that had mini donuts that I felt were better than the AI generated poster advertisement, but the rest of the food I ate, was certainly not.
I will say, it was a learning experience, and next time I will just look at what others bought and try to determine if that might be the same as the AI generated images, and whether it looks good enough to order, rather than look at the AI images.
The thing about the icons next to each phrase is that they are useless. Forget how they look, instead ask why they are there? Icons in UX design give a visual representation of what a button does, to help people understand the interaction with the UI. Well, these are posters. There are no buttons. It shows a fundamental misunderstanding of why an icon exists in the first place. (And yes, this is true for many of the places where AI throws in icons.)
That is why, even if the look of a poster is OK, they are failures. Because they forget that the reason these advertising posters exist is to communicate something that is going on. A nice look to them is a bonus, not the core purpose. So claiming that AI isn't doing a horrible job is because the author is misunderstanding what the job is in the first place.
> The problem is that once you’ve seen that style 20 times it starts to irritate just from the sheer repetition.
But that's how the algorithm behind LLMs functions. It simply cannot create something unique by stepping out of its existing knowledge base. It has to refurbish existing data, because, well, that's all it has.
One might argue that a human artist also is refurbishing data, made out of experiences and knowledge it has gather throughout its life.
The difference I think comes from something extra (that we're entirely dumb-founded on) that the human mind can contemplate and extrapolate from, to be able to generate something truly unique and different.
I hope (and believe) this extra magical capacity is what will not allow AI (at least in its current statistical form) to be able to match us in terms of creativity & uniqueness.
This is good to know, but the kind of folks who use AI to create their posters and menus aren't going to be able to be so specific. They'll throw the details at an LLM and take whatever they get the first time. What matters is they didn't have to pay a designer (they ignore that they're paying a subscription).
One trick that works from IRL is building a moodboard. Go to Pinterest, find what you like, paste it together.
If you're short on time, you can ask AI to summarize into a certain time and craft the prompt from there. But it's better to figure out what you really like.
ChatGPT tends to fall to the same things, but many of the other image generators do much better.
I'm old enough to remember the Desktop Publishing revolution in the early 90s. There were so many awful posters, flyers and such that actual people made. My favorite was a preschool flyer where they used the kidnapper font.
The comments seem to have the consensus that these designs are just "ok"
But to me it still seems genuinely amazing that LLM's are able to generate graphics of this high quality with the text and narrative correctly positioned.
Blown away, but also quite sad, about the future of creative endeavours like graphic design
I love how the AI silently injected "A day of fun for all the family" on the hand-drawn by a child design.
PS: Which then survives in the next iterations as "A day of music, making and family fun"
Edit: Ah just saw the call out on the previous iteration.
But still it's a nice display about the semantics encoded in the models.
It’s interesting, all these examples look exactly as what I remember a typical result at an intro graphics design would look like, in that the idea might be good, but it gets very sloppy (pun unintended) in the details, such as alignment, consistency – especially in the visual hierarchy –, or typography.
What’s also interesting to me is that requesting ”professional typography” did not fix the problem at all. And I would guess that there is a staggering amount of examples in the training data.
Maybe inference is just wobbly by nature? The same as text output has the characteristic randomness, even design output cannot resist being – for a lack of a better word – hand made?
I'm a big fan of FixIt Clinics, i.e. community repair workshops. Here's an example of one of their posters:
https://allevents.in/mattapan/fix-it-clinic/200026636930752
Here's what I like about it: it communicates. What, when, and where. And crucially, photos showing what the event looks like. Photos of real people fixing real things.
The author demonstrates that AI-generated posters can imitate many artistic styles besides the generic default, but these examples suffer the same problem as all template-based posters: they don't communicate what the event is actually like. What does a samba band performance look like? (There are drums, I guess?) What does a circus skills workshop look like? (There are juggling clubs, I guess?)
These posters may be more aesthetically pleasing but none of them make me interested in going to the event.
Can someone post an event poster that they think is incredible? These posters all look fine to me, but the comments seem to know much better ones - but at least in my memory I can’t recall any much better.
I mentioned this in a previous comment, but I really like this Fixit Clinic poster from the Boston area:
https://allevents.in/mattapan/fix-it-clinic/200026636930752
It's not a ground-breaking paragon of graphic design but it communicates what it needs to communicate: what, when, and where. And crucially, it has photos showing what the event looks like. Photos of real people fixing real things.
The deep dark uncomfortable truth is that art is subjective, and at best you can only ever get a general consensus
We just have to accept that we’re now living in the age of industrialization of any skill that is digitized. And on average that means it’s not better than what a qualified professional can produce, but it’s good enough, and good value for money. Just like IKEA furniture is not better than anything that a skilled carpenter can create, but most of us settle on industrialized furniture because we don’t have the budget for better, or we prefer to spend it elsewhere. Similarly, most companies don’t need bespoke posters nor software.
> We just have to accept that we’re now living in the age of industrialization of any skill that is digitized.
What do you mean by "just accept"? Should professional graphic designers give up their profession? Should they stop advocating for legal protections of their work?
Yes, why would government suddenly start protecting workers when we never cared in the past? Our society only cares about money, cheaper and faster. We’ve automated so many jobs, including the carpenters, but soon also all drivers, taxi drivers, truck drivers, and thousands of other jobs. And realistically, most customers don’t see the difference between average and high quality from a skilled professional. They just want cheap.
And what are graphic designers going to protect? AI is not allowed to make designs? Or the style of a specific designer is not to be copied by anybody else, AI or human? Many graphic designers produce work in the same style, are you going to prohibit that as well?
Small businesses torching years and years of propaganda and goodwill lavished on them, so they can save the $50 it would cost to have a human design a decent-looking poster.
"Me: a poster paint drawing by his young child."
Some time ago, I was in this apartment complex and there was a hand drawn sign of a dog pooping on the grass - the sign then said that residents should pick up after their dog. It looked like the locals living in the apartment complex had their child draw the dog pooping in a slightly adorable style. I remember feeling kind of happy about this, like I could see a kid sitting there with some crayons painting this dog. I know there were human artists perfecting this child like style before but still feels like some humanity is getting lost here making AI paint like a kid.
What I find off-putting is the emoji style used. They look like images you'd find in a first grade workbook, or on sticker sheets handed out to first graders. I quit using emojis on my phone because of that "playmobil" look.
I suspect this trend started with the yellow happy face. Barf.
It used to be that all the available art generation systems would make mistakes on text, making the letters into weirdly shaped non-letter blobs and/or having strange typos all over the place (that were probably from getting the letter-shapes confused rather than not knowing how to spell words).
How exactly did that get fixed? It seems like suddenly they can consistently produce correct text with sharp borders, even with various "special effects" on the letters, as if they'd been actually graphic-designed in rather than "painted" with the same techniques as the rest of the image. Is there actually some kind of system that does tool calls and superimposes text on a base?
In Gemini, which is quite good at image generation, it gets locked into a path so rigidly that you need to start a new chat to get much variation in style; about half the time when using a previous image (in the same chat) as input it just reproduces it exactly.
I grabbed an old Obon festival flyer from 2014 and told chatgtp to:
"look at this image and give me variants in the style of classical japanese artists and graphics designers (be sure to include hokusai and Ikko Tanaka). be sure to tell me about each style. upscale and include the original with some designer words that are plausible"
at least two of these don't look like AI to me and are perhaps better than the original. but a non-designer is likely to pick the more busy ones.
https://files.catbox.moe/5p5m9v.png
> One note here is that along the way, the poster has acquired extra text (“A day of music making and family fun”) – it’s decided that Designers Republic would have thrown in some text of that kind, so it’s come up with some words. Those words are now in the chat context, so they appear in subsequent posters.
This is very important for programming and I don’t think enough people are cognizant of it
One of the biggest problems is actually making sure the information needed is on the poster.
Times, dates, location, pricing, parking etc…
As he points out “it added a bunch of text…” now it’s one all the future designs. That’s great - is the text correct?
To be honest this was a problem before AI. People are not very good at communicating.
This is something I actually cover in the follow-up project's how-to. Ask the AI to sense check the info you've supplied. It can tell you "hey, maybe you should mention venue address".
https://john.hartnup.uk/poster-prompts/how-to-use/
But as with all of it, it's no use if you don't ask the right questions.
The very end of the article hit on the best point.
If you ask AI to use HTML to create an 8.5x11 designed "poster" or "one sheet" it can do a great job that is indistinguishable from what anyone/artist can do in HTML/CSS.
But, fine-tuning is still required - like ask it to use less used fonts and less gradients :)
I think basically AI posters are bad because when given freedom to the model (which is what people will do when just asking "make me a poster for my coffee shop"), the model will always tend to do the same design style. So yes, as this article says, with better prompting you CAN get better results. The other problem I think is tool calling, because when prompted for a poster, ChatGPT will definitely use image generation, when it should be generating some html and css + some image assets and then presenting the user an image or pdf.
I think the tendency to go for image generation always might be related to token costs, designing with Code & adding some generated images to the mix should be more expensive than just image generation.
Exactly this. One of my favorite breweries near where I live went full slop and uses AI for almost all of their posters and event graphics. The owner is a chemist, not a designer, so the results are exactly what you just described.
They do, the very fact of using such posters indicates the lack of necessary competence and or resources in the process that can discern quality to fix the results
I would argue that “AI-generated” posters are, by definition, horrible. They can’t not be horrible because of the very nature of how they're made.
The most glaring weakness in AI poster design to me is its inability to create strong visual hierarchy. Even if you explicitly ask it to do so, its fundamental inability to “see” is quite apparent in the output.
It's not that the first one is so awful in isolation, it's that they are everywhere you look when you walk down the street. The barbers, the school fête, the cafe, the church. Everywhere.
I’ve been a designer (and developer) for 15+ years now. AI can produce better design than 80% of human designers already. Those we scream “AI can’t replace me” the loudest are those whom it already did.
This has always been what irritated me about the AI poster style, is that I could tell that zero creativity or effort was involved. It is not that difficult to spend some time with an image generator to make something unique that even the staunchest AI art haters would probably not notice.
I like the other posters more, but the first poster probably still conveys the idea of the event better: people having fun, drinking beer, with a live band. You don't get that from most of the other posters unless you first mentally transform those icons into real things, which takes effort.
I'm starting to think that icons are in fact the low-effort way to convey information. It's design you can just throw in anywhere without adapting it to context (except for maybe changing color).
I really don't get any sense of what these events are from the look-alike posters. They are all just a wall of color and excessive detail.
For a poster to catch your eye and be informational it needs to be way simpler - should be able to take it in at a glance, not have to pore over it like a "where's waldo" exercise.
Is there an explanation for why AI images, or posters, look "AI"? What I mean is that even some of the better ones, that I quite like, have a distinct AI look that I can’t quite put my finger on.
Some elements are, the very saturated color or being overly busy, but not all images have these tells, and not all of them.
For a while I thought it was that sort of very subtle dithering/texture that a lot of the images have, but again not all of them.
Looking online, most seem to focus on things like the wrong number of fingers, things merging into one another, details that don't make sense, etc., but that’s not what I’m talking about.
Does anyone have an explanation for why they are this easy to recognize as AI even when they are decent?
(I'm the author of the post)
Just as with "you're absolutely right" and the em-dash thing, the image models have a load of habits they fall back on. Some of them are easy to spot - the yellow filter, making grids of icons, ...
Others are things you recognise subconsciously without being able to describe consciously. I've been experimenting a lot, and I can probably see more tells than most people. But sometimes it's just a sixth sense.
And some of those tells do now give me the ick. And some of those tells are in the "better" posters on that page. Today I would clean them off.
But I still think it's unnecessary and dishonest to try and hide that it's made by AI - just tidy up the bits that give people ick. Same goes for text, btw.
Hi, thanks.
Yes, I agree that disclosure is important, and yes, some of it is just “habits” of the model and we are a pattern-matching machine.
I still find it fascinating that, in my group of friends with somewhat diverse backgrounds, we are all pretty good at spotting AI-generated images (and also text to a lesser extent), but none of us can quite describe how. Some of the tells are more obvious, but I would love to see someone do a more systematic exploration of AI art to unearth the less common ones. Sometimes it almost makes me feel “crazy” that, to me, something is clearly AI, but I would not have any idea how to explain to someone who can’t recognize it how.
This is a bit of a problem for me when, for example, I try to explain to my parents how to spot it, and I can only show a list of AI images and say, “You know… like that,” instead of giving a real explanation.
A lot of things are like that though. There's a cartoon - I thought XKCD but I can't find it - about how a beginner might identify an oak leaf by a set of descriptions - but an experienced arboriculturist would just say "well, you know, it's an oaky shape".
Like, I can tell a crow from a blackbird. Could I explain to you how to tell a crow from a blackbird? Absolutely not.
They usually do a noticeably bad job at kerning and text in general. They’ve gotten much better but it still doesn’t quite match the results of actually using a font/computer-generated text.
They also tend to not lay things out in quite the pixel perfect way you’d expect from a good designer. But that’s not as good a tell because many designers also fuck this up.
I probably wouldn’t catch these good examples as AI in a casual context, but those tells would be enough to decide if I was asked.
To me, it seems more to be something about the colors, but other than saying that they are often oversaturated, I can't quite place exactly what it is. I sometimes try to open them with an image editor and zoom in, or use other tools to try to "discover" what it is that I'm seeing, but without success so far. It doesn't help that graphics is not something I have experience with.
these are definitely better.
I really wonder what's going on in the minds of those who make the shitty AI posters? like, are they that unaware?
for me when I see them I just get instantly repulsed
It's pretty sad when you realize the average person is just kind of... unaware. They are fine with whatever, they don't really notice most stuff that goes around them.
This is barely prompting 101. Author is essentially saying "instead of asking it to just make a poster, ask it to make a poster in [aesthetic]."
This has nothing to do with design. Is bauhaus the best aesthetic choice for a spring fayre? Why or why not?
For me the tell for AI-generated-anything is too much detail
Like, it just throws everything in there, because it doesn't have the same friction that humans do.
Horrible is - not caring about what AI created, and just throwing it out there.
Not horrible is - caring about the outcome, and using AI to make it possible, irrespective of the skill level.
Horrible is - everyone trying to copy paste someone else’s work without caring.
I think, human thought + ai built is the “not horrible”, might even be awesome
While it’s interesting to see renderings in past styles graphic design, ultimately it’s going to ring false. Even if it’s executed well it’s just a costume or pastiche, with no real connection to the style.
What made these historical design movements actually memorable was usually a set of newly-possible techniques joined with young people with a set of shared community values.
So if you want to make something that will read as authentically “2026” to future generations, you should make brainrot. :-)
One thing you can do that never seems to occur to anyone is to tell the LLM to critique its own work. Then ask it how it would fix the issues it found, then feed that into the next iteration. You can also ask it to look for generative AI “tells” and do the same. One-shotting a prompt rarely gives you the best output.
Word processors are designed to maximise readability, handling things like alignment and white space with zero effort from the user.
These posters don't have the feature of readability. They inconsistently apply the required design principles for this. Removing some of the clutter helps, but a WordArt poster from 1992 is still a better final product for the purpose.
Taking the last poster as an example (1940s cubist style), the graphic seems almost designed to draw your eye towards blank space. This, very precisely, detracts from the goal: the graphic is providing negative value!
Whereas, genuine 1940s cubist art exhibition posters are really astonishingly good at communicating the key information. As one example, https://artposterarchive.com/products/edward-wadsworth-vorti...
Ah, I see that I've completed a full circle, sorry.
The original comment - that this article is a response to - was exactly that WordArt and Comic Sans, or even a piece of paper and a Sharpie, is better at doing the job of communicating the information.
I'm reminded of how Mac apps are supposed to conform to common UI standards rather than going off and reinventing the wheel. Also the Bootstrap template for websites.
Similarly, it would be nice if there were common styles for posters that you could just use and an AI could generate and nobody would criticize you for. Not everything has to be an original design.
I did not expect to see a Leamington Spa beer fest poster being used as a reference image today.
if NOT TRULY personal preference, then all those variations ARE horrible, but if they serve some taste--personal or marketing--then they are likely not to everyone's taste.
to me, they all look like lazy-prompting, which is the only way I ever do genAI imaging, because I fail to see why that "CPU" should be wasted on something I barely even care for.
That said ... let kids do that shit and pay them 50 or 100 bucks ...
The issue is that in my walled garden, I have not seen any of the good AI stuff. My wardens still use some home trained GPT 3.5 for most stuff, including their songs on potify and bootube. And i can't get access to current top level public AIs, either. Had the actual ChatGPT and Claude models for some while but I knew why ... otherwise I might put effort into semantics, syntax, grammar and my image generation prompts, which currently look like some MITM is speedrunning collages using haiku cowork and crayons or something ...
I agree that these examples are "better than the default" but still suffer from many AI-design bad smells. In terms of design, "style" (as in "Bauhaus" vs "Japanese" vs "Faux kid drawing") is less important than readability, economy and communication:
- The main issue with AI posters and flyers is almost uniform information density. They read as "too crowded". Posters should, like photographs or paintings, have a rhythm where some areas are high density and others act as negative space, and provide a more restful transition between information areas.
- The icons as bullet-points are a big AI cliche, and for the most part useless. Nobody needs an icon of a cupcake to understand what "cake" means and most of the other icons have no clear interpretation. Icons are only useful when, by themselves, communicate the idea (like the typical toilet icon). It's telling that every poster includes them.
- AI is not brave enough, or wise enough, to leave some blank space. Blank space is the #1 design resource.
- Font and visual style should not be arbitrary aesthetic choices, but rather motivated ones. They could relate to the event or the place through its history, culture, biome, or through the utopian vision of what the organizer is trying to bring to life. There should almost never be a legitimate choice between "Should we use Japanese, Punk or Kid-drawing style?"
- Being honest, earnest, truthful, is better than being cool.
- If a poster for an event calls your attention you can scan for the date, time and place. They will be there somewhere. But before you get there, there'll be important questions: "who organizes this?" "who is this for?" "what's the vibe going to be like?". Only a few of the posters try to partially provide this information through very small sentences (e.g., "A day of music, making and family fun")... but it's hardly enough. In my opinion this is what 80% of the time designing the poster should be spent on... looking nice and "professional" won't inspire trust or create commitment.
AI will leave blank space if its prompt gives it permission: https://john.hartnup.uk/poster-prompts/minimalism-art/
And similarly, all your other points. But of course, the more I say "you've got to prompt it right", the less value the AI is providing. A great AI would of course have that taste on your behalf.
Well, yes, of course. At some point, the availability of AI might result in people that have all the planning, communication and constraint management skills of a graphic designer but don't need to define the layout themselves. Something akin to programming beats on a drum machine vs performance on an actual drum set.
... but I'm not too bullish on an AI having "taste" because the reason people have taste and a POV is because they're living life. Artistic choices are the consequences of past experiences and associations we make unconsciously, which result in a patchwork that holds meaning. A "great AI" would need to imitate that, and maybe they someday will, but we're talking about imitating embodied experience and thousands of sensory impressions that we normally don't even bother verbalizing, or writing, but as humans are able to transform and share.
I remember seeing that default style long before AI. Probably where it came from. At least the default is not Corporate Memphis.
AI is a tool, just like photoshop was. Just because someone bought photoshop didn't mean that they can magically create amazing digital artwork, they had to learn photoshop and also be creative. Otherwise it would have been a horrible poster with comic sans. Same goes for AI, one has to learn to use the tool and be creative.
This post showing that creativity will make you the winner in this AI era.
I feel like ChatGPT Images 2.5 is another step up in terms of quality of designs. But it still needs to be told very specifically what to generate. A generic output is in turn due to a generic input.
This is quite sad - there is some simple text, and icons - sure ai saves some time… but honestly, text and a few pics?
This is misunderstanding the problem really. People don't hate ai posters because they are bad, they are technically better than many normal posters. They hate ai posters because they hate ai generated work and desire to just be done with the whole thing.
By that logic they hate this even more because now its harder to tell its ai. This is really a person hating the means but using the ends to justify it rather than stating so outright
Pay. An. Artist.
These models are built on IP theft from artists who are now losing work to this slop. Even if you don't see the difference (rest assured, most of your audience will), the morality of it is terrible.
Going to these events sounds like too much work. Couldn't AI just give me a summary of the event? It could even play some AI music similar the band that performed.
AI image generators are really bad at making posters and even worse with small tweaks.
I gave up on AI images and moved to having my agent generate html, rendering it, and then taking a snapshot in the needed size.
Now do this for science conference posters. There's something haphazard, unnerving, and uninformative about the AI-generated ones I am encountering increasingly. I imagine musicians feel similarly about AI-generated music and artists about AI-generated art because in all 3 cases, we're detail oriented.
For me it's about the unconventional analogies they try to express combined with their layout that even a couple crude 8.5x11 Excel plots and a poster author express better. And the human factor is an important component of poster sessions IMO.
I love this posting. Taste is something that needs to be worked for. It doesn’t matter how well the tool renders the output if the tool user has not taste (me included).
In the future I think that users will learn more, and tools will get better. The true tell of AI usage will be that a small organization will have a beautiful poster. That was never possible in the past.
A lot of the AI generated posters are just too crowded. I think part of the beauty of the "old fashioned way" is that time and budget constraints forced you to prioritize what was important.
We have seen this before in physical design. Complexity used to be expensive, it would take someone hours hand carving or embroidering designs to produce. Then we industrialized production and a machine could stamp a design in to metal, stamp complex painted designs instantly. Suddenly complexity was cheap and everything moved to minimalism.
This is a bit like telling the owner of a tiki bar that they don't need to use the Papyrus font, or a kindergarten that they don't need to use MS Comic Sans. The default style exists because AI-naive people with unsophisticated tastes find it amazing. If you give them prompts for different styles, you at best just trade one devil for another, similarly to how everyone started prompting for "studio Ghibli".
Beware of Lobster.
I did the same experiment, only with architecture diagrams. Was pleasantly surprised at the results and the variations: https://robotpaper.ai/generating-weird-beautiful-architectur...
On design we have aesthetics but also legibility and usability.
For legibility: the first examples are bad because they fail to easily communicate what/when/where/details in a couple seconds, mainly because the profusion of visual clutter obfuscates the message. The latter examples fare much better on that regard.
Usability is a constraint maybe more applicable to websites like the discussion I saw the other day on the design of claude-written pages (all look the same, feels ok but good UX probably lacking).
Moral of the story - have taste.
Just like in engineering.
The same applies to "vibe-coded" software btw: You can give the agent style suggestions on how to design the UI - you don't have to end up with the standard "flat/pseudo-material/2020s SV startup" (or alternatively "cyberpunk-ish dark mode") look if you don't want to.
Prompting is an art
All posters I saw used to look like these sub-10-dollar stuff before AI took over: https://graphicriver.net/posters-graphics?sort=trending#cont...
They were/are not great. While I agree that spending extra 10 minutes improves the results, AI stuff are also not amazing. I think there's nothing surprising about this.
It's the typography. I'm yet to see a single AI generated thing where the typography is not distorted. The examples generated are no exception, everything is just a bit off.
It's not horrible, no: it's off enough to make one feel uneasy looking at it without being able to pinpoint the problem.
From a creative direction perspective, I think this is missing a major part of the story and what's driving much of the slopsign aesthetic.
Your prompts and turns help with the graphic design portion of a poster. But, if you're a restaurant owner, you're doing both the graphic design and the food photography in GenAI, which further compounds the signals of slop that can seem unsettling to someone viewing it.
The former is much more tunable than the latter, but the end diagnosis remains: if you can't tell what's bad in a design, you won't be able to tell what's good, and no amount of turns will iterate towards it. This is one layer above your scope. Art direction encompasses both, because there's a relationship between media and graphic design, especially when you have products to show.
The top ones which are all the same are better than any that which follow. To my eye.
Guess it’s subjective. I’m looking for fair info. He is looking for design uniqueness.
Ive been getting AI political ads. I mean political ads are already shitty enough but now I'm seeing "<incumbent> is a wolf in sheep's clothing " with an Ai image of him wearing a sheep suit. It's true and kinda funny because he is indeed a piece of shit but cmon put some effort!
Remember back in the day when people used to insult human-made art by saying it was "derivative"? Yeah, this isn't an AI era phenomenon. I think some of these posters are good.
At least the AI generated posters are better than human-generated t-shirt designs, where you find generic texts such as: "Est. 1984" (or any random year), "I [heart] NY", "Property of [City/School] Athletic Dept.", "Original Trademark", "Authentic Denim Brand", etc., etc.
I don't often say this but those jobs are ripe for replacement by AI. It won't do worse!
Nothing in that article isn’t horrible to my eyes.
Some of these are actually... pretty good. I used to do print design to pay my way through college, and they wouldn't be too far from run-of-the-mill pamphlets we would turn around (both design and print in small runs) over lunch.
Indeed, the most important function of a designer, tailor, decorator etc. is filling the weaknesses in the client's request with actually good taste.
Well, they're superficially less same-y, but none of them are really giving spring fair vibes.
Except for the "professional graphic designer has added typography to a poster paint drawing by his young child" one, I'd go as far to say that I actually like it, especially if you were to remake it with the assistance of an actual child.
That default style is very recognizable. I am seeing it everywhere.
I guess it is like the early days of wordprocessing, where you saw Comic Sans everywhere.
The early days of word processing that I remember involved monospaced serif fonts, with lines exactly 80 characters wide.
You obviously didn't have access to a Mac SE. ;0)
Sure, you can get any style you like, but /you will pull those little icons lining the list of activities at your county fair from my cold robotic hands/
> Inspired by this blog post, I went on to make a catalogue of one hundred poster styles, with ready-to-paste prompts and example images for each one.
This is really cool! I don’t ever make posters - but I can imagine these being super useful
The icon list in every poster, no matter which style (even the minimalists) is what's killing me.
I've been trying to help someone create publicity images (who can't afford to pay a designer). The biggest problem with AI is modification of input photos. The results are good, but still trying to get it to not "sloppify" the images.
That’s AI’s Achilles heel. It’s super powerful but it fails in dumb ways.
Would be interesting to see if it could use CSS Zen Garden to build the posters.
https://www.csszengarden.com
The point really isn't just the use of technology. People don't complain when a hand drawn poster is photocopied! The issue is that it's taken a human out of the creative process _and_ it's using the plagiarism machine that is also making everything worse while enriching a handful of the worst people. It's a sign of how lazy the event organizer is, and how little they care about people, which is especially foolish for an event where you would like "people" to show up.
Who specifically did the author's preferred posters here plagiarize?
I like this post. And the comments even more. I've rarely seen such a breath of opinions and analysis on HN. And it's all from a straightforward use case and a few examples. Is it HN tailored clickbaiting? If it is, it is the right kind.
Author here.
That post has been lying around for a while, and got very little interest when I shared it on BlueSky and Reddit. So I'm absolutely delighted it's prompted a healthy discussion on HN.
Some of the comments I've had rebuttals for, but people have beaten me to making the same point I would have.
That first poster example is exactly how every poster at my kids school looks. If theres ever any carton people they have extra fingers or are reading books backwards.
Early dnb gig flyer gave me rave days nostalgia
They may not have to be horrible, but they DO have to be beige... apparently?
Why do the ChatGPT posters always have a lot of dividers? No matter how you change the style, it's always there.
Good "taste" and knowing what you want (and don't want), seem to once again be the trick to success with LLMs.
It all reminds me of when Amazon website used to get laughed at but those who overweighted their design preferences. The first ai poster in the list look fine to me
For anyone here who works at Anthropic or OpenAI, this is the doing of your lovely CEOs and their constant fear-mongering that has turned an entire population of people against anything even remotely touching AI.
Community flyers have been notoriously cringe for a very long time. In the 1990s they were all Comic Sans with cringe Microsoft Word clipart. Then, the design world decided that Comic Sans was the bar for bad taste.
Even if these examples look lazy, someone still had to do the work to prompt the thing into existence and they, at the very least, found it acceptable. So, either way, it had the same amount of effort it always had.
Is there a way to formalize the space of all possible aesthetics a model knows, in a way that you could randomly sample from it?
The analogy in my mind when I read this post was: you are asking a machine to paint a color, but the machine always paints the exact same shade, deterministically; and you'd like to explore different colors, but somehow you don't know anything about colors, don't know any of their names. So you don't have the language to ask for what you can't name.
Random sampling of colors (without names!) is a solved problem, because we've parameterized the entire universe of colors that can be perceived. It's just a very low dimension manifold, and there's even a computable metric on it such that unit-distances in that metric are what humans say are color differences of equal step size.
Are there more general versions of this? Like: "Here's a list of every human art in history: infer a coordinate system that uniformly metricizes every art that can ever exist?"
Man, I must be so basic when it comes to such designs. They all looked fine to me lol.
For your basic words-and-dates-with-shapes-and-shit posters, the AI ones are annoying, but I’m not gonna die on a hill over it. The hill I _will_ die on is restaurants using AI generated images of food. No. That needs to be illegal. I thought it _was_ illegal.
>That needs to be illegal. I thought it _was_ illegal.
Ummm.... I have news for you, pretty much all ads have used fake food since the beginning of advertisements.
Nobody ever cared that McDonald's ads makes McDonald's food look appealing but all of the sudden when mom & pop places can do the same cheaply and easily there's lashing out saying it should be illegal? Wtf?
> Under the law, claims in advertisements must be truthful, cannot be deceptive or unfair, and must be evidence-based.
> Companies must support their advertising claims with solid proof. This is especially true for businesses that market food
https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/advertising-marketing
Isn't this pretty unambiguous?
Sure, yeah, I understand what foot photography is. McDonalds etc. are at least riding the line instead of ignoring it. Using real food to carefully craft a scene, no matter how "done up" it is, is still representative of what's in the product.
Generative AI art is going to fabricate things. Especially when used by smaller shops who won't fact check it. I go to restaurant, look at picture of food, and expect to receive that. Period.
That icon+text row is the tell for me too, though I'd blame the prompt more than the model, nobody ever asks for an awkward layout.
AI is killing designers, and this guy just delivered the final blow.
This article is doing the whole concept a disservice. It's still just randomly generating without thought; albeit maybe with a drop more taste than usual. (not a significant amount of taste, just a single drop).
The problem with a lot of AI is that the baseline is already past "good enough" for many folks.
But you can also imagine a very different approach:
Imagine if you start with a vision, and just happen to use AI tools as part of your process to realize that vision, just-like/along-with many other implements. I've seen examples where people put together many layers in photoshop or gimp, and mix with rendering, hand drawn art, photographs, etc. Very much like how some of the better programmers work with AI assist.
Their very first attempt is arguably the best one there. I was surprised they didn't like it much and kept going. Then the "Stamp / Letterpress Style (Modernised)" was the only other good one.
So of the two designs made, only two were good, the rest was quite bad and lost all meaning.
This is one of the most interesting posts I've seen, and that's the way people should work with AI. A brainstorming session, with background and references, with broad knowledge of the field, then with clear instructions on how to proceed, different designs, propositions out of the ordinary, etc
I've been doing that for the last six months and the results are more than spectacular for the apps I build
So no, 'create an inventory app' is not enough, you have to be specific in every sense, every detail of the tech stack, phases, checklists, roadmaps, decisions, everything that makes AI's life easier (less mistakes to make and fix) and yours too.
Next time, start with "Let's have a brainstorming session about an [inventory] app we will create and at the end write a very detailed prompt.md, here is the initial context... ask all the questions you may have before writing any code"
* Replace [inventory] with any other app you may need
And remember one thing, AI is a multiplier of both our intelligence and our stupidity, the outcome will reflect that
Edit: The link at the end deserves some exposure, it's the work of the author showcasing 100 prompts for different designs [1] and some people won't get there because tl;dr or short attention span. Get them, use them, learn from them
[1] https://john.hartnup.uk/poster-prompts
AI posters may or may not have to be horrible, but they absolutely must include [ icon | icon | icon | icon ], apparently
The Designers Republic one arguably avoids it. Only one of its five is an icon: three are zero-padded numbers and one is a smudge where someone forgot to stamp the icon.
This isn’t a web UI, it doesn’t need icons.
But more importantly, if you aren’t the kind of person who could make a halfway decent text only poster before, you are going to make the posters at the top of the article. Those are objectively harder to read than something typed up in word.
You aren’t going to know to tell the AI to “ Go for a clean, unfussy, bright layout with a bold striking spring-themed graphic. Avoid pastel/airbrush/oil style art or images of people.”
It's almost like you'll get much better AI generated posters if you're experienced at graphic design and know exactly what you want to create given what the client that is paying you for might want.
Interesting...
(A lot of people end up using Canva for this kind of stuff, btw)
You need AI for this?
Go to Pinterest, search "poster", find some cool ideas, steal it and do it in Inkscape in 30 minutes.
Has the world gone crazy?
Thank you! These are so nice compared to the 1000 times repeated AI graphic I see everywhere.
What is the new phrase? The moat was always ‘taste’, or something?
Ironically the author isn't immune from publishing slop themselves. https://john.hartnup.uk/backpressure/
Perhaps... but is this all you found once you made it into the Ministry of Information? Perhaps this was a sort of Information Retrieval all its own?
Yeah, and adding an explicit "no sakura, no rising sun" list does half the work.
It did pretty great on the 90s drum-and-bass party version at the end, takes me back! :)
Like HDR photos of the mid-2000s, these too shall pass.
My eyes immediately move away from AI generated graphics. If it does manage to fool me, I get irritated and the thing you are trying to promote gets associated with that feeling. Make a poster with crayons if you will, but spare us from more cognitive polution.
So, I think this article is circling something a lot more foundational when it comes to people’s disdain for AI. If you put more thought, more effort, and more originality into your work, you get something that starts to feel like an actual artistic expression. If you just type in a basic prompt and accept whatever comes back, that shows too. And I think that is a large part of why people feel insulted by this stuff in the first place.
It’s hard to respect a piece of work or take it seriously when it feels like the person who made it didn’t think it was worth giving much consideration. You’re asking someone to stop, look, and care about your poster and whatever it represents, but you haven’t given them much reason to believe you cared about it yourself. If you can’t take it seriously, how should we? It isn’t really about whether it took five minutes. It’s about whether there was any thought behind those five minutes.
So, I read this article as if it had the following title: “If you insist on using an LLM to generate visuals, you still have to put some thought into them.” But then, that starts to defeat the point for anyone who was using an LLM to avoid that effort in the first place, doesn’t it? You can make the process easier, but you can’t just assume that having produced something means you’ve made something worth sharing.
At the end of the day, I think there are valid uses for LLMs and there are uses that don’t add much of anything. As a consumer of content, the ones I respond to tend to be the ones where the LLM’s involvement isn’t the most obvious thing about the work. I want to see the person’s idea come through. A very light touch, not a deluge. This can absolutely apply to creating visuals, but it requires judgment, revision, and a willingness to do more than accept the first thing you’re given.
And it seems like a lot of people aren’t willing to put in that effort. That’s fine. Their work will continue to be distinguished by that lack of care, while people who are willing to put more into it will stand out. The initial novelty only carries something so far. Once you start picking up on the familiar patterns, that sense of something being slightly off becomes hard to ignore.
So, moving forward, I’m not so sure human creativity and input are things that can simply be outdone and made irrelevant. Maybe they’re an additional layer that keeps giving us somewhere further to go. An LLM can imitate what people have already brought to the table, but given access to that same LLM, we can bring our own experiences, ideas, and judgment into the mix. The tool gives us a starting point. I don’t see why we should assume it also determines how far we can take it.
It's interesting how the negative examples all look like mobile game ads.
Which isn't an accident - mobile game ads are tuned studiously on consumers actual preferences and not the preferences of designers. i.e. the people that are likely to spend actual money on the product/service being advertised to prefer the ad being portrayed here as bad.
Bluntly, being able to sidestep the whims and fashions of graphic designers is proving to be a major feature of the AI revolution.
It is kind of sad that whenever you see art now, whether it's good or "bad", it's uncertain if the artist actually made it, or just prompted AI.
People dont want to write multiple prompts or write a lengthy one. They want to say create poster x for event y. That's it, that's what they get and that's what they take.
The second options seem very similar to the popular templates in canvas.
those actually don't look half bad
Can you tell your AI to not apply piss filter to everything?
I've done a lot of experimenting, and with the GPT image AI, it's quite hard to prevent the piss filter, though you can reduce it.
It's easy to colour balance it in post though - if you have the aesthetics and the knowledge to do that.
All trash, in my opinion. Different flavors of trash.
Some people only have taste in their mouth
As usual, AI is a tool and will be good in the hands of the wielder. I've been saying this since Stable Diffusion released nearly half a decade ago.
interesting to see a prompt post getting so upvoted
> They’re OK
They are not OK.
If it's a craft festival, you should pay one of the crafts people to craft a poster. Any stench of AI (and in particular, the weirdness of an AI generated punk-ish poster) for a craft event makes me think it's a scam because I know for sure they had contacts of people that could've done a better job, and been supported while doing it... which is the moral pitch of the event. Even if the craft was basketmaking or something totally non-poster-related, use a close-cropped photo of a basket as the background or something. You've got artistic people around you. The outcome is going to be better, universally. (I don't really want to debate this honestly. We can agree to disagree if you think this isn't universally applicable.)
But I'm fine with the beer festival phoning it in. I guess my only issue with the in-the-wild poster example you found is it does look... bland and just aestetically bad. Your example AI poster styles would be a huge improvement! I can't say they're like, impressive in anyway or winning any awards since they're also bland, but aestetically they hold up and IMO, actually communicate the info better than the ez-slop original.
Maybe to put it another way: if it was 2015, and an craft festival and a beer festival both used the same incredibly lame looking Word template for posters, I'd have the exact same opinion.
I’m convinced that almost nobody that is saying to hire cheap designers instead of AI has actually done so.
Think of the absolute worst, dogshit offshore developer contractors you have worked with. It’s the same thing for design. In the 1% chance they can even understand what you want them to do, you then have a 1% chance that they are capable of executing it in a barely satisfactory way.
Not a great sentence.
Kids are rediscovering typography and pictograms. With AI. Well done!
bunch of haters in these comments.
I've been telling people to be thankful the posts are blatantly AI.
Soon enough it will be harder and harder to tell, and all their feedback is being scraped to improve the next model.
This already demonstrates 2-3 extra sentences of prompting and you get a completely different style that is harder to call out.
the ones in the article that aren't complete eyesores are just what you get out of Canva with no changes except busier (which, by the way, is worse)
this is dumb as hell. Instead of feeding it through an LLM just make it plain text comic sans and it'll be better. Word clipart looks more palatable than this
This is one example of how knowledge is still useful, even in the world of AI. If you know about different art movements, aesthetics, etc. you can prompt images using them, and make stuff that doesn't look like the generic slop that uses that recognizable round-corners style.
so who is going to the spring fayre?
Slop is slop because people put in zero effort so the LLM just produces the first thing it was trained to do. You can absolutely get good results out of AI but it takes taste and a little work.
the biggest issue is NO WHITE SPACE.
The irony is that the less appealing posters would take a human artist much more skill and time to create.
Humans actually prefer minimalist designs with basic flat shapes with flat colors which ironically is trivial to create and can be done without AI or talent. Most people can’t even create anything remotely close to the less appealing posters by hand.
just spend hours tweaking the prompt and it will look like you spent hours making the poster. Isn't AI great
> Go for a clean, unfussy, bright layout with a bold striking spring-themed graphic. Avoid pastel/airbrush/oil style art or images of people.
This seems to be the crux of the issue. It's not that the AI posters were bad, but has all the hallmarks of low effort. And if the organizer can't be arsed to put effort in their poster, why should anyone think it will be an event worth attending? The quoted prompt is not something someone can think of off the cuff. It requires someone who have seen enough posters to know what they would like and what not to put in. That takes effort. It's called AI slop not because it looks bad (though I do think it is), but no effort is put into them.
AI posters is like using the Papyrus font.
Beautiful. Now this is how to work with an LLM, not castigate it.
Adding a safety pin to the punk design was too much of a cliché.
I wasn't a fan of the Memphis one as it reminds me of the worst eighties and nineties designs.
But if a designer improves an AI design and I feel it's fine, does that make me strange? If you ran a blind test on this, I think it would come out with high preference...
These are still terrible. It's painfully obvious they are AI. And that's the whole problem. AI posters feel soulless and like nobody put in the work to make something nice. I mourn our pre-AI world with its showcases of human creativity.
Instead of typing create some posters for the Spring Fayre with soul. Prove your point.
Why would I? Stop wasting my time.
Only the last poster kind of gave me vibes, the other ones are absolutely soulless and slop.
I guess it works for the target audience.
So AI slop is in reality prompt slop
The beige / slightly faded Claude design trend is atrocious.
> They’re OK
No, they aren't.
once again judgment comes into play.
judgement + taste is the difference maker.
That post was written by a designer judging designs.
His attention is biased by the practice of seeing and understanding dozens of visual languages. But he doesn't understand that, unlike a painting, a poster isn't the purpose, the end. A painting in a museum exists for itself. A poster in a street exists at the service of a commercial message. The poster isn't the focus or the point, the message is.
He looks for visual languages, but most people would look just for information: what, who, where, when, why. If they need to spend more than a tenth of a second to decode the visual language of a poster then the poster failed.
There is a famous book on UI design whose title defines very well the design principle for things that should face the masses: "Don't make me think".
As a designer, the post author seeks the unexpected. Normal people just overlook and avoid it.
Normal people love the bland and repetitive precisely because it is familiar. That's the reason there are so many more McDonald's and similar franchise chains than fine French/Italian bistros and unique shops. That's why people listen to dumb pop and country music but not Stravinsky. That's why so many people watch Hallmark movies. People choose boredom because that's something they can easily understand.
Peopel are dumb, they don't want to think.
Please stop.
Most AI-generated art is "good enough" for most one-shot designs by now (though still not [always] as good as a good meat-based artist of course)
The problems right now are:
- Maintaining a consistent and coherent style/aesthetic when you have to generate lots of assets for something. For example sprites in a video game.
- Iterating over a design for more than a few passes. For some reason most models keep degrading the entire image if you keep asking for edits to a specific part of the image. Or, some problems are or become impossible for them to fix no matter how you prompt them.
Well, sometimes AI generates pictures that are not bad. Personally though I am tired of AI slop in general, and I don't want to support it. AI literally kills humans. In some scenarios AI is still useful (e. g. if you write a game, say, in javascript and you don't have any designers helping you out, you could generate images that don't suck, quickly, via AI) but other than that the less I get of AI the better. Google now has that problem with AI - tons of AI slop and fake videos. I realised the AI slop just wastes my time but Google does not offer a simple "do not show me any AI slop" videos. After all they want people to waste their time on youtube, by design. So I now waste my time twice by using Youtube, if I watch an AI slop video.
If only there was a way to precisely control our output so it matches our taste and imagination. Some might call this technology, drawing.
The problem is that not everybody has it but they still want the end result. If everybody could draw nobody would hire designers.
This is hilarious.. The bad examples are ai slop. The final "good" one they make is corpo slop, lol!
Julio
Simply, don't use AI to generate posters and pay someone to do it.
AI posters are not horrible, they just expose the person who "commissioned" them as trash. In a way, that is a good thing, since you can avoid them more easily.
The only thing that separates you from trash is that you meticulously hand-craft your posters.
They just need to not exist
HN may as well be /r/accelerate
The AI obsession is ruining every conversation.