Comment by simonw
13 hours ago
I'm fascinated by how AI poster designs have taken over local advertising in seemingly just the last six months - presumably because ChatGPT Images and Gemini Nano Banana finally got good enough at outputting text without obvious defects in the typography.
The posters all look good - much better than their desktop publishing predecessors. And yet they also eat away at the credibility of the event or business for me.
It's hard to trust a poster when the quality of the design has zero relation to the amount of effort that went into creating it.
But is that a widespread feeling, are the vibes bad for regular people, or is this effectively just old man shouting at clouds?
I was talking to my daughter a few weeks ago about a coffee shop that was opening soon and I said that based on the posters in the window it probably wouldn’t be very good. She didn’t really understand how I could draw that conclusion and I explained that you could tell that they had been stretched to fit the available dimensions in a way that clearly distorted the images and text. And that like… if you’re careless about one thing like that you’re probably careless about other things.
And I think it’s ultimately the same sort of thing? If in your marketing materials you don’t value craft and you take the shortest path rather than embrace your constraints and produce something good within them, then that’s maybe a negative signal about how you treat the thing you actually do.
IME the people I know who embody great craft in a field… they care about it in everything they do, and they don’t do a thing unless they can do it with care. I think sloppy AI is just a very strong signal of someone who doesn’t follow that.
Not just you. There's been a huge pushback in the local music community around this. Concerts listings now prominently feature the name of the poster designer! Humans FTW.
One of the coolest things about seeing a show at the Fillmore is getting the posters they hand out. A number of bands sell, or have their artists, sell show posters (which then become collectible limited editions); it's way less offensive when it's King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard than when it's Wizards of the Coast.
Finally! We need more of this. It did happen sometimes in the past, but not nearly as often as it should.
My perspective on this, as someone skeptical of (but also bullish on) AI, is complex and I haven't completely nailed it down.
My knee-jerk reaction is instant credibility loss for the business/person/thing.
Follow-on is sadness (what are we losing in society because of this?), and curiosity: if a polished appearance (even if it is mega plastic) is no longer a sign of quality, then what is? What signals do I need to look for now?
But, wait! Was a high degree of polish ever truly a sign of quality? I've certainly had experiences where a place made every effort to look polished and professional (and generally did a good job at it), but quality missed the mark. In the case of restaurants, a common refrain of mine used to be, "they're trying too hard in the wrong places." Now, I guess, they don't have to try too hard... but they're still not focusing in the right places.
I don't know what to make of it and I go back to still trying to figure out new (or old?) signals for quality.
I have the opposite impression. For me the quality is the cake; polish is just the icing. Putting out a 5-min of effort output with an AI as your image, is all icing and no cake: it has all the right proportions, layout, etc, but something is very wrong with it.
Not sure how diffusion models work in detail so consider this wet neural slop, but I feel like the training data had a sizable portion of it of high quality art, photography, design, and the models captured mostly the polish: the crispiness, the geometry, the contrast: they're after all computable features. It's more difficult to capture the meaningful blurs, the deliberate deviations, and the organic rule breaking. They're properties much harder to "featurize" for, and rely on tags/labeling/descriptions, etc of variable quality.
By all means you can get that with AI anyway, but it also requires you to understand the art itself, and describe it in a way the model produces satisfactory results.
> if a polished appearance (even if it is mega plastic) is no longer a sign of quality, then what is? What signals do I need to look for now?
AI produces apparent uniformity, it makes it harder to distinguish the quality of the underlying process. Same thing happens in all fields, we are all harder to differentiate, then why would you pick me over the others? this is the hard question we are facing now, and it's a desperate situation to be in. Not just artists and people looking for a job, but also companies to their investors and products to customers. All harder to tell apart.
I think this drives a lot of the AI craze. If I can't own my niche anymore, what is my new specialization? We have no answers yet. We have seen this kind of total competition in a domain with cheap imitation in SEO and slop writing.
A high degree of polish was tangible evidence that someone in the organization gave a shit about their work.
Or a third party was paid a one-time fee to make something look good - which still isn't a testament to the quality of the first party's service they're providing.
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>But is that a widespread feeling, are the vibes bad for regular people, or is this effectively just old man shouting at clouds?
A cursory glance at YouGov strongly suggests that people have bad vibes about AI in basically every territory where they're asked about it, and for basically every use-case
How many of the people who answer polls like that also have the ability to look at a poster and instantly clock that it was AI-generated?
I agree with others saying that this doesn't disqualify complaints.
In fact, it can be precisely because they can't tell the difference that they would be concerned about consuming AI outputs when they don't know they are. If someone wants to take a stand and only read human text and human art then we may need regulation to add notices when text and images are LLM outputs.
What's the argument here? People don't like spit in their food, how many people can tell their food got spat in? Does that mean they're somehow wrong or to be belittled for not liking spit in their food?
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Almost none, sadly. Most of the population just doesn't have that skill, which is why places like Facebook are just reams of AI Jesus upvoted to the Moon.
I saw this menu online the other day, and it's not even discernable from the photo what the food products are; it even sets off trypophobia:
https://imgur.com/a/YvyRjts
But people are still ordering it.
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They don't care, because it's only tangentially about the concrete output. It's about the hollowing of human communication and creativity.
> how AI poster designs have taken over local advertising
Tale as old as time: a race to the bottom. Businesses trying to cut corners, thinking they can offset it against losses from exiting customers. If it wasn't, a lot will just cut more corners.
I don't think it's a corner cutting thing though.
These businesses weren't paying someone to make a flier. The business owner was sweating for an hour in Microsoft Word and producing something that looked terrible.
I expect they are now investing approximately the same about of time iterating in ChatGPT and producing something that genuinely looks like a huge improvement to them.
This.
I said it elsewhere in this thread differently but people want to pretend the options are:
1. Paying a local designer to make a bespoke beautiful poster
OR
2. Use AI
It's not, the money is often just not there to pay someone. So you get whatever the intern or the owner can slap together in whatever tool they know best (which is rarely the best tool for the job).
It's completely understandable that they would reach for LLMs to help improve their posters.
So many people are anti-AI/anti-LLM just because it is AI/LLM, not because it's objectively worse than the alternative. It's tiring.
It's the Electron vs Native argument all over again. Sure, we'd all love hand-crafted, beautiful, low-resource native applications for everything, that takes a lot of time and/or money. It's a decision between Native and Electron, it's a decision between Electron or nothing (or at best only 1 OS supported).
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I called it out a while ago but the largest market to get destroyed by gen AI was never the professional market - it was the gig economy.
The quality of generative AI may not be top-notch, but it presents an easy drop-in replacement for one-off tasks that people previously outsourced to platforms like Fiverr (voiceovers, logo design, clip art, copy editing, translation, etc).
To me nothing a human makes has the capacity to be as terrible on an existential level as genAI slop.
> something that genuinely looks like a huge improvement to them
Of course they think it's great, or they wouldn't be doing it. That goes for everyone, with anything, ever. And some customers probably think it's great, too. But if you want me as a customer, to whom all those other opinions are completely irrelevant, you'd be better off just putting a turd glazed with boogers. Doesn't matter what it advertises, I'll know a human made this, and look at the product description.
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> The posters all look good
Maybe I’m misunderstanding but I haven’t seen many that I’d say look “good”. Especially food related ones.
I definitely roll my eyes whenever i see a poster with that obvious-AI-generated cartoon-people style. or the "edgy rock-and-roll poster" style that seems to be so prevalent. It seems that everyone generating posters is using the same 3 prompts! it's maddening.
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