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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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/
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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 we 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?
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 :)
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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".
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.
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 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.
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.
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. :-)
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.
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.
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.
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 ...
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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)
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
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.
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.
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.”
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.
31 replies →
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!
6 replies →
> 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.
4 replies →
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.
5 replies →
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.
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).
38 replies →
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.
12 replies →
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=48134400
8 replies →
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.
11 replies →
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.
1 reply →
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.
2 replies →
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.
3 replies →
>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.
1 reply →
>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.
2 replies →
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.
12 replies →
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
2 replies →
You should try typing "American flag clipart" into Google and see non-AI images with the wrong number of stars.
4 replies →
> 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.
3 replies →
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...
2 replies →
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.
4 replies →
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.
1 reply →
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.
3 replies →
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.
6 replies →
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.
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.
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 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.
10 replies →
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.
9 replies →
> 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.
20 replies →
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.
7 replies →
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).
10 replies →
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.
1 reply →
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.
1 reply →
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?
[dead]
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?
2 replies →
> 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.
7 replies →
Creativity does not have to be expensive to be good. Yall just dont want to bother dealing with it.
17 replies →
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.
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.
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.
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
1 reply →
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.
1 reply →
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?"
[flagged]
[dead]
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?
3 replies →
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.
2 replies →
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
7 replies →
"AI fills the vacuum with the obvious thing."
I like that a lot.
1 reply →
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.
2 replies →
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
3 replies →
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
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.
> 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.
1 reply →
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
3 replies →
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.
5 replies →
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.
1 reply →
> 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.
3 replies →
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.
1 reply →
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.
[dead]
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.
1 reply →
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.
6 replies →
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.
1 reply →
> 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.
1 reply →
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?
Standard Claude typography :(
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.
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.
2 replies →
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.
2 replies →
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
>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.
We basically had two kinds of posters:
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.
31 replies →
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.
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.
> 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.
1 reply →
> 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
10 replies →
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.
> 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.
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..
2 replies →
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.
4 replies →
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/
2 replies →
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.
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.
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.
2 replies →
Those people run stalls at fairs. The amount of slop I see at fairs is really on the upswing.
1 reply →
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
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.
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?
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.
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
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
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.
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.
10 replies →
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.
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.
3 replies →
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.
1 reply →
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.
1 reply →
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?
1 reply →
I believe the point is that there is no baby in this bathwater
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.
1 reply →
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
Prompting is an art
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
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.
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?
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.
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'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.
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.
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 we 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?
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 :)
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
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.
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 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?
"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.
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.
[dead]
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
1 reply →
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.
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.
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 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?
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. :-)
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.
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
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 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.
This post showing that creativity will make you the winner in this AI era.
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 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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Moral of the story - have taste.
Just like in engineering.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Indeed, the most important function of a designer, tailor, decorator etc. is filling the weaknesses in the client's request with actually good taste.
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.
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.
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/
Early dnb gig flyer gave me rave days nostalgia
> 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.
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?
Would be interesting to see if it could use CSS Zen Garden to build the posters.
https://www.csszengarden.com
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.
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.
They may not have to be horrible, but they DO have to be beige... apparently?
What is the new phrase? The moat was always ‘taste’, or something?
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.
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.
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
Man, I must be so basic when it comes to such designs. They all looked fine to me lol.
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?
> 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.
AI is killing designers, and this guy just delivered the final blow.
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?
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)
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.
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
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.
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.
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.”
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?
Thank you! These are so nice compared to the 1000 times repeated AI graphic I see everywhere.
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.
Like HDR photos of the mid-2000s, these too shall pass.
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! :)
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.
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.
those actually don't look half bad
The second options seem very similar to the popular templates in canvas.
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
interesting to see a prompt post getting so upvoted
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.
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.
> They’re OK
They are not OK.
Not a great sentence.
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.
Kids are rediscovering typography and pictograms. With AI. Well done!
bunch of haters in these comments.
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
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.
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.
just spend hours tweaking the prompt and it will look like you spent hours making the poster. Isn't AI great
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.
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.
Please stop.
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.
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!
[flagged]
[flagged]
[dead]
[flagged]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
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.