The author claims that the AI posters don’t have to be horrible, but fail to see that the dozen variations generated are not distinctive - they might have somewhat different typography or imaginary, but still have the same AI uniformity and smell as the crappy restaurant poster you see on the street. The core issue is not only technical, but also the lack of vision and imagination when creating art or even infographics.
The alternative is WordArt, or just black on white Comic Sans with some bolding and font size variations with bad ClipArt. These small scale events would never hire a professional.
I'm old enough to remember that people also complained about WordArt and Clipart and too many fonts etc.
I see the chatgpt poster style on many small-scale local village events also. But again, what they replace wasn't any better. It's not replacing some beautiful craft that existed before.
> I'm old enough to remember that people also complained about WordArt and Clipart and too many fonts etc.
We basically had two kinds of posters:
- those made by someone skilled/savvy (not necessarily a professional)
- those made by someone without skills/knowledge
The later were awful, in the sense that I would never display them in my home as a reminder of a an event I took part in.
But still, they were nice because you knew someone took the time to create them to promote an event and share the important information about it, and each person was producing their own awful posters.
Now with gen AI we have something filled with trash, everything looks the same, the important information is hard to find...
Sure, the variations offered in the article are a bit better and more opinionated, but they still reek AI conformity and I feel sick looking at them.
If I saw an Images 2.0 flyer in year 2020? In a world where Images 2.0 didn't exist? I'd be impressed. But if I see it now, today? I'm not impressed at all.
It's the same image, produced by the same AI and seen by the same person. So, what's the difference? What changed over time?
Saturation. "I've seen it all before." AI made that specific flyer style plentiful and omnipresent, and that made it "derivative" and "cheap". What used to invoke "cool" and "wow" was turned into a dreary cliche by repetition. Flaws that were easy to overlook when overshadowed by novelty stand out like a sore thumb now that you've seen them before in the same patterns many times over.
The image is the same - it has the same strengths and the same flaws. But your focus is shifted by familiarity.
It's the same mechanism that drives trends and fashion. AI just supercharges it.
Naturally, you can avoid a lot of it by using careful prompting and steering to guide an AI away from the "cliche" style-space. You can get something with both good quality and good identity that way.
But that requires: being aware of the problem, being really good at prompting, and putting in a considerable effort. It's hard to steer a model away from "AI cliches" if you don't have the eye to spot them in the first place.
Most AI-generated content doesn't have that kind of skill and effort applied to it - it simply uses the "model defaults", and gets the "model defaults". For all the good and bad that comes with those.
If you think about whether it is AI, are good at recognising those tells, an thinking about whether it is AI, then its probable you will spot things like that.
Most people are not that good at spotting those tells, and when looking at a poster they will not be thinking about whether its is AI or not. If its not obviously AI they are not going to even think about it.
Yes. That's the issue: we are looking at the same posters.
It's just that "seeing this poster for the first time, unaware of the workings behind it" is a very different experience from "seeing this poster after you already saw dozens of other AI generated posters that used a similar style and had similar issues, got canny at spotting both the style and the issues in it, and came to associate them with cheap low quality work".
The former impression is "wow that's a good poster". The latter impression is "ew, it's posterslop". The poster, in the meanwhile, remains the same.
AI can often win in art contests - images, short stories, design. But that requires either sharp prompting, or an audience that's not familiar with "AI cliches". The quality is, if removed from the context, fairly good. If embedded in context, it's utter slop. The work is the same. Funny how that works.
Yes, context matters. The greatest painting in the world is just crushed materials smeared on a canvas, it's nothing too special without the context.
A computer (not even an LLM, just something generating random pixels) could randomly generate the exact same pixel pattern as the greatest painting in the world, and it would not be the greatest painting in the world, because context matters.
> The quality is, if removed from the context, fairly good.
IMO that doesn't fully explain AI hate, triggered by simple exposure to AI generated images, unless you'd include all standard educational programs until introduction of AI - which is arguably a part of the context, but if so, IMO, "fairly good" is part of context and is devoid of meaning in absence of context and cannot be said.
If you read the article at all, the "everything looks the same" is easily fixed with just a tiny bit of effort.
It's not AI causing the sameyness and hard-to-read nature of these posters, it's people being lazy. I personally think there's a few nice looking ones in there (the punk fanzine style for one).
Sure it's not some 9/10 hand made poster, but considering these take 30 seconds to make, it's impressive.
> Sure it's not some 9/10 hand made poster, but considering these take 30 seconds to make, it's impressive.
It's not impressive. It would be impressive if a human did it, but a human did not do it. Is it impressive when a printer prints out 10 perfect copies of the same flyer, because it would be impressive if a human could do that? No, of course not. It's similarly not impressive when the copying machine makes a plausible copy of something a human once made.
> But still, they were nice because you knew someone took the time to create them to promote an event
Unlike a gift, "it's the thought that counts" doesn't fly with me here. I don't care how much effort the secretary took to cobble some shitty poster together - it still looked terrible. I'd rather look at something clean and polished produced by AI (no matter how "generic" people here claim the OP's posters look).
Some level of uniformity is fine and indeed the norm. It was uniform back when posters were hand painted, eg 19th century world fairs or zoo openings or theater posters. They look pretty similar. Carneval posters looked similar.
The expectation of some kaleidoscope of styles is not really grounded in how things used to be ever.
Also, it's just nostalgia, just like how some young people now think audio cassettes and discmans are "cool" and have some revival, some are nostalgic for the back-in-the-day Word posters because "at least back then", but "these days" it's decline etc. Pretty sure in a few years people will be nostalgic for crappy AI slop of 2025-26 because their shittiness will feel like some charm compared to whatever the AI will be able to do.
I'm not sure about that. I, myself, am not skilled enough to make a nice poster, so when I needed one, I used to asked my skilled friends to do them for me.
But sometimes I also purposefully made myself some Comic Sans stuff, exaggerating them in every possible way, as a joke. And it was well received because people knew it was my own work and understood the joke.
If I made this today, it would not be seen the same. People would thought I'm trying to fight gen AI trash or I'm nostalgic of the past. While I'm just trying to make a joke by making something awful on purpose.
And I couldn't do the same joke using gen AI. The "on purpose" cannot be conveyed. People would just see gen AI trash.
I was one of those "skilled friends" that people go to, to make those posters in times of need back in school. And this was many years ago. Didn't enjoy it, but just did it as part of volunteering, or help the student community or a school club out.
Some people enjoy doing that work, but most people did not, and I was often the last resort because a random club or activity could not find suitable help in time. So had to step up when a friend or acquaintance asked.
I think there is some misguided view where in "the good old days" people designed everything by hand. From the perspective of someone who had to make 10-20 of those a year as a volunteer, I can say it came at personal cost, often caused distractions from the actual event, and there was not enough people who stepped up to get it done. If it was so enjoyable we would have no problems finding people doing the work and that was not the case.
The posters and designs were often rushed out late night by the closest person you can find who had a copy of photoshop on their computer. If we had AI back then, I would bet you 100% it would be the preferable solution and no one would bat an eye. It wasn't the type of work a lot of people wanted to do, could do properly and is willing to do for free, at their spare time, rushed for a deadline.
I could be mistaken but in my case I never forced anyone to use their artistic skills, it was actually more often voluntary from them.
Basically everyone was doing their part using their skills if they had some useful for the project, or just their time/sweat.
The relationship we had (still have, actually) was healthy enough so they could just tell us to piss off if they didn't want to do it. I particularly remember one such instance, because I ended up doing an ugly poster but when asked, I said it was the work of our skilled friend.
On the other hand I've been spending at least an hour per week doing sysadmin work for various groups/clubs, it's not the funniest thing in the world, particularly in the evening when I already spent the whole day doing it at work, but it's just me doing my part for the greater good!
Making stuff that's bad on purpose is annoying, like acting retarded ironically. Make good stuff or just spend little effort. Putting in effort to look low effort is just trying to be special when you're not.
Sorry, but Walkmans and Discmans were considered cool... At the time.
Personally I like simple designs. I always remind people who make posters that whoever looks at them will only do so for a matter of seconds. If you want extensive detail, put it in smaller print. Put the main hook in large letters and a brief description.
But they became uncool when the iPod and mp3 players came out. Nobody felt sentimental about VHS artifacts either, and now it's a genz aesthetic or something. These things cycle, like I'm sure some old folks miss the radio hiss and listening to football matches with just audio.
I am somewhat tired of all the AI posters, but I have to agree with what you are saying. The alternative was not any better. I think there's a persistent and very vocal segment of the population that just want to complain about anything to do with AI with a take no hostage approach. Some instances are understandable but if a local small town event or a low budget restaurant using AI to make a poster draws so much ire, I feel that it may be likely misplaced personal frustrations projected towards others. The response don't seem to be proportional to the offence.
I know this is an internet forum, but do you have any experience with posters? There are many great tools to create posters from templates. You can make something in canva for example in minutes from free templates.
You upload a photo, play around with it. You can also search the old internet for some tutorials. You know, like a human would do.
One of my favorite local ice cream shops uses Comic Sans (white on navy blue) on all their signage and this is one of the main reasons I frequent it. If they were to switch to some AI slop I wouldn't step my feet in there again.
In the examples above, that’s really your own loss? There will only be one or two events in your local village, it seems self defeating to ignore what they offer because you don’t like the medium. At least these posters are well laid out and easy to read.
People take photos with their cell phones instead of painting a scene like Rembrandt. They don't think they are a genius, and nobody cheers and claps. The photos look fine, they get the job done, and everyone moves on with their lives without projecting insecurities online.
God forbid some overworked volunteer make a poster in 30 seconds instead of taking a college course to please some huffy internet commentators with an axe to grind
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.
I think that's unfair. Many local community fairs happen to have a graphic designer or someone with some of the same chops who's willing to lend a hand to design a decent poster.
> 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.
> but fail to see that the dozen variations generated are not distinctive - they might have somewhat different typography or imaginary, but still have the same AI uniformity and smell as the crappy restaurant poster you see on the street
Hard disagree: every single example TFA gives is way better than the horrible generic ones that are polluting every shop and LinkedIn post.
That's not what OP is complaining about. The issue with AI art isn't how the individual piece look, but the similarities they have in aggregate. One image can look perfectly fine, once you seen a hundred they all start looking extremely similar. Human brains are great pattern recognizer and lock on to those similarities, even when they are covered under different styles.
When all your art comes from a single source, it's difficult to create real diversity and novelty. That's still the big issue when it comes to genAI in general, without a lot of hand holding you'll just bound to end up with slop, since the AI won't get creative on its own.
Did you look at the examples? They're almost ridiculously diverse, and the prompts show very little handholding was required.
They're not novel, but a poster for a spring fair isn't supposed to look like a de Kooning.
These arguments are almost completely detached from reality. Most artists aren't diverse either - they're told to find a style and stick to it, and that's what they do.
Commercial graphic designers are more versatile, but the set of standard looks is still relatively small. Hollywood movie posters and book cover designers are notorious for reusing the same tropes and colour systems, and that's been true for years, long before AI was a thing.
> They're almost ridiculously diverse, and the prompts show very little handholding was required.
The structure is identically to all of that, big title, graphic, list with icons. As said, they look fine on their own, the problem is only becomes apparent when you had to look had hundreds or thousands of them. It's the em-dash or the "load-bearing" of the AI-art world, the more you look at this stuff, the more apparent the similarities become.
> Hollywood movie posters and book cover designers are notorious for reusing the same tropes and colour systems, and that's been true for years, long before AI was a thing.
Exactly, but with AI that issue becomes even more drastic since the models don't create diversity by default.
> Most artists aren't diverse either
They don't have to be, since there are millions of them, all coming from different backgrounds, with different art styles and all. While there are only a handful of big AI models, who all come with a pretty generic default style.
> The structure is identically to all of that, big title, graphic, list with icons
You're complaining about posters being structured like posters?
But also the structure is particularly similar between these posters themselves across styles because they use the same prompt to describe the desired content and that's on purpose. The model is not asked to rework or reword any of the content, this lets you compare the styles.
I am not sure. If something is not in the usual AI style its not going to leap out at you that it is AI the same way. Maybe if thought about it, but when someone looks at a poster they typically focus on the information, not the style.
There was some upgrade in tech where the posters had legible text and all used that paint brush text highlight thing. The first time I saw it on Bambulab makerworld I though, "huh thats a neat image". Then I saw it on every low view count youtube thumbnail, and then the exact same thing at the failing sushi business menu and I was no longer impressed. I'm actively repulsed when I see that style of image now.
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…
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.
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.
The variations the author generates are night and day better than the "piss filter" era slop in the first batch.
Some of them would have passed as intentionally crafted by a graphics designer before AI.
And let's not forget that before AI, many of these would be word doc printouts with clip art. The alternative wasn't hiring a designer - the alternative was doing nothing special at all.
I was honestly ok with the silly looking posters. Where I'm from in italy it's common to have sagre, sort of cheap food events sponsored by the municipality/local shops. Before ai the posters looked like each other (as in, poster typically looking like sagre posters). Now not even that, they're just slop ai that could be everything before you read. Nobody needed better looking posters in this case...
And the old fluo ones are more effective than decorated new ones, since they're mostly on road sides and you need to be able to tell at a glance what they're about. I unironically went to a sagra recently because I spotted a similar fluo advert while cycling in Tuscany
I played it with Playstation VR2 and it was great, cost me around 350 euros for the headset and the PC dongle during black friday some years ago, but it might be more expensive now.
Unlike Steam keys, there are no ways to distribute Playstation keys outside of Playstation platform. By removing retailers and second hand markets, what exactly would make Sony or any other publishers to continue offering any deep discounts on their products on a closed platform, especially when their biggest competitor Xbox has dropped the ball heavily.
Homebrew 6.0.0 seems to be the first major version of brew that is heavily written using AI. There’s new document at https://docs.brew.sh/Responsible-AI-Usage that was added 11 hours ago. Do you think that these guidelines have been followed consistently since 5.0.0?
I would say I’ve embraced AI most heavily and I wrote this document so: yes.
I review AI written code on Homebrew the same way I review code from a no avatar GitHub user with no previous contributions.
The experimental and abandoned brew-rs frontend was more “vibe coded” using my knowledge of how to benchmark and test homebrew accurately and with a shitload of manual testing. Maybe that’s why the performance wasn’t as good as expected, who knows.
With it’s current AI setup GitLab still couldn’t make anything that could be called great in UX so I can’t wait to see what they can do by eliminating the remaining human factor. Can’t personally wait seeing tickets like these [0] open for months with bots telling you that everything will be alright.
The Wallet Pass[0] and PassKit[1] documentations are some of the sparsest and cryptic documentations around filled with absolutely archaic flows that _need_ to be supported for proper integration. If this solves the need of ever having to deal with those features ever again.
Luckily we have had the perfect paradigm for this kind of mindset for decades: proprietary software. The spirit of open source is already essentially dead due to it being co-opted by companies and individuals working only for their own gain, and for it to rise again we probably need a total reset.
Fugazi released almost 900 shows on CD in the early 2000’s, costing 5 bucks a piece. Some of them are available on their Bandcamp page these days too https://fugazi.bandcamp.com/.
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