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.

exactly. Hindsight is 20/20.

I believe the point is that there is no baby in this bathwater

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.

I think you need to remember that most people have no eye for design, and that includes even just presenting the essentials of an event in text.

And AI can actually do it much better than the average idiot. Of they ask.

Like, if you ask - "here's the event details, let's make a poster" in the right way, it's going to come back and say "you've supplied the venue name but not the street address, do you want to include that?".

And then it'll lay the info out with generally sensible relative sizes and positions, better than the average idiot would.

And, probably about equally as well as the average "I'm not a designer but I know a bit" amateur - and a lot faster.

The catch there is that the idiot only gets this if their prompt is right - and since they're an idiot, it probably isn't.

I think there's a gap in the market for a service with system prompts that make it work for people who don't think very hard.

(That might be what, say, Canva Pro does with its AI features. I don't know because I'm not paying for that.)

The sort of use cases I was think of (village fête etc.) would never have paid for a professional designer. We're talking about an event that's delighted to raise £500 for the church roof repair fund. Even £50 for a poster is 10% of the fundraising lost.

If it wasn't AI, it would be Comic Sans and some clipart.

It will (for a while). We are already seeing the groundwork being laid.

It’s unlikely to stay that way, though.

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.

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

Same mentality as people who voted for Trump. No wonder he's become such an AI booster.

In the examples above, that’s really your own loss? There will only be one or two events in your local village, it seems self defeating to ignore what they offer because you don’t like the medium. At least these posters are well laid out and easy to read.

I 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.

At least in this case I can't pretend I have some kind of super power since I knew beforehand that it was gen AI.

And also it's not like I'm saying I love all the man-made posters. Or that I never been "fooled" by gen AI content.

It's just that as soon as I start seeing some gen AI tells on an image, I can't unsee them and I feel disgusted by it.

If there's nothing to think about they may well not think.

That's the problem.

Chocolates and rocks are different things.

Pictures and pictures are the same thing.

No, it's like if you bought a box of chocolates, and you couldn't distinguish if they were handmade or factory-made, even after you ate them.

And it took them telling you before you knew.

And then you decided you didn't like the ones made by the factory as much anymore.

It's saturation.

If I saw an Images 2.0 flyer in year 2020? In a world where Images 2.0 didn't exist? I'd be impressed. But if I see it now, today? I'm not impressed at all.

It's the same image, produced by the same AI and seen by the same person. So, what's the difference? What changed over time?

Saturation. "I've seen it all before." AI made that specific flyer style plentiful and omnipresent, and that made it "derivative" and "cheap". What used to invoke "cool" and "wow" was turned into a dreary cliche by repetition. Flaws that were easy to overlook when overshadowed by novelty stand out like a sore thumb now that you've seen them before in the same patterns many times over.

The image is the same - it has the same strengths and the same flaws. But your focus is shifted by familiarity.

It's the same mechanism that drives trends and fashion. AI just supercharges it.

Naturally, you can avoid a lot of it by using careful prompting and steering to guide an AI away from the "cliche" style-space. You can get something with both good quality and good identity that way.

But that requires: being aware of the problem, being really good at prompting, and putting in a considerable effort. It's hard to steer a model away from "AI cliches" if you don't have the eye to spot them in the first place.

Most AI-generated content doesn't have that kind of skill and effort applied to it - it simply uses the "model defaults", and gets the "model defaults". For all the good and bad that comes with those.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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...

And anyone selling flying lessons could probably afford a graphic designer, it sounds like we agree.

Now that you mention it, I'm pretty sure I recall a hand-painted "Skydiving" sign at some small rural airport...

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.

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.

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…

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.

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.

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.

What is the tell on the punk one?

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

It's a village fete, what kind of signals do you want from the poster?

That's why the "Look here's a 100 identical village fete posters" memes are kind of missing the point, it's actually not a bad thing that I can tell from a glance what it is, I don't actually have to read any of the details to know it'll have a tombola, because it's a given.

My bigger issue is all the posters calling it Fayre, not Fete, which is the weird part, particularly the "Craft Fayre" which should definitely be "Craft Fair", but misspellings and greengrocers apostrophe's are part and parcel of a good hand-made poster too.

I’ve also seen people put a lot of effort and love into poster and stuff because that interests them (doesn’t mean they’re good at it either), then the event is utter crap because they didn’t spend much time on the actual event.

Tech people seem to have a really difficult time grasping that the average person is not a utilitarian.

People are really bothered by perceived inauthenticity and injustice. And care about more things than the utility of the end product.

On top of that, we have a very out of touch political system that has continually ignored the will of the electorate. So then the tech people will say “see, the masses voted with their feet, they love the utility of AI generated art!”. Completely ignoring the perverse incentivizes and regulatory capture that led to that outcome.

If you were to poll 100 people on the street, they would be very against replacing human artists with AI.

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.

They like how the AI poster looks better. They have no visceral anti-AI reaction to it because they don't spend their lives in online bubbles where AI is the new heresy.

I would class something quickly run up in a word processor as much the same as the AI "slop" in comparison to a professional designer. I would prefer it but the basic signal that its not professional work is the same.

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.

"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.

Ok, don’t go because of the poster. Miss out.

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.

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

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 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

You obviously didn't have access to a Mac SE. ;0)

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...

Or they would pay a designer to do it for them. Also no effort but just cost more.

Everyone is suffering and not getting what they want to some degree. Life is short, and opportunity runs out. People turn this into bitterness and direct it at external things that are going well that they're not a participant in.

It's not just AI, it's everything. Romantic rivals, celebrities, sports teams, fandoms, choice of IDE or programming language.

It's a social evolutionary strategy to neg and gossip about people and things you don't like or are jealous of. It's low energy, has little downside, and can reduce the fitness of rivals, especially when done in group settings.

The algorithm has co-opted this part of our primate brain and turned it into ad dollars. It's also twisted discourse to be sour and negative by default because it activates these perverse reward pathways.

The similarity may be partly the image model's fault – especially if it's been post-trained/distilled towards performance, correctness and "quality" (for some value of "quality" anyway) which inevitably occurs at the expense of creativity and variation.

But I think it might be more about the LLM's lack of creativity in coming up with the prompt for the image (or "embellishing" a user's prompt), or directly the embedding vector if the LLM is itself the image model's text encoder. Then whatever the image gen outputs is simply an instance of the GIGO principle. It would be interesting to test whether similar cliches and motifs also occur if you ask the model to create an SVG rather than a raster image.

The 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.

The funny thing is, 10 years ago, people said photos on menus was a sign of extremely poor quality.

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.

The only thing that separates you from trash is that you meticulously hand-craft your posters.

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.

Moral of the story - have taste.

Just like in engineering.

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.

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.

I remember seeing that default style long before AI. Probably where it came from. At least the default is not Corporate Memphis.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Kids are rediscovering typography and pictograms. With AI. Well done!

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/

They’re OK

No, they aren't.

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.

They’re OK

They are not OK.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That's a bold statement on HN. Perhaps you confused this with reddit.

Quantify this. What constitutes a resurgence, or a slow rise?

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.

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.

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!

All trash, in my opinion. Different flavors of trash.

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.

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 ...

If only there was a way to precisely control our output so it matches our taste and imagination. Some might call this technology, drawing.

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.

Are you insinuating those 1970s fonts takeout fonts aren’t actually how Chinese people communicate? I knew they were AI!

My point is that those kinds of prompts are dumb and I actually expect the model to produce slop. In programming we write these huge prompts that go into a lot of detail, and when we do that, it actually works. I've never asked a coding agent to go beyond the mean, that just sounds like a dumb thing to do. Apply this rule in design and I'm sure you'll get better results. Kinda what the blog post is all about.

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.

If given an underspecified option, yes. Which is why it's good to specify options.

The masses love clichés and stereotypes, which is why these "artiste" designers frequently miss their target audience.

Of course they have ulterior motives to push the message that it can replace high quality human artists, even though that would be ridiculous under any serious analysis.

That doesnt mean you have to believe them.

Ah yes they should have gone with that one wave

Pretty sure 90% of the posters of the type at the top of the article are made for $0. I bet for $10 you could get real artists from non-Western countries to make a simple poster, but these days people would probably claim those $10 jobs and then have AI generate them anyway.

"AI fills the vacuum with the obvious thing."

I like that a lot.

If you need pseudo-originality I have a skill for that: https://github.com/iandanforth/force-associations

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.

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?"

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

Yeah, and adding an explicit "no sakura, no rising sun" list does half the work.

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.

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.

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?"

Given that any advertisement with AI generated food would be illegal there

So you never actually walked the streets ive been in recently lol

News flash: nobody cares about whiny political karens. Business owners are doing it en mass because it converts better.

You reminded me of this tweet I came across recently

https://x.com/tylerglaiel/status/2099382887045108154

Then you get Chick o' Fish.

It is not, in fact, more pleasant to look at.

Just let your kid draw something for your small restaurant.

Wait, we've gone from "pay the local artists" because AI shows you're "lazy and cheap" and "don't care about your brand".

And now whatever my 7-year-old draws is good enough.

My only conclusion reading these threads is that folks come in with their mind made up, and will argue absolutely anything so long as it amounts to "AI bad".

These people just doesn't have a good taste, imo.

This is like anything. If you want good and inexpensive it's going to be a pain in your arse one way or another.

They said: "I volunteered and designed a good amount of posters for student organizations." What do you think how many student organization have the excess money to hire a professional designer for a one-off poster? Of course they needed someone to do it for free, or else it wouldn't have been done at all!

oh my. from my perspective, this is the most useful comment on this post.

we should have asked the arts students! (and find a way to return the favor) i did not think about that.

that being said there were some intense rivalry between various studies, my presence may not be have been well received.

and judging how i am here, you can guess what i studied :-)

thank you for this. really feel like i got a missing piece of a puzzle reading this.

For every human good art that is cheap I can show you ten that are not. The problem is you don't know which version you'd get. Someone charges less because they are unknown. Fixing AI art is much less hassle than human one.

Well, no. Before genAI, I used fiverr, and I was also shamed for hiring those humans.

They're not saying they can't live without it, they're saying it's helpful. If you've been walking to the well for years to get buckets of water, and suddenly have running water in your kitchen, going back to trudging buckets doesn't sound very appealing.

Depends on which economy the buyer and the seller respectively come from.

What is your experience with design done by students? Because mine isn't great. It's not bad either, but it's just... mediocre.

Have you ever tried doing that? In my experience, art students don't like to work for "little money" and "professional reference" and stablished artists don't like when you try to pay "little money" to students.

the problem is that AI does better than those students, especially if you don't know what good design looks like... which is most people

but of course this means the entire market will dry up because no one pays students anymore

In year 2026 you are likely going to pay for a meat proxy who would still use the same model just without you controlling the prompt.

These days a cheap designer is just going to be a meat proxy for AI anyway.

AI, at least for now while it's still free/very cheap, enables producing a lot of very low-value content that in the past you never could have justified spending money and human labor on. The cost or time needed to make a poster or a flyer acted as a value-based gatekeeper. Today, it costs nothing to make an AI slop image and blast it out on social media, so we're drowning in it.

Just a note about language: when folks say they "don't have the money" or "don't have the time", it's almost never the case that they don't have any of the resource in question...it's about priorities. What they are saying is that there are far more effective ways to spend their money than incidentals like this, especially when cheap alternatives exist.

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.

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.

Yea these look bad you don't need to be a pro designer to see that.

People aren’t feeling the benefits of AI. Where there are any benefits, they aren’t causing prices to decrease or supply to go up, instead the excess value is being absorbed by profit taking.

If most people aren’t shareholders but instead workers whose jobs are threatened by AI, we should expect this response.

It has nothing to do with artists, it has everything to do with trying to mount a collective response to the apparent threat, poorly expressed as crowds tend to do.

It's also about art. AI is a multi-faceted problem.

It's all of the above. The unreliable empty garbage they barf out, threats to destroy jobs for oligarch asshat profit, and the resource hungry pillaging of neighborhoods. Oh, yeah, and also the crappy mush up of stolen art.

The AI art is also a class/status marker.

If a business markets itself with these AIgen posters, you get wildly different responses from different groups.

boomers that spend all their time on Facebook will think “this is such a nice pretty poster” and be oblivious to the fact it is even ai. Even if they knew it was ai they don’t care.

Young people will think it is low class/trashy. Some hate it because it’s ai, others hate it because the poster is ugly/busy/confusing.

Both of these communicate that I will probably not get a good value for my money when buying your product or service.

This is where I stop following. Businesses should focus on where they differentiate, and I really don't care how they generate signage if I can read it. I don't get anything by them paying Banksy to make their menu instead of having Gemini generate it. And if there is any connection to getting good value, it's the inverse: I'm more likely to get good value when I'm not paying for fancy advertising. See: every drugstore that puts generics alongside brand names for cheaper.

They asked the AI for a list of different styles.

The author then picked them out, not the AI. For curiosity I assume.

The Spring Fair is a lorem ipsum, here.

Read what I said again. AI art falls into the uncanny valley range and solicits disgust, ire or suprise in most people.

Sometimes that's okay, but probably not in ad copy.

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.

Not engaging with your second argument, it's just trollbait. But for your first argument, there is a big difference between info graphics trying to convey information and video thumbnails trying to trigger a click

trounce human thumbnails (often nearly doubling the click-through rate according to A/B testing)

That stat sounds more than dubious. Do you have a reference for it that isn't published by someone with a vested interest in people using AI?

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.

For what it’s worth i think the Bi Nuu poster you share here as reference for something badly designed looks really cool.

Poster design like any visual or artistic field will always cater to conflicting individual tastes - for some it looks great, others hate it.

I like Art Nouveau but a lot of stuff in that style looks kitschy to me.

As I said, "Today's AI makes it look even worse". But the post makes me hopeful than in a couple years, actually good graphic design can come out from AI. It still looks terrible and AI even for the best posters it highlights, but noticeably less than the random ice cream or coffee shop where I live with fully ai-generated interior design, memorabilia and menus.

Your links are supposed to be examples of bad posters? They're awesome!

Pro designers are generally paid because they’re extremely good editors. And they’re an intermediary between clients and their consumers.

So when you put the capability in the hands of the client without the editing (or taste) and no way to evaluate the result, you get the passable, homogenous thing.

It mostly doesn’t matter because there’s no economic incentive for it to matter, which is why much of our aesthetic world is the way it is.

Aren’t those ai generated too?

Posters for small events, a well known space where you will find „top artwork“… you really just need to spend 1h in Inkscape to get something decent

Step 1: develop a cult of personality, to the point of becoming president 2 (even after openly failing to coup a lost election)

Step 2-3: sell anything to your cult followers, doesn’t matter how good or bad it is

Step 4: profit

Simple recipe for success

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.

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.

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.

Shitty engagement will just get them recommended to more people because of The Algorithm though.

What's ridiculous about that?

You can dismiss criticisms of theft if you look at the goals of the thiefs

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.

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.

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.

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.

Absolutely spot on. For tech focused content/audience Ai thumbnails don't improve much but for the regular youtuber and daily vlog stuff they lift ctr by a decent percent. Source. I run https://thumbnail.ai/

I believe that comment is satire. Look at the last six words.

I agree.

To be precise, the tool and the artist are two different things. You can make crap with brushes or PS, and you can make art too.

AI is a tool too. What I build with it is orders of magnitude less important/interesting compared to what a talented artist can build with it.

Wouldn't say that, there is a huge shift in art style between what we got before Photoshop and what we got after. Just look at book covers in the 1970/80s and book covers in the 1990/2000s. The old stuff was full of custom illustrations, while the new stuff is often just copy&paste of generic stock images or some rather hideous early 3D renderings. Even the bad covers of the 80s (see /r/badscificovers/) still have some personality to them that is lacking in a lot of more modern ones.

It's not that you can't create good art with any tool, it's just that the economy and expectations change with the tools available, and the tools being faster/cheaper doesn't translate into better art.

You forgot the /s.

Sadly, if it hadn’t gone on to DaVinci, I wouldn’t be sure.

In both photoshop and painting, the human using the tool decides what strokes to use.

except for the million posters and album covers unironically made with a real photo passed into one of photoshop's "Artistic" filters to make it look like some impressionist painting

HEH. It seems like you don't remember the early days of Photoshop.

The analogy holds perfectly well. We can "no true Scotsman" this all day long.

Any "real" artist could dunk on PS: "Oh, you didn't have to go out and buy a canvas and paint and brushes. Hell, you probably don't even know how to properly mix paint on a palette! Not only do you not to clean your brushes, you don't even have brushes!"

And the right response is: "Who gives a shit?" The answer is "Some folks, but their opinion decreasingly matters." And the same exact logic applies to AI. You might as well be complaining that Google doesn't pay cartographers to hand draw Google Maps.

when it does the entire activity for you.

This is total fiction, and has spawned an entire cult of "just give me the prompt" folks that think using AI requires no skill, and anyone using AI is just a "meat proxy". But that's not true, at all, as evidenced by years of commentary on this site with people getting radically different outcomes using AI. We've gone from "stochastic parrots" to "gonna destroy humanity" in 2 years.

AI will do jobs that we used to go to Fiverr for -- it'll eat the bottom of the market, just like automation does elsewhere. The bottom of the market is blog art, clip art, menus, commercial signage, event posters, and the like. That's completely natural, and hating it is shouting into the wind. The local cafe owner was never particularly incentived to have their menus crafted by some local artist.

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

knowing it was AI irrespective of anything else was enough to think it was bad.

That's prejudice.

I found this very funny until it made me very sad.

Such a world view will justify any belief, because the internet will give you ample supply of the dumbest, most ill-considered opposition to any belief you hold.

Doesn't guarantee there isn't a steel version of their straw out there that you're deliberately ignoring.

One might argue that your comment reflects the intelligence of a 13 year old redditor.

They are pretty shit, but the main problem is that they are the generic style of the model. So that’s what everyone gets by default. If they were a one off they’d still be bad, but at least unique.

I trust Pangram's stats to be a good baseline.

“I can tell because I judge that my judgement is correct.”

Makes sense, no? That’s a pretty terrible world

Yeah, but the issue is we are getting constantly exposed to a barrage of really low quality obvious AI generated content. Except a lot of people seem to not know that it's AI and interact with like it's real. The people posting it are being reward by monetization platforms.

Low quality baiting content was a problem before but the barrier to entry has been significantly reduced and the.amount of content is growing quickly.

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.

It's not everyone though.

yet have the audacity to criticize as if top artists owe them free output

Literally nobody is saying that, what are you talking about

Do people really care much about how beautiful a human made poster look like? I don’t think I’ve ever seen that as an issue, a poster doesn’t have to look fancy. Though if I love any art piece then learn later it was made by AI I will for sure update my judgement and dismiss it as if I was tricked in the first place. You’re way better using Word art for your poster than delegating to an AI if you don’t want to receive negative attention

Pentagram and DDO.

Kinda pricey, though.

If taste is all that's left you can't fault people for discriminting on taste

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.

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.

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.

At least for me, the enumerated svg-like icons give it away, but that's merely a prompt fix.

Cool man, how good of a job would you do at your craft if I only gave you $5

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.

AI posters is like using the Papyrus font.

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.

It did pretty great on the 90s drum-and-bass party version at the end, takes me back! :)

The second options seem very similar to the popular templates in canvas.

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.

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).

Some people only have taste in their mouth

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 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.

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

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.

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.

Nothing in that article isn’t horrible to my eyes.

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.

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.

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.

The deep dark uncomfortable truth is that art is subjective, and at best you can only ever get a general consensus

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.