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.
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.
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.
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.
You seem to think design is mere flourishing, nice colors to make something pleasant to look at, but ultimately superficial and useless. I would strongly object to that--visual presentation can carry a lot of additional information, and improve the transmission as well. Giving more people the ability to present information well leads to more efficient communication, which I wouldn't just dismiss this easily.
But there isn't any extra information in AI posters. It's necessarily either something that can already be conveyed in writing (that is after all, what they're prompted in), or something the AI pulled in based off of the text unintentionally, at which point no actual information is being conveyed by the added visuals.
I think you need to remember that most people have no eye for design, and that includes even just presenting the essentials of an event in text.
And AI can actually do it much better than the average idiot. Of they ask.
Like, if you ask - "here's the event details, let's make a poster" in the right way, it's going to come back and say "you've supplied the venue name but not the street address, do you want to include that?".
And then it'll lay the info out with generally sensible relative sizes and positions, better than the average idiot would.
And, probably about equally as well as the average "I'm not a designer but I know a bit" amateur - and a lot faster.
The catch there is that the idiot only gets this if their prompt is right - and since they're an idiot, it probably isn't.
I think there's a gap in the market for a service with system prompts that make it work for people who don't think very hard.
(That might be what, say, Canva Pro does with its AI features. I don't know because I'm not paying for that.)
So you want to reduce entropy by “fixing” semantic mistakes and hardcoding some design decisions “by the book” and end up with what exactly? The exact same poster everywhere?
That's a more interesting question than you might have intended it to be.
A designer's job has two contradictory aspects. One is knowing the rules and following the rules. The other is having novel ideas, and breaking the rules when it works.
The balance between those depends on the brief, and the designer's place in the ecosystem. For example the architect I paid to design my extension wasn't in the business having novel ideas - he designs well proportioned buildings in established styles, that work as living spaces, don't fall down, and get approved by planning authorities.
But other architects are paid to design skyscrapers that look like nothing you've seen before.
For a school fete poster, you're probably more in the first category - follow the rules. But you want to know where there's room for variety within those rules. Which is where the blog post starts - not every Spring fete poster has to have bunting and daffodils.
If you ditch generative AI you go back to needing to pay an artist/designer for their work, and they likely charge more than ChatGPT because they might have rent/bills and that sort of thing to cover.
The sort of use cases I was think of (village fête etc.) would never have paid for a professional designer. We're talking about an event that's delighted to raise £500 for the church roof repair fund. Even £50 for a poster is 10% of the fundraising lost.
If it wasn't AI, it would be Comic Sans and some clipart.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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).
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 know this is an internet forum, but do you have any experience with posters? There are many great tools to create posters from templates. You can make something in canva for example in minutes from free templates.
You upload a photo, play around with it. You can also search the old internet for some tutorials. You know, like a human would do.
The 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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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…
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Graphic design skills don’t correlate with effort. I’ve seen terribly designed posters that the makers clearly put a lot of effort and love into because they loved whatever it was they were promoting.
I’ve also seen people put a lot of effort and love into poster and stuff because that interests them (doesn’t mean they’re good at it either), then the event is utter crap because they didn’t spend much time on the actual event.
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 regularity 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.
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.
It feels particularly bad for a local arts faire. Like maybe ask one of the local artists if they could design a poster instead of defaulting to the plagiarism machine? If I saw this ai poster for a local crafts faire I’d immediately dismiss it.
Do you offer to pay them in exposure? Or do you offer them actually money commensurate with the work and skill they provide?
Because if it’s the latter we’re back to money being the barrier. And if it’s the former you should go and check with your local artists how much they love working for exposure.
Yes, running an event has work and expenses involved in it. An AI slop poster is a sign the event is not serious and has other more major issues under the surface.
Making a poster is free and easy. Literal children do it in school.
I’ve made posters for events. Affinity is free now, it takes you like an hour to learn it from scratch and make your poster. If you couldn’t be bothered doing that, then that’s a signal the event itself is low effort slop.
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.
So I saw a public poster exposition called "Hihlights of moder design in industry" in the middle of a busy square, with high quality panels that must have been pretty expensive with sponsor logos plastered all over. It was mostly photos, most of them quite interesting - cool machines, research project, factories.
But that's where the good stuff ended - all the text was total cheesy AI slop, expanding what should have been just "masive steam turbine fan calibration table" into a wall of text - the same for all the nice photos.
And worst of all was the title poster introducing the exposition - a horrendous AI slop image of a high tech motorcycle, whit a chan fused together with the body, asymmetrical wheels fused to the frame.
I find this really insane, someone with enough money, representing a serious project just decided to use an AI instead of doing their job & the garbage they produced was not stopped by anyone sane until it was presented to people as an achievement...
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.
I am inclined to agree. Small community organisation cannot afford to pay a professional designer. They might be lucky and have a talented volunteer, but in general its a waste of limit resources.
But nobody needs a fancy poster. A small org doesn’t have to pay for a designer. They can literally open Word, and make something in half an hour that communicates the details of the event. You’re all acting as if the choice is between AI slop posters or paying a professional who will make the most fancy art. A poster really just need to show the brand/name of the org, maybe a logo, and info about the event
They like how the AI poster looks better. They have no visceral anti-AI reaction to it because they don't spend their lives in online bubbles where AI is the new heresy.
Have you spoken to a young person recently? Like at all? Say what you want about thinking that an AI-gen poster actually signals high competency to you, but acting like there's not a huge swath of people that hates AI and trying to dismiss them out-of-hand as an extremely online fringe just seems irrational. No, there are a lot.
I would class something quickly run up in a word processor as much the same as the AI "slop" in comparison to a professional designer. I would prefer it but the basic signal that its not professional work is the same.
The difference between them, as pointed out elsewhere in the comment thread, is authenticity. A basic, unassuming poster made by an amateur conveys a simple, grassroots event with no frills. A professional poster made a by a graphic designer signals effort and attention to detail. The average AI-generated poster says that the organizers don't have time or money, but really want to seem like they do. It's like how people tend to perceive someone who wears or owns an obvious knockoff of an expensive status item - it's seen as worse than having the real deal and worse than having nothing at all, because that person is trying to create an appearance of something that's not true.
To me it's the opposite. If the poster is something typed up in Word, I know the Farmer's Market is the real deal. If it's AI generated, I immediately get Temu dropshipping vibes.
But neither is an actual signal. The Word-market can just be selling fruit from a wholesaler at a mark up, and the AI poster could be coming from an established "real" farmers market who's organizer has tried to promote it with the tools and design knowledge they have access to.
The factors behind branding (or a lack of) are multi-causal and not correlated to the actual quality of a farmer's market.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
> 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 mean this page kind of looks like AI slop. If that’s the case, making more slop explaining how you made the original slop is definitely not inspiring confidence.
Gotcha, that makes sense. Thank you very much for the feedback.
I asked Claude to go through all the previous committee, the chat history and the 100 or so intermediate assets and create a timeline of sports assemble the current page as you see it.
It's AI-generated as are the assets, the process and decisions depicted are human.
Yup! Sorry to not reply sooner. I took all y'all's feedback in and decided to replace all of it. You can now read the full, UNREDACTED conversation. Now there's zero AI-generated page-filler, just raw input/outputs.
I have to agree with @fleshdaddy. The explainer page itself looks like slop. I haven’t seen the original project but I’m afraid this makes me less interested, not more.
Thank you as well, just wrote below to the same point.
And I agree with your impression.
My goal here is to understand how can I demonstrate that I did in fact put work and care into the "thing" (video in this case).
Basically show that I did spend energy over time, that the final product took a few dozen iterations with a lot of dead ends (as opposed to a lazy one-shot "make good video, no mistakes")
So I do think this route can have merit given there is actual work, but how would a page like this look if the current one is not yet giving you a trustworthy vibe?
So funny, I didn't even expect the page itself to be such a blocker/issue!
I replied to another sibling: Based on your feedback, I scrapped it all and started over with the actual, unredacted Claude Code transcript plus a personal letter.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
It’s actually very amusing to me comic sans is being referred to as “charmingly honest” on this forum, of all places. Shows how much this is all just aesthetic judgement and doesn’t have any connection to reality, just opinions. Before, comic sans was so low effort it earned scorn and derision. Now, it’s charming. Meanwhile, it’s actually the same amount of (low) effort as always. But for some reason now it has been elevated. Seen people say the same about MS paint drawings, and that’s when realized this isn’t serious at all.
Everyone is suffering and not getting what they want to some degree. Life is short, and opportunity runs out. People turn this into bitterness and direct it at external things that are going well that they're not a participant in.
It's not just AI, it's everything. Romantic rivals, celebrities, sports teams, fandoms, choice of IDE or programming language.
It's a social evolutionary strategy to neg and gossip about people and things you don't like or are jealous of. It's low energy, has little downside, and can reduce the fitness of rivals, especially when done in group settings.
The algorithm has co-opted this part of our primate brain and turned it into ad dollars.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 215 ms ] threadBut I'm convinced that just vetoing AI is to throw away the baby with the bathwater. So I set out to prove it.
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.
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.
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.)
A designer's job has two contradictory aspects. One is knowing the rules and following the rules. The other is having novel ideas, and breaking the rules when it works.
The balance between those depends on the brief, and the designer's place in the ecosystem. For example the architect I paid to design my extension wasn't in the business having novel ideas - he designs well proportioned buildings in established styles, that work as living spaces, don't fall down, and get approved by planning authorities.
But other architects are paid to design skyscrapers that look like nothing you've seen before.
For a school fete poster, you're probably more in the first category - follow the rules. But you want to know where there's room for variety within those rules. Which is where the blog post starts - not every Spring fete poster has to have bunting and daffodils.
If it wasn't AI, it would be Comic Sans and some clipart.
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!
It’s unlikely to stay that way, though.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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).
Polish: make it nicer
??
The alternative is people just taking some markers & a sheet of paper, or chalk and a blackboard.
If you travel around 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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 regularity 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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IxqdAgNJck
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.
Because if it’s the latter we’re back to money being the barrier. And if it’s the former you should go and check with your local artists how much they love working for exposure.
I’ve made posters for events. Affinity is free now, it takes you like an hour to learn it from scratch and make your poster. If you couldn’t be bothered doing that, then that’s a signal the event itself is low effort slop.
But that's where the good stuff ended - all the text was total cheesy AI slop, expanding what should have been just "masive steam turbine fan calibration table" into a wall of text - the same for all the nice photos.
And worst of all was the title poster introducing the exposition - a horrendous AI slop image of a high tech motorcycle, whit a chan fused together with the body, asymmetrical wheels fused to the frame.
I find this really insane, someone with enough money, representing a serious project just decided to use an AI instead of doing their job & the garbage they produced was not stopped by anyone sane until it was presented to people as an achievement...
The factors behind branding (or a lack of) are multi-causal and not correlated to the actual quality of a farmer's market.
Bike sheds are important. Their color is not.
Event promotion is important. The color of the poster is not.
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
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.
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?
I asked Claude to go through all the previous committee, the chat history and the 100 or so intermediate assets and create a timeline of sports assemble the current page as you see it.
It's AI-generated as are the assets, the process and decisions depicted are human.
And still you're reaction is "it's slop". Noted!
The text on the page sounds really AI written so I can see why people think it’s slop.
https://alexisrondeau.me/mosey-site/conversation/ - (You can skip the letter and the final cut since you already know all of that)
My question still remains: Slop or not?a
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/
And I agree with your impression.
My goal here is to understand how can I demonstrate that I did in fact put work and care into the "thing" (video in this case).
Basically show that I did spend energy over time, that the final product took a few dozen iterations with a lot of dead ends (as opposed to a lazy one-shot "make good video, no mistakes")
So I do think this route can have merit given there is actual work, but how would a page like this look if the current one is not yet giving you a trustworthy vibe?
You'd definitely see some raw and embarrassing stuff (like frustration, anger, greed, ignorance).
Is that maybe what we need to see to believe that a human (me n this case) was involved meaningfully?
I replied to another sibling: Based on your feedback, I scrapped it all and started over with the actual, unredacted Claude Code transcript plus a personal letter.
https://alexisrondeau.me/mosey-site/conversation/ (Feel free to skip the letter and the final cut)
How does this feel?
The making-of post itself also is clearly LLM generated, probably by Claude, judging by the language used.
Reasons were the same as now: low effort and overuse.
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.
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.
But people would shit on a Comic Sans poster more than a Times New Roman poster.
Otherwise you would be excited about going to the village fete and realize that the poster doesn’t make it a bad event.
I guess it is like the early days of wordprocessing, where you saw Comic Sans everywhere.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So of the two designs made, only two were good, the rest was quite bad and lost all meaning.
Just like in engineering.
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
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.
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.