8 ms·

I'm fascinated by how AI poster designs have taken over local advertising in seemingly just the last six months - presumably because ChatGPT Images and Gemini N

• couchand 3mo ago
  Not just you. There's been a huge pushback in the local music community around this. Concerts listings now prominently feature the name of the poster designer! Humans FTW.
  • wingworks 3mo ago
    Finally! We need more of this. It did happen sometimes in the past, but not nearly as often as it should.
  • adw 3mo ago
    One of the coolest things about seeing a show at the Fillmore is getting the posters they hand out. A number of bands sell, or have their artists, sell show posters (which then become collectible limited editions); it's way less offensive when it's King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard than when it's Wizards of the Coast.
  • YurgenJurgensen 3mo ago
    https://xkcd.com/993/ https://xkcd.com/993/ A friend also called this the “Party Cannon effect”, in reference to black metal festival posters. When lavish detail is available at the push of a button, simplicity stands out far more.
    • tobr 3mo ago
      That XKCD idea is basically the Swedish Blåvitt product line that existed during the 80s and early 90s.
      • icantevenhold 3mo ago
        Germany also has some product lines that have similar brutalist design
      • bccdee 3mo ago
        Or the contemporary "no name" brand in Canada. https://jacobnelson.ca/2022/01/17/the-beauty-of-no-name/ https://jacobnelson.ca/2022/01/17/the-beauty-of-no-name/
    • flobosg 3mo ago
      For a bit of context, Party Cannon is a death metal band with this logo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_Cannon#/media/File:Party_Cannon_Logo.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_Cannon#/media/File:Party...
    • deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
  • dfxm12 3mo ago
    Going back over a decade (ETA, actually, wow, over two decades), I used to go to shows, not only to see the bands, but also to make sure I got the poster. This one, made by Tim Gough, escaped me: http://www.oldskull.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/timgough-diseno-oldskull-03.jpg http://www.oldskull.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/timgough-...
• OtherShrezzing 3mo ago
  >But is that a widespread feeling, are the vibes bad for regular people, or is this effectively just old man shouting at clouds? A cursory glance at YouGov strongly suggests that people have bad vibes about AI in basically every territory where they're asked about it, and for basically every use-case
  • simonw 3mo ago
    How many of the people who answer polls like that also have the ability to look at a poster and instantly clock that it was AI-generated?
    • qingcharles 3mo ago
      Almost none, sadly. Most of the population just doesn't have that skill, which is why places like Facebook are just reams of AI Jesus upvoted to the Moon. I saw this menu online the other day, and it's not even discernable from the photo what the food products are; it even sets off trypophobia: https://imgur.com/a/YvyRjts https://imgur.com/a/YvyRjts But people are still ordering it.
      • somewhereoutth 3mo ago
        I suspect it is a fair representation of the food you would receive - looks kinda like real food, but actually isn't.
        • jackvalentine 3mo ago
          Here is a picture of the food you actually get along with the poster. https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1uv0xcq/the_food_you_order_the_food_you_receive/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1uv0xcq/...
          • WithinReason 3mo ago
            Waiter, I wanted AI slop for lunch! What is this??
• throwaway613746 3mo ago
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• tgv 3mo ago
  > how AI poster designs have taken over local advertising Tale as old as time: a race to the bottom. Businesses trying to cut corners, thinking they can offset it against losses from exiting customers. If it wasn't, a lot will just cut more corners.
  • simonw 3mo ago
    I don't think it's a corner cutting thing though. These businesses weren't paying someone to make a flier. The business owner was sweating for an hour in Microsoft Word and producing something that looked terrible. I expect they are now investing approximately the same about of time iterating in ChatGPT and producing something that genuinely looks like a huge improvement to them.
    • joshstrange 3mo ago
      This. I said it elsewhere in this thread differently but people want to pretend the options are: 1. Paying a local designer to make a bespoke beautiful poster OR 2. Use AI It's not, the money is often just not there to pay someone. So you get whatever the intern or the owner can slap together in whatever tool they know best (which is rarely the best tool for the job). It's completely understandable that they would reach for LLMs to help improve their posters. So many people are anti-AI/anti-LLM just because it is AI/LLM, not because it's objectively worse than the alternative. It's tiring. It's the Electron vs Native argument all over again. Sure, we'd all love hand-crafted, beautiful, low-resource native applications for everything, that takes a lot of time and/or money. It's a decision between Native and Electron, it's a decision between Electron or nothing (or at best only 1 OS supported).
      • simonw 3mo ago
        What's weird here is that I should be in total agreement with you. I love it when AI tools are used to give people the ability to solve problems that previously they could not solve well. For the fliers I'm talking about here (think a hardware store promoting their summer sale) I don't think the impact on the local poster design community is meaningful. And yet... the resulting posters put me off. I'm trying to figure out why that is. I think the best explanation I have is the lack of intention behind them - knowing that none of the visual details - the illustrations, the typographic flair - had anyone thinking about them while they were constructed.
• jodacola 3mo ago
  My perspective on this, as someone skeptical of (but also bullish on) AI, is complex and I haven't completely nailed it down. My knee-jerk reaction is instant credibility loss for the business/person/thing. Follow-on is sadness (what are we losing in society because of this?), and curiosity: if a polished appearance (even if it is mega plastic) is no longer a sign of quality, then what is? What signals do I need to look for now? But, wait! Was a high degree of polish ever truly a sign of quality? I've certainly had experiences where a place made every effort to look polished and professional (and generally did a good job at it), but quality missed the mark. In the case of restaurants, a common refrain of mine used to be, "they're trying too hard in the wrong places." Now, I guess, they don't have to try too hard... but they're still not focusing in the right places. I don't know what to make of it and I go back to still trying to figure out new (or old?) signals for quality.
  • vkou 3mo ago
    A high degree of polish was tangible evidence that someone in the organization gave a shit about their work.
    • jodacola 3mo ago
      Or a third party was paid a one-time fee to make something look good - which still isn't a testament to the quality of the first party's service they're providing.
      • vkou 3mo ago
        Sure, but it means that they managed to pick third-parties they work with that give a shit. They could have always picked ones that didn't. When you're buying a pig in a poke (which is always the case when you're a first-time customer), this is a positive signal.
  • fer 3mo ago
    I have the opposite impression. For me the quality is the cake; polish is just the icing. Putting out a 5-min of effort output with an AI as your image, is all icing and no cake: it has all the right proportions, layout, etc, but something is very wrong with it. Not sure how diffusion models work in detail so consider this wet neural slop, but I feel like the training data had a sizable portion of it of high quality art, photography, design, and the models captured mostly the polish: the crispiness, the geometry, the contrast: they're after all computable features. It's more difficult to capture the meaningful blurs, the deliberate deviations, and the organic rule breaking. They're properties much harder to "featurize" for, and rely on tags/labeling/descriptions, etc of variable quality. By all means you can get that with AI anyway, but it also requires you to understand the art itself, and describe it in a way the model produces satisfactory results.
• bigfishrunning 3mo ago
  I definitely roll my eyes whenever i see a poster with that obvious-AI-generated cartoon-people style. or the "edgy rock-and-roll poster" style that seems to be so prevalent. It seems that everyone generating posters is using the same 3 prompts! it's maddening.
• cautiouscat 3mo ago
  > The posters all look good Maybe I’m misunderstanding but I haven’t seen many that I’d say look “good”. Especially food related ones.
• deleted 3mo ago
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• matthewowen 3mo ago
  I was talking to my daughter a few weeks ago about a coffee shop that was opening soon and I said that based on the posters in the window it probably wouldn’t be very good. She didn’t really understand how I could draw that conclusion and I explained that you could tell that they had been stretched to fit the available dimensions in a way that clearly distorted the images and text. And that like… if you’re careless about one thing like that you’re probably careless about other things. And I think it’s ultimately the same sort of thing? If in your marketing materials you don’t value craft and you take the shortest path rather than embrace your constraints and produce something good within them, then that’s maybe a negative signal about how you treat the thing you actually do. IME the people I know who embody great craft in a field… they care about it in everything they do, and they don’t do a thing unless they can do it with care. I think sloppy AI is just a very strong signal of someone who doesn’t follow that.
  • teo_zero 3mo ago
    > if you’re careless about one thing like that you’re probably careless about other things I'm not convinced. This rule holds only if the two "things" are related. But one can have a passion for serving the best quality coffee, and be a total wreck in graphic arts.
    • Planktonne 3mo ago
      If you're really passionate about serving the best quality coffee, you'll be passionate about the experience around that, and you'll put effort in even if it doesn't pay off. AI-generated art signals that you didn't put effort in, and so aren't passionate about the experience, and so aren't really passionate about the central thing. "At least you tried" is not a high standard, but it's the one that AI art fails.
      • vladms 3mo ago
        While I agree with the general sentiment (people not putting effort is a bad signal), I also think people are sometimes being too harsh. Everybody has limited time and resources and knowledge. Making something (a business, a book, a website, etc.) means making some trade-offs with the resources you got. When I can easily (without lots of effort/resources) check the quality of something, I prefer not to be that influenced by this type of "bad signals". Think of buying a coffee or trying a sandwich place. When I make a big investment, like a laptop or a TV, yes then it is a different story.
• furyofantares 3mo ago
  > The posters all look good - much better than their desktop publishing predecessors. They all look awful to me, visually extremely busy, nowhere to focus. The text is the same. Useless text and visual details everywhere, no opinion about what's important shining through, nothing to focus on.
  • bobthebob 3mo ago
    Thanks I’ll use this in my prompt to make a better advertisements
    • Planktonne 3mo ago
      This is a genuine comment, rather than snark, though I appreciate it might initially look that way. Your comment is an example of something that seems to accrue around AI users: casual, even gleeful, spite. You don't get this with every technology; there is no significant strand of the pro-3D printing community, for example, that goes around taunting people who don't use printers themselves. It's significant, I think, that this sort of attitude is common around AI, but not other technologies, and it does have a meaningful impact on public attitudes around it. I'm not sure whether it's a result of using AI, or a characteristic that leads to a propensity for AI, but there's something here.
      • thuuuomas 3mo ago
        > a characteristic that leads to a propensity for AI A smoldering sense of inadequacy compels use of the adequacy machine
        • bobthebob 3mo ago
          [flagged]
      • bobthebob 3mo ago
        I’m replying to a user critiquing the output of AI images. His critique is useful to refine that. Eventually there will be no way to tell between AI slop or not. I’m not sure how your bridging this into psychoanalysis
• foxglacier 3mo ago
  It's always been like this - businesses signal that they have piles of money to burn by burning it on expensive advertising. Before AI, you would have been dubious of an ad that was amateurish/clipart/etc. because it shows they can't be bothered spending money on professional designers. Back in the day, I heard that websites used Flash content for this reason too because it was expensive to produce. I think it would be better if consumers stopped using burning money as a measure of whether to buy something.
• ben_w 3mo ago
  For me it depends on the details. The baseline is as you say, negative, but there's a plumber not too far from me whose logo is AI generated, and I can't say I'd hold it against them because I wouldn't be hiring them for an eye to artistic credibility in the first place.
  • ourmandave 3mo ago
    Is he just down the street from Carl's Draperies? https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/terminator/images/e/e9/Tdf-carl%27svan-film-1.jpg https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/terminator/images/e/e9/Tdf...
    • ben_w 3mo ago
      I live in Berlin, so no. With my mere B1 German, I'm not entirely sure if the pun would even work in German, despite "Vorhangen": translated puns sometimes work fine, other times just make no sense at all.
• Keyframe 3mo ago
  distopian nature of AI generic soulless songs as background music in supermarkets is what got me. This has to stop.
• dekleinewolf 3mo ago
  My job did a 'lunch concert'. A violinist and pianist were invited to play during our lunch hour. Great initiative. And then they notified us by means of an ai-generated poster involving a photorealistic image of a violinist and pianist playing in an office setting. But not the actual artists, no, fake real artists. And I feel like that is such an insult to the actual artists? Like, these are real, actual people, with real skills, that are doing real work, and apparently that's the same as these two fake non-existant people? So yeah, I share your sentiment. But I may just be old woman shouting at clouds with the old man.
  • smelendez 3mo ago
    Right, and any musicians taking that kind of gig will have professional photos they would happily share that you could just put some text on top of! With the OP and restaurant menus in general, and to some extent here, it also feels like false advertising: You’re showing an illustration that’s not even based on the real product or people.
• twoquestions 3mo ago
  If they're skimping on their posters, what else are they skimping on? It's cheap, looks cheap, and signals laziness. This is the sentiment I'm getting even from non-technical people on Facebook these days.
• dfxm12 3mo ago
  It's generally bad vibes because honestly, they're ugly. If you're flat broke, are too many non ugly templates out there. Hiring a local person to do a job like this isn't that expensive, either. All else fails, there's a certain charm in an honest diy poster that AI lacks. If taste is involved, it's even worse vibes. I mean, an AI poster for a cell phone repair shop is whatever. An AI poster for a clothing store? I don't trust their fashion. This could be the deciding factor on if I get Filipino or Chinese (especially cause the food on the menu in the article looks terrible)...