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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 somew
by petetnt 7d ago
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.
- bonoboTP 7d agoThe 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.
- r_lee 7d ago> But again, what they replace wasn't any better. I would argue otherwise. whereas before I'd take a glance and go "hm interesting" or whatever, with these its just "oh look, it's AI slop" and that's all I will notice
- bonoboTP 7d agoI can't help but like the posters for the sheer reason that they annoy some annoying people who have a visceral reaction to the concept of AI.
- r_lee 7d ago> who have a visceral reaction to the concept of AI why do you think this is the reason? should I be cheering and clapping when someone goes on chatgpt and say "make me a poster" and they think they're a genius when this slop comes out?
- bonoboTP 7d ago[flagged]
- r_lee 7d agowhat are you even trying to imply here? should I be complimenting these default AI slop posters or be feeling good about them? I never felt this way towards low effort / simple posters before, I thought they were fine
- drstewart 7d agoGod 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
- dolebirchwood 7d agoPeople take photos with their cell phones instead of painting a scene like Rembrandt. They don't think they are a genius, and nobody cheers and claps. The photos look fine, they get the job done, and everyone moves on with their lives without projecting insecurities online.
- breezybottom 7d agoSame mentality as people who voted for Trump. No wonder he's become such an AI booster.
- Bootvis 7d agoIn 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.
- dreambigwrkhard 7d agoI 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.
- wiether 7d ago> 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.
- jwr 7d ago> they still reek AI conformity and I feel sick looking at them I bet you would not feel sick if you didn't know ahead of time they were AI-generated. Some really are quite good.
- phoronixrly 7d ago> if you didn't know ahead of time they were AI-generated You can't be serious... Are we looking at the same posters?
- ACCount39 7d agoYes. That's the issue: we are looking at the same posters. It's just that "seeing this poster for the first time, unaware of the workings behind it" is a very different experience from "seeing this poster after you already saw dozens of other AI generated posters that used a similar style and had similar issues, got canny at spotting both the style and the issues in it, and came to associate them with cheap low quality work". The former impression is "wow that's a good poster". The latter impression is "ew, it's posterslop". The poster, in the meanwhile, remains the same. AI can often win in art contests - images, short stories, design. But that requires either sharp prompting, or an audience that's not familiar with "AI cliches". The quality is, if removed from the context, fairly good. If embedded in context, it's utter slop. The work is the same. Funny how that works.
- gyomu 7d ago> 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.
- Kreutzer 7d agoOne 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.
- 1123581321 7d agoSounds like you could go to a different shop right now, that stands out for its ice cream instead of its signs. :)
- nevertoolate 7d agoI 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.
- echelon 7d agoThe 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.
- amarcheschi 7d agoI was honestly ok with the silly looking posters. Where I'm from in italy it's common to have sagre, sort of cheap food events sponsored by the municipality/local shops. Before ai the posters looked like each other (as in, poster typically looking like sagre posters). Now not even that, they're just slop ai that could be everything before you read. Nobody needed better looking posters in this case... Before ai example https://www.sagretoscane.com/sagre/fi/rignano-sullarno/sagra-del-cinghiale-rignano.html https://www.sagretoscane.com/sagre/fi/rignano-sullarno/sagra... Post Ai example https://www.instagram.com/p/DZiKFZgIwcY/ https://www.instagram.com/p/DZiKFZgIwcY/ Here's an article by the biggest online Italian newspaper, worth reading translated https://www.ilpost.it/2026/07/26/ai-locandine-sagre/ https://www.ilpost.it/2026/07/26/ai-locandine-sagre/
- ChrisLTD 7d agoYikes. The old posters had an austere beauty
- amarcheschi 7d agoAnd 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
- bspammer 7d agoFor me what always gives it away is not the posters themselves, it’s the context. These are all overdesigned for a local community fair. There is no way they’d be paying for a professional designer for this, therefore it’s AI. On the other hand if it had word art, grammar/spelling mistakes, images with wrong aspect ratios or clipping issues, that would immediately convince me it wasn’t AI.
- singpolyma3 7d agoPrompt: 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...
- _puk 7d agoContext is everything. A twee handwritten sign for free range eggs at the roadside is likely to do well. A handwritten sign for flying lessons on the other hand..
- TacticalCoder 7d ago> but fail to see that the dozen variations generated are not distinctive - they might have somewhat different typography or imaginary, but still have the same AI uniformity and smell as the crappy restaurant poster you see on the street Hard disagree: every single example TFA gives is way better than the horrible generic ones that are polluting every shop and LinkedIn post. It's not even close.
- grumbel 7d agoThat'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.
- graemep 7d agoI 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.
- TheOtherHobbes 7d agoDid 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.
- BoredomIsFun 7d ago> 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.
- AIiscoming 7d agoThey look absolutly well done.
- shiandow 7d agoWell maybe not that, it would have to stop almost aligning text to make it good instead of usable.
- crazybonkersai 7d agoIdk, 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.
- danpasca 7d agoIt 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.
- FuckButtons 6d agoI 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.