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A lot of people in the comments say that the supposedly better examples in the article are still “horrible” because they can tell they’re AI and point to things

A lot of people in the comments say that the supposedly better examples in the article are still “horrible” because they can tell they’re AI and point to things that the AI did “wrong” and a human artist would do better. That may be true if you’re working with a top of the line artist, but in my experience the average freelance designer online is significantly worse than AI. I’ve worked with dozens of budget friendly designers on Fiverr and consistently get way worse results than I’ve gotten from AI models. Will a great human designer produce better output than an AI? Maybe, but a small local event or business probably won’t have the budget to hire them or know where to find them. It’s cheaper, faster and easier to use AI to generate something that’s good enough for their purposes. People also point out all the little flaws in the “good” examples and cite them as obvious tells that they were AI generated. I think it would be interesting to see if people could reliably distinguish between AI generated flyers and human made flyers. Sure, sometimes it’s obvious like when the AI adds those weird, cartoony people. But if the model is told not to create designs like that and stick to the styles used in the second half of the article, I expect people would have a much harder time distinguishing the human designs from the AI designs.

Forgeties79 9d ago
I sure hope it’s better than some random person you paid $20
sevenzero 9d ago
>Maybe, but a small local event or business probably won’t have the budget to hire them or know where to find them. This is funny to read given I am currently on a Japan trip with 3 friends and we actively avoid every small restaurant that have AI generated images of their food. Using AI generated bullshit just shows that you really dont want to put in the work to produce something actually charming. Hell, we've seen a food menu drawn by a toddler and it was infinitely more sympathetic than all the AI generated Wagyu images.
- Kim_Bruning 9d ago
  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.
- netsharc 9d ago
  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 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?"
- CobaltFire 9d ago
  Given that any advertisement with AI generated food would be illegal there I don't imagine you have to avoid very many! I just got back from a month there and recall perhaps 2 posters that may have been AI. I actually ran into several public art exhibits as well.
  - sevenzero 9d ago
    >Given that any advertisement with AI generated food would be illegal there So you never actually walked the streets ive been in recently lol
- CuriouslyC 9d ago
  [flagged]
- ErneX 9d ago
  You reminded me of this tweet I came across recently https://x.com/tylerglaiel/status/2099382887045108154 https://x.com/tylerglaiel/status/2099382887045108154
  - sevenzero 9d ago
    This is exactly what I meant.
ha-shine 9d ago
This is my experience as well. I run a bootstrapped business, so we don't have a ton of backing. We can't afford the top design firms, and Fable can do better than those within our budget. So it's not that we prefer AI over human designers; we just don't have the money!
- sevenzero 9d ago
  Creativity does not have to be expensive to be good. Yall just dont want to bother dealing with it.
  - sammularczyk 9d ago
    Exactly. Sad to see another industry getting decimated by AI just to save a bit of cash.
    - w4yai 9d ago
      A bit ? A lot.
      - sevenzero 9d ago
        Because people assume u need to actually hire someone to make art. Just let your kid draw something for your small restaurant. It's more pleasant to look at for people who didn't yet sell their soul to AI.
        sejje 9d ago
        Then you get Chick o' Fish. It is not, in fact, more pleasant to look at.
        rpdillon 9d ago
        > 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".
michaelbuckbee 9d ago
To me, they look very much like Canva style designs. Some pre-existing design template that someone took and then smooshed their own dates and information into.
- nasseri 9d ago
  Yea these look bad you don't need to be a pro designer to see that.
berkes 9d ago
The blog also mentions, several times, that it wasn't the goal to be indistinguishable. I think it's actually a feature when people can recognize it as AI. Why would someone want it to be unrecognizable as AI? What is the reason people want to hide AI usage ? (other than when "cheating" in studies or examns or such, obv)
- afavour 9d ago
  > Why would someone want it to be unrecognizable as AI? What is the reason people want to hide it Because a lot of “everyday” folks really strongly dislike AI. I’ve lost count of the number of AI generated Instagram ads I’ve seen where the comments are filled with “AI slop!”. It’s not a positive signal for anyone who wants to persuade someone of the value of whatever they’re advertising because it’s associated with being cheap and lazy.
  - p-e-w 9d ago
    [flagged]
    - afavour 9d ago
      They really don’t. A tiny minority of cranks dislike vaccines. AI dislike is far, far more widespread. Not to mention, there’s a reason why AI is seen as cheap and lazy… because it is! There’s no good parallel to vaccines here.
  - jryle70 9d ago
    I think "a lot" is very subjective. I can also say "a lot of people really like AI-generated arts" and that would be true as well. HN is a place where a lot of normally objective, informed, and probably very nice folks in the real life come to engage in endless of debates that go nowhere.
    - afavour 9d ago
      > Half of U.S. adults say the increased use of AI in daily life makes them feel more concerned than excited, according to a June 2025 survey. Just 10% say they are more excited than concerned. Another 38% say they are equally concerned and excited. > About half of Americans said in the June survey that AI will worsen people’s ability to think creatively and form meaningful relationships with others. Far fewer said AI will make these things better. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/03/12/key-findings-about-how-americans-view-artificial-intelligence/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/03/12/key-findi... “about half” surely objectively qualifies as “a lot”. > I can also say "a lot of people really like AI-generated arts" and that would be true as well. Yes but without the corresponding negative. If someone who likes AI generated art sees some human created art they don’t think “gross, why didn’t they use AI to do that?”. So for something like advertising using AI will alienate some potential customers. Not using AI will alienate no one.
exitb 9d ago
The alternatives are not horrible, but look like I’m being lured to a Spring Fair by an alien. It makes no sense to associate with Japanese imagery or 90s computer graphics for an event that has nothing to with these topics. Design is a language and these speak gibberish.
- mattmanser 9d ago
  They asked the AI for a list of different styles. The author then picked them out, not the AI. For curiosity I assume.
- zetanor 9d ago
  The Spring Fair is a lorem ipsum, here.
- doug_durham 9d ago
  I love the idea of using unexpected styles. I think it can be very creative. I appreciate it if someone does that deliberately as a humor.
alerighi 9d ago
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. If there are graphics designer that produce a worse result of what AI creates, it's because they probably use AI as well. The problem of AI generated stuff (we see the problem of manifests, but I'm a software engineer and with computer programs it's exactly the same thing) is that they immediately look non-human, and our brain trained itself to detect, and thus get irritated by, AI generated content. It looks fake, it hurts to see, it seems fine at first glance fine but it's not, everyone seems identical because the AI is not, despite of the name, creative, it just a hyper complex copy/paste machine, and obviously the result just looks copy/paste as well.
- goatherders 9d ago
  Sure but why? Outside of a small joy of the organizing committee, is an incrementally "better" (which is almost entirely subjective anyway) worth the trouvle?
  - otabdeveloper4 9d ago
    AI irritates people. This is fine if you're making political cartoons or racist memes, but not so fine for ad copy.
    - jryle70 9d ago
      A lot of posters or arts in general are to be seen once and never again. If you put pre-AI arts together in an exhibition like at the top of the article are you sure it wouldn't irritate people? I walk past countless of such arts everyday, none of them registered after even 15 mins. Maybe you have better taste, but don't try to project your opinion as that of the majority.
      - otabdeveloper4 9d ago
        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.
wiederholen 9d ago
[dead]
eloisant 9d ago
The biggest problem that I have with most AI posters is that they are too busy, you have to look for information instead of seeing it popping right away. Amateurs posters of before AI didn't have this problem. White background, the important info in big letters, maybe one clipart or to. So I'm not talking about how pro artists could make a better job, but even the small local non-profit used to produce better posters. Not in the sense of "better looking", but in the sense that they were more readable. At least the examples of this blog are more readable than what we usually see.
- jcelerier 9d ago
  Well what's better ? I have so many pictures of posters of old events or storefronts saved on my phone because they were so astronomically bad it'd have been better to not have any poster at all. Today's AI makes it look even worse but I'm hopeful that in five years we'll all live in a world generally more agreeable to look at and not "concrete with pink and yellow fluo paper smashed on top of it" like https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/music-poster-wall.html https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/music-poster-wall.html or https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/france-poster-wall.html?pseudoid=943AE081-1E9F-4158-A6AF-5FAE6EEE58B9&sortBy=relevant https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/france-poster-wall.html?ps... because the cost of making things enjoyable with more colour and detail will have come down. Maybe we can finally go back to Art Nouveau if the cost of making it comes down!
  - icantevenhold 9d ago
    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.
  - stymaar 9d ago
    > we'll all live in a world generally more agreeable to look at and not "concrete with pink and yellow fluo paper smashed on top of it" like https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/music-poster-wall.html https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/music-poster-wall.html or https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/france-poster-wall.html?ps https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/france-poster-wall.html?ps... Sorry buf I'd take these posters over your “generally more agreeable ” homogeneous slop literally any day.
VCFundedGenYer 9d ago
There aren't small problems in these posters though. They're huge, obvious, and an indicator that the one who made the flyer didn't care whatsoever. When it includes an American Flag with more than 50 stars + the bottom row is cut off, you know they didn't even bother to proofread it. This is the kind of garbage we're suffering with.
- qarl 9d ago
  You should try typing "American flag clipart" into Google and see non-AI images with the wrong number of stars.
  - dgellow 9d ago
    Aren’t those ai generated too?
    - qarl 9d ago
      Why you making me check for you? The first one I clicked on is at a stock photo site that says: Every visual at iStock is crafted through human expertise, creativity, and ingenuity. We do not allow AI-generated visuals in our library.
      - dgellow 9d ago
        Are you aware we don’t all get the same results from a google image search? Or do you seriously believe if I search the same keywords we will be looking at the exact same images?
        qarl 9d ago
        That's not what I said. I said the first one I saw was not AI art via simple inspection. I wondered if you even looked. Did you even look?
        HappMacDonald 8d ago
        Why would you ask them to search for you if you knew they wouldn't get the same images you would get? Claim: A vast majority of human-made clip art that involves flags as tertiary elements will fail to render them in a vexillologically perfect manner.
CuriouslyC 9d ago
AI thumbnails outperform human thumbnails on YouTube by a lot, I've seen click-through rate spreads of 4%+ (~5% -> ~9% in AB tests). Yet people will do drive by comments trying to excoriate creators for using AI thumbnails. It's really quite ridiculous.
- driverdan 9d ago
  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.
- Kubuxu 9d ago
  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.
  - Forgeties79 9d ago
    It’s the current iteration of the red arrow with a (staged) surprised face and as you’re saying we will all learn to just skip it as well. These things are always an arms race, and given LLM’s can only generate facsimiles of things I don’t see how it can stay ahead of it
- ks2048 9d ago
  What's ridiculous about that?
- dspillett 9d ago
  A lot of any real gain will be due to novelty, and that will wane once you've been doing it a short time (or once other people in your field are doing it so you all go back to looking the same). I suspect a lot of the gain isn't even that useful to the channel: it being people clicking to complain. You might not see that mean actual complaints because many will see the existing ones and either just upvote them or move on without doing anything (their chance to repeat their regular comment to get a few upvotes having been taken by someone already having said it).
vrypan 9d ago
Not to mention that I can also tell when a poster has been generated using Photoshop and not real artist tools, like brushes and pens. I've seen a lot of these Photoshop-generated posters, and they are in no way comparable to something DaVinci or Picasso would create.
- driverdan 9d ago
  > not real artist tools Nice no true Scotsman fallacy. PS is a "real" artist tool.
  - usef- 9d ago
    I believe that comment is satire. Look at the last six words.
  - vrypan 9d ago
    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.
  - grumbel 9d ago
    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.
- fn-mote 9d ago
  You forgot the /s. Sadly, if it hadn’t gone on to DaVinci, I wouldn’t be sure.
sparkilyshpark 9d ago
>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
glenstein 9d ago
There's an amazing viral twitter thread where someone claimed a real Monet painting was an AI generated imitation, and it got an avalanche of comments from people who claimed it was an obvious fake and a poor imitation at that. It's not tracking a real thing as much as people would like to think.
- AndrewKemendo 9d ago
  In fact it’s only tracking the quality of the produced image Every single person I’ve asked, and I’ve asked hundreds, say that knowing it was AI irrespective of anything else was enough to think it was bad. There’s millions of genai images that people aren’t commenting on because they don’t know it’s AI.
  - deleted 9d ago
    [deleted]
  - qarl 9d ago
    > knowing it was AI irrespective of anything else was enough to think it was bad. That's prejudice.
    - paulhebert 9d ago
      The definition of prejudice requires the judgment to be unfair. Do you think it’s unfair for people to dislike AI generated art based on their principles?
      - qarl 9d ago
        Unfair in this context is judging the art without even looking at it.
        paulhebert 9d ago
        You don’t think it’s fair to factor how art was created into your judgment?
fwlr 9d ago
If the AI makes a “better” poster that everyone hates because it’s AI, and a person makes a “worse” poster that everyone likes because it’s human, isn’t the business better off with the “worse” poster?
- zamadatix 9d ago
  It's not everyone though.
- mionhe 9d ago
  I think the issue there is that, in the absence of the AI poster, people will still dislike the "worse" poster. Since this is idealogical, a business owner's choices are: * use AI and some people hate it on principle, don't use AI and don't pay enough and some people hate it because it looks cheap, don't use Ai and pay a bunch more and people don't hate it...maybe, depending on style and skill of the artist. As a business owner, it's not an encouraging situation.
  - FooBarWidget 9d ago
    None of the AI haters (or haters in general) are willing to put money where their mouths are. None of them are willing to pay for better human artwork, yet have the audacity to criticize as if top artists owe them free output.
    - dgellow 9d ago
      > yet have the audacity to criticize as if top artists owe them free output Literally nobody is saying that, what are you talking about
      - FooBarWidget 9d ago
        Which critic is proposing funding better artwork, made by good human artists? Sometimes, silence says more than words. Non-decision is also a decision.
ChrisMarshallNY 9d ago
I've worked with some of the top designers in the world. I don't think that AI will beat them (for now), but the examples in his sample page[0] beat the junk that I've seen a lot of non-top-designers do. As he states, he isn't trying to make stuff that doesn't "look like AI did it," he just wants to introduce variety, and has proposed a disciplined way to do that. [0] https://john.hartnup.uk/poster-prompts/ https://john.hartnup.uk/poster-prompts/
- deleted 9d ago
  [deleted]
- skor 9d ago
  can you please list some of the people you worked with? I really appreciate good design and am always looking for great artists that I don’t know about yet, thanks.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 9d ago
    Pentagram and DDO. Kinda pricey, though.
    - potamic 9d ago
      Going through pentagram's site, their shakespeare in the park posters do give me that AI vibe. Perhaps AI has been trained in many such similar posters, but as a layman, I'd be hard pressed to be able to distinguish these from AI generated ones. On a side note, I wanted to link that collection here, but unfortunately there's no hyperlink, it just opens in a popup. You'll have to scroll down to the bottom of their home page to find it. I hope for their sake they just overlooked this one thing, because if designers don't see the role of hyperlinks in user experience, I can't take them seriously. [1] https://www.pentagram.com https://www.pentagram.com
      - ChrisMarshallNY 9d ago
        Pentagram is an interesting company. We worked with them around fifteen or twenty years ago, so it’s likely a lot has changed, since then. They had a structure, where each studio was run by a partner, and had its own specialty. Almost a separate company. We worked with the San Francisco one, which specialized in digital design (looks like it’s no longer around, or transitioned to an independent company). We used them for graphic design. We used DDO (they are still around[0]), for interaction design (we worked with both, simultaneously). It was quite an experience, and taught me a great deal about integration of professional designers, into a technical project. I still use a lot of what I learned, to this day. They had that “AI vibe,” back then, so I guess we know where the LLMs got some of their training materials. Their Web sites have always been like that. I’m assuming that part of the reason, is to discourage scraping, and another, is to be fairly pretentious. There was quite a bit of showmanship, back then, and I have no reason to think that it’s any less, these days. They are certainly not alone. New York is filled with studios like that. I know a chap that designs top-end jewelry, and is almost a caricature. On any given day, his outfits cost more than my car. It seems to work. He makes a lot of money, so someone takes him seriously. [0] https://www.dubberly.com/ https://www.dubberly.com/
PLenz 9d ago
If taste is all that's left you can't fault people for discriminting on taste
giancarlostoro 9d ago
> a human artist would do better. Except we have all seen really awful human made posters long before AI. People are just upset just to be upset at this point. Code was nosediving before AI badly.
- deleted 9d ago
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- oblio 9d ago
  > 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.
  - giancarlostoro 9d ago
    2010s to 2020s code has been bad. We used to have 100% natively compiled apps, now everything is a Chrome browser wrapped JavaScript abomination, and before anyone assumes I hate JavaScript, I love doing front-end web development, and backend, and automation... and an unhealthy number of things (my GitHub is a mess). My point being, software quality has been downhill before AI, we just have nonsense rosy eyeglasses.
    - oblio 9d ago
      And before that we had PHP apps and VB apps, etc. Most code didn't have tests, most code wasn't version controlled. Functionality was much more limited, lots more stuff wasn't available on Linux. Yes, we lost speed and resource usage but regular people don't care enough to pay for that or to punish offending apps in the marketplace.
      - giancarlostoro 8d ago
        Even after tests a lot of code does not.
- johnnyanmac 9d ago
  >People are just upset just to be upset at this point. Despite this being a technical community we seem to be really bad at understanding scale. A bad artist is at worst like a fee pieces of trash littered in your lawn. Bad AI art is like a dump truck tipping over into your yard. And you see 10 more dump truck coming in at 90mph. It doesn't matter if it's a recyclables truck and all the bottles are individually cleaner and more Eco friendly than candy bar wrappers. The magnitude is still overwhelming. You can ignore a few bad artists you don't like. You can't ignore swimming through slop day in and day out. Friction in a previously smooth environment angers people, and AI creates a lot of newfound friction.
HawtAds 9d ago
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.
mrbluecoat 9d ago
Anecdotally, I was reading https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematicians-build-long-awaited-graph-sandwich-20260918/ 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/ https://www.pangram.com/ said was legit human created. Sad that my new default is assuming everything is AI created or vibed nowadays.
aizk 9d ago
At least for me, the enumerated svg-like icons give it away, but that's merely a prompt fix.
mbgerring 9d ago
Cool man, how good of a job would you do at your craft if I only gave you $5
tompark 9d ago
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.
- pembrook 9d ago
  True, but whats even dumber is that 99% of the use cases people are getting angry at would never be given to a real designer anyway (too low value). The funniest genre of AI backlash imo is normies yelling at small businesses for using AI on social posts. There's no world where your local flowershop has both the time and money to brief a design agency to create a flyer for Fridays social post. Yet, in the mind of the mob, they imagine some designer is losing a job due to the existence of AI...not realizing that every social post they've previously been looking at from the same flower shop was just a 1-click Canva template. The only person losing a job due to AI design is Canva, which itself was hated for taking jobs away from Photoshop designers, whom in the 90s ended up taking jobs away from the phototypesetting industry, who took the jobs away from the manual typesetters, etc etc etc. Meanwhile the economy and living standards grew each time.
- johnnyanmac 9d ago
  Well that's why and how we got the current model. Lots of noise, so tools were made to curate and figure out the most consistent artists But it goes both wwys; artists that stand out get ebough of a reputation to boost their prices. Unless you get very lucky with budding taletnt, you generally get what you pay for.It's not much different from how you'd run your gaming team.
tstrimple 9d ago
I’ve been diving into Ink Master highlights on YouTube lately. These are typically all excellent artists but they don’t always produce excellent work. I’ve seen some hands that could have come out of an early gen ai model permanently inked into someone’s skin.
ynac 9d ago
You said it - and the same is true for many of the other talents from Ai. I've worked with gobs of artists, accountant, MBAs, developers, appliance repair techs, and so on. Ai does a better job than most of them, but not as good as the best of them.
AlfeG 9d ago
> they can tell they’re AI and point to things that the AI did “wrong” and a human artist would do better. Pretty much all of the designers we contacted recently were using AI to draw. Especially on those kinds of cheap work. They are just a bit more professional in the prompting and can do final touch in Photoshop.
petetnt 9d ago
Have you considered looking up designers you like and asking them instead of "budget friendly designers on Fiverr"?
heaney-555 9d ago
This is an excellent point, and it doesn't only apply to art/design. In almost any intellectual domain, including coding, the models are already ahead of the average human. But instead, we compare them to the very best humans, which almost no one on the planet has access to. $20 for a lot of access to better-than-average is a world-changingly good deal!
- alecst 9d ago
  This reads like the opening scene of the Monkey’s Paw. Doubt it will feel like a good deal in the long run.
no_no_no_yes 9d ago
> I’ve worked with dozens of budget friendly designers on Fiverr and consistently get way worse results than I’ve gotten from AI models. That makes sense given they're on Fiverr. However, Fiverr freelancers are now just AI prompters :) doesn't matter whether it's code or art.
Anonyneko 9d ago
Maybe it's just me, but even on pure aesthetic reasons I would take a Comic Sans and clipart poster made in Word over the slop. At this point I have some kind of a physical repulsion to the generated posters, and it's always easy to tell from the fontwork and the iconography, let alone illustrations if there are any.
rsoto2 9d ago
i would never go to an event that cares so little about people buying tickets they can't even put a pen to paper or just use a photograph. it reeks of laziness.
cush 9d ago
Totally agree. Opinions are cheap. People can be drawn to “horrible” art, and small artists - especially social media managers - right now are creating intentionally bad mspaint.exe 1994 aesthetics because AI art looks like it was created by real artists, and it’s the only way to differentiate
- dyauspitr 9d ago
  You can’t even differentiate it that way. AI generates perfect MS paint aesthetics
blub 9d ago
The problem’s not so much that the posters are AI generated, but that they’re too crowded and unfocused. Their individual elements seem fine and look good, but when taken as a whole they feel wrong. This may be a failure mode similar to juniors using AI and making it much harder for seniors to find the bugs, because the code actually looks good at first sight. I don’t think the blog author actually has any design skills based on the prompts and the AI obviously can’t nudge them in the right direction or help them clarify their brief, like a real designer (i.e. not random online freelancers) would.
atomicnumber3 9d ago
It sure seems like, while LLMs and diffusion models won't completely eradicate the middle class, the bar has now risen significantly to actually contribute in a lot of areas. For programmers, sure SV startups and actual software-first shops are probably only augments with LLMs and not replacing. But what % of software engineers are employed in such shops? Well, from my graduating class in CS, approximately 30% of grads all went to the same contracting shop whose business model seems to be, take the bottom 30% of each CS class, underpay the fuck out of them, bootcamp them into something vaguely usable + teach the house style of CRUD/LOB app framework, then throw them at clients. And this seems to still be a step above "offshore to barely baseline capable (or worse) body shop for extremely dubious results." That entire bottom 50% is probably about to be eviscerated. The "offshore + pray" approach is probably going to be completely zapped, much easier to just vibe code for probably better (or at least not worse) results. And the onshore-but-cheaper contracting shops are probably going to need a lot fewer people whose main contribution is translating low-ambiguity tickets into syntactically valid java spring code. Similarly, for artists, disney is probably not going to use AI in a way that substantially speeds them up because they won't tolerate the quality loss at all. But how many artists work for disney? And how many make anime waifus for the gacha apps? The latter of which I can only assume has already switched substantially to AI assets.
- Morromist 9d ago
  I'm not sure about coders but for artists I don't think a massive number were making anime waifus, but instead were making graphic designs for advertisements, publications & websites. Currently AI is actually replacing some of these jobs. But there's kinda a hitch there - when you target me with ads or show me your company's website and it has obvious AI art I tend to think that you're either selling me something very low quality or are a scammer. If you show me the novel you've written and it has an AI art cover I assume the contents are also AI generated garbage writing. So I wonder if those jobs will really be replaced? It all depends on society's acceptance of AI art and if AI art doesn't get any better. I thought it would get to the point that I couldn't tell it was AI by now, but so far it hasn't. I think AI waifus and porn and memes and browser based zynga type games will be a place AI is going to be accepted because nobody cared too much about the authenticity and quality of those things before either. But an advertisement selling me a car? The cover of a book on philosophy? A website that I'm going to give my credit card number to? I'm not sure about those things.
lofaszvanitt 9d ago
Nah, AI cant design prooper pages, and posters. Period. Even someone with basic aesthetic skills and a knack for illustrations will create a much better postan, than these. Because you'll immediately recognize the human in them. AI has no soul, no experiences, it's just a primitive neural net.
asdff 9d ago
>but a small local event or business probably won’t have the budget to hire them or know where to find them. And yet, somehow, up until what maybe 2024, every single small event or business in every local market around the earth managed to figure this out. I guess we've lost that ancestral knowledge of how this was possibly done and afforded in a few dozen months.
crisnoble 9d ago
If you can convince Chat GPT to stop putting icons next to every single thing, it would be loads better. 1940s cubist style seems sort of there, then bam a tiny cake icon next to the word cakes and drinks. Why? Each of these posters, including the original would be so much better without these tiny stupid icons. No one at the Bauhaus ever made a poster with tiny icons! Chat GPT just cannot drop the icons. Like just have it read a graphic design history book. These secondary attempts might pass more people's AI aversion filter but they would all receive an F in a graphic design class.
- NinjaTrance 9d ago
  Students in a graphic design class are expected to create something that graphic designers like; but that's not the same as what other people like.
  - crisnoble 8d ago
    No, aesthetics really don't come into play in graphic design classes. Students learn, and are expected to follow, the technical rules of design just like CS students learn general concepts of programming. You would probably fail your class if you decided to come up with a brand new data storage concept instead of using a database. Hierarchy of information, typographic consistency, grid structure, and information density.
Gathering6678 9d ago
My take is most users (who generate these posters) are not aesthetically astute and/or care enough to put in more effort.
DrewADesign 9d ago
You’re comparing the sub-minimum-wage offshore template jockeys to average designers, not “high end” designers. A high-end designer making a one-off poster for a local fair is about as likely as a senior engineer at a FAANG company making a website for it. It would be like someone paying for a simple website for their small business saying off-shore fiverrrr Wordpress hacks are average coders, and anyone making anything close to a reasonable dev salary in this job market was a high-falutin’ luxury option. An average graphic designer would ask what unique, non-informational things about the event the poster should portray, do a little bit of research and exploration, and then figure out how to communicate that in pure visual terms. It draws people into the vibe of your event, and hints at the visual impact of experiencing it. You get the nice type work, information hierarchy, attractive layout and color scheme, etc. for free because those are the tools average graphic designers use to visually communicate. This is not expensive compared to the expertise required. With both AI and the Fiverrrr designers, at best, you only get nice type work, information hierarchy, attractive layout and color scheme, etc. You’re not paying for design — you’re paying a graphics software technician for a graphic, like you would at a sign shop. An average designer is who you’d want to make your posters and maybe a few other types of advertisements, such as postcards, or bus shelters or billboards or banner ads. Someone in a country with a minimum wage of less than a dollar is who you get on fiverrrr. A high-end graphic designer is who you’d contract to do a complete branding and identity overhaul.
ChrisMarshallNY 9d ago
You’re absolutely right! (See what I did, there?) I mentioned something similar, in a previous comment. The sad part, is that the same thing is likely to happen to design, as is already happening with software development. The junior training track is going to get the bottom ripped out. Established outfits like Pentagram will do fine, but lesser ones, like small design shops, are likely to get run out of business by AI image generation, which will improve quickly. The problem is that these are the shops that train the designers that end up in companies like Pentagram. Or only Ivy-League sheepskins will get junior jobs at the big studios, which will be the only ones left standing, when the dust settles.
sickcodebruh 9d ago
This misses the point about complaints of AI slop. It’s not about “worse”, it’s about “distracting”. It’s about AI fingerprints overwhelming the consumer. It’s not too different from hiring a freelancer who does a blatant stylistic ripoff of a popular artist in an unflattering way: the consumer of the work sees the ripoff first, focuses on the ripoff, is unable to appreciate the message being delivered. AI slop is overwhelming and distracting to the consumer in that it communicates messages of laziness, disinterest, disregard for the underlying message. Whether this is true or not in every case, we’ve seen enough cases where we have to start by considering it. It’s the vehicle for scams and spam. It’s like sending an email that starts with “FIVE TRICKS TO HAVE BETTER SKIN” or any other meme spam line. A human freelancer might do work that is technically worse. Worse can be distracting in ways that are, well… worse. But it’s different, it doesn’t tap into a collective cultural understanding of “AI slop.” It may communicate even more poorly, but it’s not the same problem.
pc86 8d ago
I agree with everything you said except I would simply add that "the average freelance designer online" is simply an AI meat proxy (which does, by definition, make them worse than AI since you could just use AI in the first place and get the same results).
maxglute 8d ago
good cgi vs bad cgi etc etc.
jimmydddd 8d ago
I'm a drummer (musician) and drummers faced a similar crisis forty years ago with the advent of drum machines. A guitarist and bassist could perform with a drum machine instead of sharing their pay with a drummer. An experienced drummer was always way better then a drum machine. However, inexperienced drummers often don't keep steady time, play too loud, over complicate things. The drum machines avoided these pitfalls of using a mediocre drummer.
vtemp009 8d ago
it's obvious that ai and humans have to colab and correct each other as part of a process of correcting overlooking issues.
poulpy123 8d ago
Maybe Fiverr is not the best place to hire freelance

Forgeties79 9d ago

I sure hope it’s better than some random person you paid $20

sevenzero 9d ago

>Maybe, but a small local event or business probably won’t have the budget to hire them or know where to find them. This is funny to read given I am currently on a Japan trip with 3 friends and we actively avoid every small restaurant that have AI generated images of their food. Using AI generated bullshit just shows that you really dont want to put in the work to produce something actually charming. Hell, we've seen a food menu drawn by a toddler and it was infinitely more sympathetic than all the AI generated Wagyu images.

Kim_Bruning 9d ago
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.
netsharc 9d ago
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 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?"
CobaltFire 9d ago
Given that any advertisement with AI generated food would be illegal there I don't imagine you have to avoid very many! I just got back from a month there and recall perhaps 2 posters that may have been AI. I actually ran into several public art exhibits as well.
- sevenzero 9d ago
  >Given that any advertisement with AI generated food would be illegal there So you never actually walked the streets ive been in recently lol
CuriouslyC 9d ago
[flagged]
ErneX 9d ago
You reminded me of this tweet I came across recently https://x.com/tylerglaiel/status/2099382887045108154 https://x.com/tylerglaiel/status/2099382887045108154
- sevenzero 9d ago
  This is exactly what I meant.

ha-shine 9d ago

This is my experience as well. I run a bootstrapped business, so we don't have a ton of backing. We can't afford the top design firms, and Fable can do better than those within our budget. So it's not that we prefer AI over human designers; we just don't have the money!

sevenzero 9d ago
Creativity does not have to be expensive to be good. Yall just dont want to bother dealing with it.
- sammularczyk 9d ago
  Exactly. Sad to see another industry getting decimated by AI just to save a bit of cash.
  - w4yai 9d ago
    A bit ? A lot.
    - sevenzero 9d ago
      Because people assume u need to actually hire someone to make art. Just let your kid draw something for your small restaurant. It's more pleasant to look at for people who didn't yet sell their soul to AI.
      - sejje 9d ago
        Then you get Chick o' Fish. It is not, in fact, more pleasant to look at.
      - rpdillon 9d ago
        > 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".

michaelbuckbee 9d ago

To me, they look very much like Canva style designs. Some pre-existing design template that someone took and then smooshed their own dates and information into.

nasseri 9d ago
Yea these look bad you don't need to be a pro designer to see that.

berkes 9d ago

The blog also mentions, several times, that it wasn't the goal to be indistinguishable. I think it's actually a feature when people can recognize it as AI. Why would someone want it to be unrecognizable as AI? What is the reason people want to hide AI usage ? (other than when "cheating" in studies or examns or such, obv)

afavour 9d ago
> Why would someone want it to be unrecognizable as AI? What is the reason people want to hide it Because a lot of “everyday” folks really strongly dislike AI. I’ve lost count of the number of AI generated Instagram ads I’ve seen where the comments are filled with “AI slop!”. It’s not a positive signal for anyone who wants to persuade someone of the value of whatever they’re advertising because it’s associated with being cheap and lazy.
- p-e-w 9d ago
  [flagged]
  - afavour 9d ago
    They really don’t. A tiny minority of cranks dislike vaccines. AI dislike is far, far more widespread. Not to mention, there’s a reason why AI is seen as cheap and lazy… because it is! There’s no good parallel to vaccines here.
- jryle70 9d ago
  I think "a lot" is very subjective. I can also say "a lot of people really like AI-generated arts" and that would be true as well. HN is a place where a lot of normally objective, informed, and probably very nice folks in the real life come to engage in endless of debates that go nowhere.
  - afavour 9d ago
    > Half of U.S. adults say the increased use of AI in daily life makes them feel more concerned than excited, according to a June 2025 survey. Just 10% say they are more excited than concerned. Another 38% say they are equally concerned and excited. > About half of Americans said in the June survey that AI will worsen people’s ability to think creatively and form meaningful relationships with others. Far fewer said AI will make these things better. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/03/12/key-findings-about-how-americans-view-artificial-intelligence/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/03/12/key-findi... “about half” surely objectively qualifies as “a lot”. > I can also say "a lot of people really like AI-generated arts" and that would be true as well. Yes but without the corresponding negative. If someone who likes AI generated art sees some human created art they don’t think “gross, why didn’t they use AI to do that?”. So for something like advertising using AI will alienate some potential customers. Not using AI will alienate no one.

exitb 9d ago

The alternatives are not horrible, but look like I’m being lured to a Spring Fair by an alien. It makes no sense to associate with Japanese imagery or 90s computer graphics for an event that has nothing to with these topics. Design is a language and these speak gibberish.

mattmanser 9d ago
They asked the AI for a list of different styles. The author then picked them out, not the AI. For curiosity I assume.
zetanor 9d ago
The Spring Fair is a lorem ipsum, here.
doug_durham 9d ago
I love the idea of using unexpected styles. I think it can be very creative. I appreciate it if someone does that deliberately as a humor.

alerighi 9d ago

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. If there are graphics designer that produce a worse result of what AI creates, it's because they probably use AI as well. The problem of AI generated stuff (we see the problem of manifests, but I'm a software engineer and with computer programs it's exactly the same thing) is that they immediately look non-human, and our brain trained itself to detect, and thus get irritated by, AI generated content. It looks fake, it hurts to see, it seems fine at first glance fine but it's not, everyone seems identical because the AI is not, despite of the name, creative, it just a hyper complex copy/paste machine, and obviously the result just looks copy/paste as well.

goatherders 9d ago
Sure but why? Outside of a small joy of the organizing committee, is an incrementally "better" (which is almost entirely subjective anyway) worth the trouvle?
- otabdeveloper4 9d ago
  AI irritates people. This is fine if you're making political cartoons or racist memes, but not so fine for ad copy.
  - jryle70 9d ago
    A lot of posters or arts in general are to be seen once and never again. If you put pre-AI arts together in an exhibition like at the top of the article are you sure it wouldn't irritate people? I walk past countless of such arts everyday, none of them registered after even 15 mins. Maybe you have better taste, but don't try to project your opinion as that of the majority.
    - otabdeveloper4 9d ago
      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.

wiederholen 9d ago

[dead]

eloisant 9d ago

The biggest problem that I have with most AI posters is that they are too busy, you have to look for information instead of seeing it popping right away. Amateurs posters of before AI didn't have this problem. White background, the important info in big letters, maybe one clipart or to. So I'm not talking about how pro artists could make a better job, but even the small local non-profit used to produce better posters. Not in the sense of "better looking", but in the sense that they were more readable. At least the examples of this blog are more readable than what we usually see.

jcelerier 9d ago
Well what's better ? I have so many pictures of posters of old events or storefronts saved on my phone because they were so astronomically bad it'd have been better to not have any poster at all. Today's AI makes it look even worse but I'm hopeful that in five years we'll all live in a world generally more agreeable to look at and not "concrete with pink and yellow fluo paper smashed on top of it" like https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/music-poster-wall.html https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/music-poster-wall.html or https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/france-poster-wall.html?pseudoid=943AE081-1E9F-4158-A6AF-5FAE6EEE58B9&sortBy=relevant https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/france-poster-wall.html?ps... because the cost of making things enjoyable with more colour and detail will have come down. Maybe we can finally go back to Art Nouveau if the cost of making it comes down!
- icantevenhold 9d ago
  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.
- stymaar 9d ago
  > we'll all live in a world generally more agreeable to look at and not "concrete with pink and yellow fluo paper smashed on top of it" like https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/music-poster-wall.html https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/music-poster-wall.html or https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/france-poster-wall.html?ps https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/france-poster-wall.html?ps... Sorry buf I'd take these posters over your “generally more agreeable ” homogeneous slop literally any day.

VCFundedGenYer 9d ago

There aren't small problems in these posters though. They're huge, obvious, and an indicator that the one who made the flyer didn't care whatsoever. When it includes an American Flag with more than 50 stars + the bottom row is cut off, you know they didn't even bother to proofread it. This is the kind of garbage we're suffering with.

qarl 9d ago
You should try typing "American flag clipart" into Google and see non-AI images with the wrong number of stars.
- dgellow 9d ago
  Aren’t those ai generated too?
  - qarl 9d ago
    Why you making me check for you? The first one I clicked on is at a stock photo site that says: Every visual at iStock is crafted through human expertise, creativity, and ingenuity. We do not allow AI-generated visuals in our library.
    - dgellow 9d ago
      Are you aware we don’t all get the same results from a google image search? Or do you seriously believe if I search the same keywords we will be looking at the exact same images?
      - qarl 9d ago
        That's not what I said. I said the first one I saw was not AI art via simple inspection. I wondered if you even looked. Did you even look?
      - HappMacDonald 8d ago
        Why would you ask them to search for you if you knew they wouldn't get the same images you would get? Claim: A vast majority of human-made clip art that involves flags as tertiary elements will fail to render them in a vexillologically perfect manner.

CuriouslyC 9d ago

AI thumbnails outperform human thumbnails on YouTube by a lot, I've seen click-through rate spreads of 4%+ (~5% -> ~9% in AB tests). Yet people will do drive by comments trying to excoriate creators for using AI thumbnails. It's really quite ridiculous.

driverdan 9d ago
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.
Kubuxu 9d ago
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.
- Forgeties79 9d ago
  It’s the current iteration of the red arrow with a (staged) surprised face and as you’re saying we will all learn to just skip it as well. These things are always an arms race, and given LLM’s can only generate facsimiles of things I don’t see how it can stay ahead of it
ks2048 9d ago
What's ridiculous about that?
dspillett 9d ago
A lot of any real gain will be due to novelty, and that will wane once you've been doing it a short time (or once other people in your field are doing it so you all go back to looking the same). I suspect a lot of the gain isn't even that useful to the channel: it being people clicking to complain. You might not see that mean actual complaints because many will see the existing ones and either just upvote them or move on without doing anything (their chance to repeat their regular comment to get a few upvotes having been taken by someone already having said it).

vrypan 9d ago

Not to mention that I can also tell when a poster has been generated using Photoshop and not real artist tools, like brushes and pens. I've seen a lot of these Photoshop-generated posters, and they are in no way comparable to something DaVinci or Picasso would create.

driverdan 9d ago
> not real artist tools Nice no true Scotsman fallacy. PS is a "real" artist tool.
- usef- 9d ago
  I believe that comment is satire. Look at the last six words.
- vrypan 9d ago
  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.
- grumbel 9d ago
  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.
fn-mote 9d ago
You forgot the /s. Sadly, if it hadn’t gone on to DaVinci, I wouldn’t be sure.

sparkilyshpark 9d ago

>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

glenstein 9d ago

There's an amazing viral twitter thread where someone claimed a real Monet painting was an AI generated imitation, and it got an avalanche of comments from people who claimed it was an obvious fake and a poor imitation at that. It's not tracking a real thing as much as people would like to think.

AndrewKemendo 9d ago
In fact it’s only tracking the quality of the produced image Every single person I’ve asked, and I’ve asked hundreds, say that knowing it was AI irrespective of anything else was enough to think it was bad. There’s millions of genai images that people aren’t commenting on because they don’t know it’s AI.
- deleted 9d ago
  [deleted]
- qarl 9d ago
  > knowing it was AI irrespective of anything else was enough to think it was bad. That's prejudice.
  - paulhebert 9d ago
    The definition of prejudice requires the judgment to be unfair. Do you think it’s unfair for people to dislike AI generated art based on their principles?
    - qarl 9d ago
      Unfair in this context is judging the art without even looking at it.
      - paulhebert 9d ago
        You don’t think it’s fair to factor how art was created into your judgment?

fwlr 9d ago

If the AI makes a “better” poster that everyone hates because it’s AI, and a person makes a “worse” poster that everyone likes because it’s human, isn’t the business better off with the “worse” poster?

zamadatix 9d ago
It's not everyone though.
mionhe 9d ago
I think the issue there is that, in the absence of the AI poster, people will still dislike the "worse" poster. Since this is idealogical, a business owner's choices are: * use AI and some people hate it on principle, don't use AI and don't pay enough and some people hate it because it looks cheap, don't use Ai and pay a bunch more and people don't hate it...maybe, depending on style and skill of the artist. As a business owner, it's not an encouraging situation.
- FooBarWidget 9d ago
  None of the AI haters (or haters in general) are willing to put money where their mouths are. None of them are willing to pay for better human artwork, yet have the audacity to criticize as if top artists owe them free output.
  - dgellow 9d ago
    > yet have the audacity to criticize as if top artists owe them free output Literally nobody is saying that, what are you talking about
    - FooBarWidget 9d ago
      Which critic is proposing funding better artwork, made by good human artists? Sometimes, silence says more than words. Non-decision is also a decision.

ChrisMarshallNY 9d ago

I've worked with some of the top designers in the world. I don't think that AI will beat them (for now), but the examples in his sample page[0] beat the junk that I've seen a lot of non-top-designers do. As he states, he isn't trying to make stuff that doesn't "look like AI did it," he just wants to introduce variety, and has proposed a disciplined way to do that. [0] https://john.hartnup.uk/poster-prompts/ https://john.hartnup.uk/poster-prompts/

deleted 9d ago
[deleted]
skor 9d ago
can you please list some of the people you worked with? I really appreciate good design and am always looking for great artists that I don’t know about yet, thanks.
- ChrisMarshallNY 9d ago
  Pentagram and DDO. Kinda pricey, though.
  - potamic 9d ago
    Going through pentagram's site, their shakespeare in the park posters do give me that AI vibe. Perhaps AI has been trained in many such similar posters, but as a layman, I'd be hard pressed to be able to distinguish these from AI generated ones. On a side note, I wanted to link that collection here, but unfortunately there's no hyperlink, it just opens in a popup. You'll have to scroll down to the bottom of their home page to find it. I hope for their sake they just overlooked this one thing, because if designers don't see the role of hyperlinks in user experience, I can't take them seriously. [1] https://www.pentagram.com https://www.pentagram.com
    - ChrisMarshallNY 9d ago
      Pentagram is an interesting company. We worked with them around fifteen or twenty years ago, so it’s likely a lot has changed, since then. They had a structure, where each studio was run by a partner, and had its own specialty. Almost a separate company. We worked with the San Francisco one, which specialized in digital design (looks like it’s no longer around, or transitioned to an independent company). We used them for graphic design. We used DDO (they are still around[0]), for interaction design (we worked with both, simultaneously). It was quite an experience, and taught me a great deal about integration of professional designers, into a technical project. I still use a lot of what I learned, to this day. They had that “AI vibe,” back then, so I guess we know where the LLMs got some of their training materials. Their Web sites have always been like that. I’m assuming that part of the reason, is to discourage scraping, and another, is to be fairly pretentious. There was quite a bit of showmanship, back then, and I have no reason to think that it’s any less, these days. They are certainly not alone. New York is filled with studios like that. I know a chap that designs top-end jewelry, and is almost a caricature. On any given day, his outfits cost more than my car. It seems to work. He makes a lot of money, so someone takes him seriously. [0] https://www.dubberly.com/ https://www.dubberly.com/

PLenz 9d ago

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

giancarlostoro 9d ago

> a human artist would do better. Except we have all seen really awful human made posters long before AI. People are just upset just to be upset at this point. Code was nosediving before AI badly.

deleted 9d ago
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oblio 9d ago
> 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.
- giancarlostoro 9d ago
  2010s to 2020s code has been bad. We used to have 100% natively compiled apps, now everything is a Chrome browser wrapped JavaScript abomination, and before anyone assumes I hate JavaScript, I love doing front-end web development, and backend, and automation... and an unhealthy number of things (my GitHub is a mess). My point being, software quality has been downhill before AI, we just have nonsense rosy eyeglasses.
  - oblio 9d ago
    And before that we had PHP apps and VB apps, etc. Most code didn't have tests, most code wasn't version controlled. Functionality was much more limited, lots more stuff wasn't available on Linux. Yes, we lost speed and resource usage but regular people don't care enough to pay for that or to punish offending apps in the marketplace.
    - giancarlostoro 8d ago
      Even after tests a lot of code does not.
johnnyanmac 9d ago
>People are just upset just to be upset at this point. Despite this being a technical community we seem to be really bad at understanding scale. A bad artist is at worst like a fee pieces of trash littered in your lawn. Bad AI art is like a dump truck tipping over into your yard. And you see 10 more dump truck coming in at 90mph. It doesn't matter if it's a recyclables truck and all the bottles are individually cleaner and more Eco friendly than candy bar wrappers. The magnitude is still overwhelming. You can ignore a few bad artists you don't like. You can't ignore swimming through slop day in and day out. Friction in a previously smooth environment angers people, and AI creates a lot of newfound friction.

HawtAds 9d ago

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.

mrbluecoat 9d ago

Anecdotally, I was reading https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematicians-build-long-awaited-graph-sandwich-20260918/ 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/ https://www.pangram.com/ said was legit human created. Sad that my new default is assuming everything is AI created or vibed nowadays.

aizk 9d ago

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

mbgerring 9d ago

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

tompark 9d ago

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.

pembrook 9d ago
True, but whats even dumber is that 99% of the use cases people are getting angry at would never be given to a real designer anyway (too low value). The funniest genre of AI backlash imo is normies yelling at small businesses for using AI on social posts. There's no world where your local flowershop has both the time and money to brief a design agency to create a flyer for Fridays social post. Yet, in the mind of the mob, they imagine some designer is losing a job due to the existence of AI...not realizing that every social post they've previously been looking at from the same flower shop was just a 1-click Canva template. The only person losing a job due to AI design is Canva, which itself was hated for taking jobs away from Photoshop designers, whom in the 90s ended up taking jobs away from the phototypesetting industry, who took the jobs away from the manual typesetters, etc etc etc. Meanwhile the economy and living standards grew each time.
johnnyanmac 9d ago
Well that's why and how we got the current model. Lots of noise, so tools were made to curate and figure out the most consistent artists But it goes both wwys; artists that stand out get ebough of a reputation to boost their prices. Unless you get very lucky with budding taletnt, you generally get what you pay for.It's not much different from how you'd run your gaming team.

tstrimple 9d ago

I’ve been diving into Ink Master highlights on YouTube lately. These are typically all excellent artists but they don’t always produce excellent work. I’ve seen some hands that could have come out of an early gen ai model permanently inked into someone’s skin.

ynac 9d ago

You said it - and the same is true for many of the other talents from Ai. I've worked with gobs of artists, accountant, MBAs, developers, appliance repair techs, and so on. Ai does a better job than most of them, but not as good as the best of them.

AlfeG 9d ago

> they can tell they’re AI and point to things that the AI did “wrong” and a human artist would do better. Pretty much all of the designers we contacted recently were using AI to draw. Especially on those kinds of cheap work. They are just a bit more professional in the prompting and can do final touch in Photoshop.

petetnt 9d ago

Have you considered looking up designers you like and asking them instead of "budget friendly designers on Fiverr"?

heaney-555 9d ago

This is an excellent point, and it doesn't only apply to art/design. In almost any intellectual domain, including coding, the models are already ahead of the average human. But instead, we compare them to the very best humans, which almost no one on the planet has access to. $20 for a lot of access to better-than-average is a world-changingly good deal!

alecst 9d ago
This reads like the opening scene of the Monkey’s Paw. Doubt it will feel like a good deal in the long run.

no_no_no_yes 9d ago

> I’ve worked with dozens of budget friendly designers on Fiverr and consistently get way worse results than I’ve gotten from AI models. That makes sense given they're on Fiverr. However, Fiverr freelancers are now just AI prompters :) doesn't matter whether it's code or art.

Anonyneko 9d ago

Maybe it's just me, but even on pure aesthetic reasons I would take a Comic Sans and clipart poster made in Word over the slop. At this point I have some kind of a physical repulsion to the generated posters, and it's always easy to tell from the fontwork and the iconography, let alone illustrations if there are any.

rsoto2 9d ago

i would never go to an event that cares so little about people buying tickets they can't even put a pen to paper or just use a photograph. it reeks of laziness.

cush 9d ago

Totally agree. Opinions are cheap. People can be drawn to “horrible” art, and small artists - especially social media managers - right now are creating intentionally bad mspaint.exe 1994 aesthetics because AI art looks like it was created by real artists, and it’s the only way to differentiate

dyauspitr 9d ago
You can’t even differentiate it that way. AI generates perfect MS paint aesthetics

blub 9d ago

The problem’s not so much that the posters are AI generated, but that they’re too crowded and unfocused. Their individual elements seem fine and look good, but when taken as a whole they feel wrong. This may be a failure mode similar to juniors using AI and making it much harder for seniors to find the bugs, because the code actually looks good at first sight. I don’t think the blog author actually has any design skills based on the prompts and the AI obviously can’t nudge them in the right direction or help them clarify their brief, like a real designer (i.e. not random online freelancers) would.

atomicnumber3 9d ago

It sure seems like, while LLMs and diffusion models won't completely eradicate the middle class, the bar has now risen significantly to actually contribute in a lot of areas. For programmers, sure SV startups and actual software-first shops are probably only augments with LLMs and not replacing. But what % of software engineers are employed in such shops? Well, from my graduating class in CS, approximately 30% of grads all went to the same contracting shop whose business model seems to be, take the bottom 30% of each CS class, underpay the fuck out of them, bootcamp them into something vaguely usable + teach the house style of CRUD/LOB app framework, then throw them at clients. And this seems to still be a step above "offshore to barely baseline capable (or worse) body shop for extremely dubious results." That entire bottom 50% is probably about to be eviscerated. The "offshore + pray" approach is probably going to be completely zapped, much easier to just vibe code for probably better (or at least not worse) results. And the onshore-but-cheaper contracting shops are probably going to need a lot fewer people whose main contribution is translating low-ambiguity tickets into syntactically valid java spring code. Similarly, for artists, disney is probably not going to use AI in a way that substantially speeds them up because they won't tolerate the quality loss at all. But how many artists work for disney? And how many make anime waifus for the gacha apps? The latter of which I can only assume has already switched substantially to AI assets.

Morromist 9d ago
I'm not sure about coders but for artists I don't think a massive number were making anime waifus, but instead were making graphic designs for advertisements, publications & websites. Currently AI is actually replacing some of these jobs. But there's kinda a hitch there - when you target me with ads or show me your company's website and it has obvious AI art I tend to think that you're either selling me something very low quality or are a scammer. If you show me the novel you've written and it has an AI art cover I assume the contents are also AI generated garbage writing. So I wonder if those jobs will really be replaced? It all depends on society's acceptance of AI art and if AI art doesn't get any better. I thought it would get to the point that I couldn't tell it was AI by now, but so far it hasn't. I think AI waifus and porn and memes and browser based zynga type games will be a place AI is going to be accepted because nobody cared too much about the authenticity and quality of those things before either. But an advertisement selling me a car? The cover of a book on philosophy? A website that I'm going to give my credit card number to? I'm not sure about those things.

lofaszvanitt 9d ago

Nah, AI cant design prooper pages, and posters. Period. Even someone with basic aesthetic skills and a knack for illustrations will create a much better postan, than these. Because you'll immediately recognize the human in them. AI has no soul, no experiences, it's just a primitive neural net.

asdff 9d ago

>but a small local event or business probably won’t have the budget to hire them or know where to find them. And yet, somehow, up until what maybe 2024, every single small event or business in every local market around the earth managed to figure this out. I guess we've lost that ancestral knowledge of how this was possibly done and afforded in a few dozen months.

crisnoble 9d ago

If you can convince Chat GPT to stop putting icons next to every single thing, it would be loads better. 1940s cubist style seems sort of there, then bam a tiny cake icon next to the word cakes and drinks. Why? Each of these posters, including the original would be so much better without these tiny stupid icons. No one at the Bauhaus ever made a poster with tiny icons! Chat GPT just cannot drop the icons. Like just have it read a graphic design history book. These secondary attempts might pass more people's AI aversion filter but they would all receive an F in a graphic design class.

NinjaTrance 9d ago
Students in a graphic design class are expected to create something that graphic designers like; but that's not the same as what other people like.
- crisnoble 8d ago
  No, aesthetics really don't come into play in graphic design classes. Students learn, and are expected to follow, the technical rules of design just like CS students learn general concepts of programming. You would probably fail your class if you decided to come up with a brand new data storage concept instead of using a database. Hierarchy of information, typographic consistency, grid structure, and information density.

Gathering6678 9d ago

My take is most users (who generate these posters) are not aesthetically astute and/or care enough to put in more effort.

DrewADesign 9d ago

You’re comparing the sub-minimum-wage offshore template jockeys to average designers, not “high end” designers. A high-end designer making a one-off poster for a local fair is about as likely as a senior engineer at a FAANG company making a website for it. It would be like someone paying for a simple website for their small business saying off-shore fiverrrr Wordpress hacks are average coders, and anyone making anything close to a reasonable dev salary in this job market was a high-falutin’ luxury option. An average graphic designer would ask what unique, non-informational things about the event the poster should portray, do a little bit of research and exploration, and then figure out how to communicate that in pure visual terms. It draws people into the vibe of your event, and hints at the visual impact of experiencing it. You get the nice type work, information hierarchy, attractive layout and color scheme, etc. for free because those are the tools average graphic designers use to visually communicate. This is not expensive compared to the expertise required. With both AI and the Fiverrrr designers, at best, you only get nice type work, information hierarchy, attractive layout and color scheme, etc. You’re not paying for design — you’re paying a graphics software technician for a graphic, like you would at a sign shop. An average designer is who you’d want to make your posters and maybe a few other types of advertisements, such as postcards, or bus shelters or billboards or banner ads. Someone in a country with a minimum wage of less than a dollar is who you get on fiverrrr. A high-end graphic designer is who you’d contract to do a complete branding and identity overhaul.

ChrisMarshallNY 9d ago

You’re absolutely right! (See what I did, there?) I mentioned something similar, in a previous comment. The sad part, is that the same thing is likely to happen to design, as is already happening with software development. The junior training track is going to get the bottom ripped out. Established outfits like Pentagram will do fine, but lesser ones, like small design shops, are likely to get run out of business by AI image generation, which will improve quickly. The problem is that these are the shops that train the designers that end up in companies like Pentagram. Or only Ivy-League sheepskins will get junior jobs at the big studios, which will be the only ones left standing, when the dust settles.

sickcodebruh 9d ago

This misses the point about complaints of AI slop. It’s not about “worse”, it’s about “distracting”. It’s about AI fingerprints overwhelming the consumer. It’s not too different from hiring a freelancer who does a blatant stylistic ripoff of a popular artist in an unflattering way: the consumer of the work sees the ripoff first, focuses on the ripoff, is unable to appreciate the message being delivered. AI slop is overwhelming and distracting to the consumer in that it communicates messages of laziness, disinterest, disregard for the underlying message. Whether this is true or not in every case, we’ve seen enough cases where we have to start by considering it. It’s the vehicle for scams and spam. It’s like sending an email that starts with “FIVE TRICKS TO HAVE BETTER SKIN” or any other meme spam line. A human freelancer might do work that is technically worse. Worse can be distracting in ways that are, well… worse. But it’s different, it doesn’t tap into a collective cultural understanding of “AI slop.” It may communicate even more poorly, but it’s not the same problem.

pc86 8d ago

I agree with everything you said except I would simply add that "the average freelance designer online" is simply an AI meat proxy (which does, by definition, make them worse than AI since you could just use AI in the first place and get the same results).

maxglute 8d ago

good cgi vs bad cgi etc etc.

jimmydddd 8d ago

I'm a drummer (musician) and drummers faced a similar crisis forty years ago with the advent of drum machines. A guitarist and bassist could perform with a drum machine instead of sharing their pay with a drummer. An experienced drummer was always way better then a drum machine. However, inexperienced drummers often don't keep steady time, play too loud, over complicate things. The drum machines avoided these pitfalls of using a mediocre drummer.

vtemp009 8d ago

it's obvious that ai and humans have to colab and correct each other as part of a process of correcting overlooking issues.

poulpy123 8d ago

Maybe Fiverr is not the best place to hire freelance