I find it kinda funny that even "smartest", most capable models often have a very hard time going beyond surface-level, top-of-mind associations, when faced with creative tasks.
Of course, a "Japanese Minimal Poster" has a sakura and a stylized flag of Japan, duh
A human designer would probably think that "Japan -> sakura" and "Japan -> Japanese flag" are way too obvious, too banal, too stereotypical, and, most importantly too boring. And then they would probably sit for a while and try to think of something fresher and less clichéd.
But AI has absolutely no problem with going with the cheesiest, most overused trope.
I remember seeing a poster for Chinese New Year years ago, and someone had included the kanji for Japan on it (日本). I couldn't resist writing a comment on the poster about it.
It showed whoever did it had no clue about East Asia or Chinese script...
Sure, but what's interesting is if you tell it to "behave unpredictably" or "don't use tropes" it usually fails down the same curve. Which is predictable, but telling.
The author claims that the AI posters don’t have to be horrible, but fail to see that the dozen variations generated are not distinctive - they might have somewhat different typography or imaginary, but still have the same AI uniformity and smell as the crappy restaurant poster you see on the street. The core issue is not only technical, but also the lack of vision and imagination when creating art or even infographics.
The alternative is WordArt, or just black on white Comic Sans with some bolding and font size variations with bad ClipArt. These small scale events would never hire a professional.
I'm old enough to remember that people also complained about WordArt and Clipart and too many fonts etc.
I see the chatgpt poster style on many small-scale local village events also. But again, what they replace wasn't any better. It's not replacing some beautiful craft that existed before.
> I'm old enough to remember that people also complained about WordArt and Clipart and too many fonts etc.
We basically had two kinds of posters:
- those made by someone skilled/savvy (not necessarily a professional)
- those made by someone without skills/knowledge
The later were awful, in the sense that I would never display them in my home as a reminder of a an event I took part in.
But still, they were nice because you knew someone took the time to create them to promote an event and share the important information about it, and each person was producing their own awful posters.
Now with gen AI we have something filled with trash, everything looks the same, the important information is hard to find...
Sure, the variations offered in the article are a bit better and more opinionated, but they still reek AI conformity and I feel sick looking at them.
If you think about whether it is AI, are good at recognising those tells, an thinking about whether it is AI, then its probable you will spot things like that.
Most people are not that good at spotting those tells, and when looking at a poster they will not be thinking about whether its is AI or not. If its not obviously AI they are not going to even think about it.
Some level of uniformity is fine and indeed the norm. It was uniform back when posters were hand painted, eg 19th century world fairs or zoo openings or theater posters. They look pretty similar. Carneval posters looked similar.
The expectation of some kaleidoscope of styles is not really grounded in how things used to be ever.
Also, it's just nostalgia, just like how some young people now think audio cassettes and discmans are "cool" and have some revival, some are nostalgic for the back-in-the-day Word posters because "at least back then", but "these days" it's decline etc. Pretty sure in a few years people will be nostalgic for crappy AI slop of 2025-26 because their shittiness will feel like some charm compared to whatever the AI will be able to do.
I'm not sure about that. I, myself, am not skilled enough to make a nice poster, so when I needed one, I used to asked my skilled friends to do them for me.
But sometimes I also purposefully made myself some Comic Sans stuff, exaggerating them in every possible way, as a joke. And it was well received because people knew it was my own work and understood the joke.
If I made this today, it would not be seen the same. People would thought I'm trying to fight gen AI trash or I'm nostalgic of the past. While I'm just trying to make a joke by making something awful on purpose.
And I couldn't do the same joke using gen AI. The "on purpose" cannot be conveyed. People would just see gen AI trash.
I am somewhat tired of all the AI posters, but I have to agree with what you are saying. The alternative was not any better. I think there's a persistent and very vocal segment of the population that just want to complain about anything to do with AI with a take no hostage approach. Some instances are understandable but if a local small town event or a low budget restaurant using AI to make a poster draws so much ire, I feel that it may be likely misplaced personal frustrations projected towards others. The response don't seem to be proportional to the offence.
In the examples above, that’s really your own loss? There will only be one or two events in your local village, it seems self defeating to ignore what they offer because you don’t like the medium. At least these posters are well laid out and easy to read.
It doesn't fail, it actually demonstrates how the model can improve the output if the prompt is better. AI generated websites look like crap because developers don't know any design language so they have no idea how to prompt the models to get something good and more unique and creative out of them. This shows that you can actually achieve that with just slightly better prompting. Just like with programming, actually.
> t still have the same AI uniformity and smell as the crappy restaurant poster you see on the street
You have really try hard to see that. It is good enough to not give immediate annoyed reflex of seeing something in the same ubiquitous default chatgpt style.
For goodness sake - these are just a fair posters.
Idk, those are more than alright to my eye. Surely they won't win any design awards, but as a throwaway poster for one time event these are miles better than any amateur work.
For 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.
> but fail to see that the dozen variations generated are not distinctive - they might have somewhat different typography or imaginary, but still have the same AI uniformity and smell as the crappy restaurant poster you see on the street
Hard disagree: every single example TFA gives is way better than the horrible generic ones that are polluting every shop and LinkedIn post.
That's not what OP is complaining about. The issue with AI art isn't how the individual piece look, but the similarities they have in aggregate. One image can look perfectly fine, once you seen a hundred they all start looking extremely similar. Human brains are great pattern recognizer and lock on to those similarities, even when they are covered under different styles.
When all your art comes from a single source, it's difficult to create real diversity and novelty. That's still the big issue when it comes to genAI in general, without a lot of hand holding you'll just bound to end up with slop, since the AI won't get creative on its own.
Did you look at the examples? They're almost ridiculously diverse, and the prompts show very little handholding was required.
They're not novel, but a poster for a spring fair isn't supposed to look like a de Kooning.
These arguments are almost completely detached from reality. Most artists aren't diverse either - they're told to find a style and stick to it, and that's what they do.
Commercial graphic designers are more versatile, but the set of standard looks is still relatively small. Hollywood movie posters and book cover designers are notorious for reusing the same tropes and colour systems, and that's been true for years, long before AI was a thing.
I am not sure. If something is not in the usual AI style its not going to leap out at you that it is AI the same way. Maybe if thought about it, but when someone looks at a poster they typically focus on the information, not the style.
The variations the author generates are night and day better than the "piss filter" era slop in the first batch.
Some of them would have passed as intentionally crafted by a graphics designer before AI.
And let's not forget that before AI, many of these would be word doc printouts with clip art. The alternative wasn't hiring a designer - the alternative was doing nothing special at all.
I 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...
But more importantly, if you aren’t the kind of person who could make a halfway decent text only poster before, you are going to make the posters at the top of the article. Those are objectively harder to read than something typed up in word.
You aren’t going to know to tell the AI to “ Go for a clean, unfussy, bright layout with a bold striking spring-themed graphic. Avoid pastel/airbrush/oil style art or images of people.”
It’s not complicated - the default style signals low effort. Why should I get excited about the village fete if the organizers put in the barest minimum of effort?
But there’s another reason it drives people crazy - it’s low effort trying to present as high effort. If the sign was simple Comic Sans then it would at least be charmingly honest.
> Why should I get excited about the village fete if the organizers put in the barest minimum of effort?
Because there's no correlation between the ability to organise a village event and the graphic design skills. (Apart from "it's been so successful we can splash money on a design agency") Maybe someone actually liked it and thought it's enough. I've seen groups overthinking posters and it felt similar to groups at uni overthinking funny names instead of doing the work that actually mattered.
To be clear, I'm not saying those designs are good, just that most of the time the design is not the point and minimum effort above "Times New Roman 12pt" is what many people always wanted to do.
Graphic design skills don’t correlate with effort. I’ve seen terribly designed posters that the makers clearly put a lot of effort and love into because they loved whatever it was they were promoting.
I’ve also seen people put a lot of effort and love into poster and stuff because that interests them (doesn’t mean they’re good at it either), then the event is utter crap because they didn’t spend much time on the actual event.
The last paragraph in GP’s comment is the key. Nobody would care about a low effort poster, what they care about is the deception of pretending you put a lot of effort into the poster. It’s dishonest, and it would make me subconsciously question what else they’re being dishonest about.
I think this (low effort posters) rather signals to me that they have the right priorities. A true professional poster would tell me that it's some commercial cash grab instead of real local enthusiasts making something normal.
I am inclined to agree. Small community organisation cannot afford to pay a professional designer. They might be lucky and have a talented volunteer, but in general its a waste of limit resources.
You don't have to get excited by anything. You are welcome to boycott the village fête because you think they didn't put enough effort into their poster. Your choice, my friend.
I live in a village with lots of local events and I do not care about the design of the posters. I just care about what the event. I just want some information.
Buried at the end of the article the author linked a library of different art styles applied to the same poster content. Found some new cool art styles to try out in the future.
https://john.hartnup.uk/poster-prompts/
What's interesting is that you can't do the same with long-form AI prose. You can ask any given LLM to write in different styles, but it will always fall back on the same rhetorical and structural techniques, so the "new style" is strictly surface-level. In fact, it's getting worse over time -- especially in Claude from Opus 4.6 --> Opus 5.
I suspect that the same thing is happening here -- as other comments note: lack of distinctiveness, uniformity -- but that the low information content of posters prevents it from becoming immediately obvious.
The similarity may be partly the image model's fault – especially if it's been post-trained/distilled towards performance, correctness and "quality" (for some value of "quality" anyway) which inevitably occurs at the expense of creativity and variation.
But I think it might be more about the LLM's lack of creativity in coming up with the prompt for the image (or "embellishing" a user's prompt). Then whatever the image gen outputs is simply an instance of the GIGO principle.
But the thing is, all have that icon+text style in the "tombola, cakes and drinks..." part. If I wanted to be distinctive, this is what I would have tried to get rid of at first, not the "visual style" (it's sort of like Windows XP visual styles, no matter how different they are the overall layout is still recognisably Windows).
although I guess it's that the author used the same context with the original generated image and thus it just reused that icon+text thing
but in general, these models do seem to be kind of just go for an information-dump type of style where its just listing everything and putting as much stuff in that is associated with the words, which is what these LLMs do
so you'd probably need to steer them heavily with explicit instructions on what to do and how to get rid of it, which I'd bet nobody will actually do when making these posters
At a certain point, pottery that looked like a child made it became the high end, because well-executed pottery was coming out of machines.
We've officially reached that point with advertisements. Save your tokens. Hire your 9-year-old niece to draw the poster by hand and you'll likely get a far better reaction from most people. Nobody goes to a fair because the poster had a "modernist / Bauhaus-influenced graphic style".
I think we're in the 'early digital camera' phase of AI art gen.
The real photographers knew they were shit photos. They were grainy, bad lenses, and ugly. A lot of people still liked them because they were much more convenient for a lot of uses than the film ones.
Well, I guess there's still a lot of film people. But film had a ceiling. Digital cameras kept getting better.
The adaptive film photographers eventually adopted the tool. A lot of their skills transferred well to the new medium. Most waited until the cameras got good enough, though.
I'm not sure when that'll be with AI art gen. Seeing scenes broken up into layers in the latest gpt image generation, though, made me think we might be near.
if NOT TRULY personal preference, then all those variations ARE horrible, but if they serve some taste--personal or marketing--then they are likely not to everyone's taste.
to me, they all look like lazy-prompting, which is the only way I ever do genAI imaging, because I fail to see why that "CPU" should be wasted on something I barely even care for.
That said ... let kids do that shit and pay them 50 or 100 bucks ...
The issue is that in my walled garden, I have not seen any of the good AI stuff. My wardens still use some home trained GPT 3.5 for most stuff, including their songs on potify and bootube. And i can't get access to current top level public AIs, either. Had the actual ChatGPT and Claude models for some while but I knew why ... otherwise I might put effort into semantics, syntax, grammar and my image generation prompts, which currently look like some MITM is speedrunning collages using haiku cowork and crayons or something ...
AI is a tool, just like photoshop was. Just because someone bought photoshop didn't mean that they can magically create amazing digital artwork, they had to learn photoshop and also be creative. Otherwise it would have been a horrible poster with comic sans. Same goes for AI, one has to learn to use the tool and be creative.
At least the AI generated posters are better than human-generated t-shirt designs, where you find generic texts such as: "Est. 1984" (or any random year), "I [heart] NY", "Property of [City/School] Athletic Dept.", "Original Trademark", "Authentic Denim Brand", etc., etc.
This feels like an AI trap almost. A lot of the badness comes from people who don't want/can't put effort into it, so we all get a deluge of the sameyness.
Or is it? Could it be the well established low-effort tendency when the dominant culture is shopping centers, vehicles, similar eating establishments, and the style of suburban housing to a large extent? That would surely encourage the LLM to emit in a similar manner. That sameyness provides a signal of comfort and familiarity.
I see, across my city and others I visit, every bar/restaurant/etc now has low effort one shot posters, menus, etc, some with old chatgpt nonsense text / errors. It's everywhere. All that brown-ish hue food 'pictures' etc. I mean 'authentic Pizza napolitana!' and then an AI generated picture of said pizza... One of them (an Italy born Italian restaurant owner here) and he just said; people come in with the very expensive pictures / menus I had before and the same amount of people come in with these free ones. And he actually likes these better as photographing (real, not mcd/burgerking plastic props with poison paint to make it look better) food is hard, even when paid for.
Here in Bielsko Biala (southern Poland) I see the same in few pubs, never seen on menus though. Shops seem to be creating lots of marketing images as well with AI and it just looks...off. In any case doesn't make me want to enter the place.
Is there a way to formalize the space of all possible aesthetics a model knows, in a way that you could randomly sample from it?
The analogy in my mind when I read this post was: you are asking a machine to paint a color, but the machine always paints the exact same shade, deterministically; and you'd like to explore different colors, but somehow you don't know anything about colors, don't know any of their names. So you don't have the language to ask for what you can't name.
Random sampling of colors (without names!) is a solved problem, because we've parameterized the entire universe of colors that can be perceived. It's just a very small three-dimension manifold, and there's even a simple metric on it such that unit-distances in that metric are what humans say are color differences of equal step size.
Does ML have an abstraction for this? "Here's a list of every human art in history: create a coordinate system that uniformly samples every art that can ever exist?"
What do we loose when we ditch generative AI? Easier poster making? What good does that do? So now pop&mom can have a poster in their shop that looks as if some graphic artist was paid for it, but wasn't. Will that drive the economy up? Improve poverty? Halt the war? Make life more tolerable? No, it just adds the pretense of having a professional designer, something that will quickly loose its added value when everybody does it.
That's true. Since ornamentation is effort-signaling, it may get dropped once it's cheap. Same thing that happened with clothing and home decor. The functional part may be beneficial though, even on utilitarian grounds. But yes, a lot of design is not about function but social signaling of taste and money as well as fashion.
every one of them still reeks of AI. especially the trend of icons next to the activities (tombola etc). its just a reskin but they all look AI, just not that triggering minimum effort AI look that is everywhere.
Have you considered making the model leverage computer use via Work/Codex?
I'd imagine making the agents use the same tools that people utilize would greatly dial back how AI-generated these things look, and it would provide much better control too.
With Astra being genuinely much better at this, it should be more viable than ever.
I think this is a misdiagnosis of the problem. The AI posters are just fine, perhaps even pretty good.
The problem is that using AI to create the posters show a lack of willingness to put in effort, and it makes you question whether the producer cares about the product and whether they care about the large scale societal problems related to the usage of post-2022 transformer based neural networks.
Most fliers put together for community events pre-AI were Microsoft Word or Google Docs plus clip art.
The world is getting better, but before everyone realizes it we have to complain first and reminisce about the good old days of Wingdings and Comic Sans.
It’s actually very amusing to me comic sans is being referred to as “charmingly honest” on this forum, of all places. Shows how much this is all just aesthetic judgement and doesn’t have any connection to reality, just opinions. Before, comic sans was so low effort it earned scorn and derision. Now, it’s charming. Meanwhile, it’s actually the same amount of (low) effort as always. But for some reason now it has been elevated. Seen people say the same about MS paint drawings, and that’s when realized this isn’t serious at all.
Everyone is suffering and not getting what they want to some degree. Life is short, and opportunity runs out. People turn this into bitterness and direct it at external things that are going well that they're not a participant in.
It's not just AI, it's everything. Romantic rivals, celebrities, sports teams, fandoms.
It's a social evolutionary strategy to neg and gossip as it's a low energy tactic to reduce the fitness of rivals, especially when done in group settings. It has little downside.
The algorithm has co-opted this part of our primate brain and turned it into ad dollars.
It's not that the first one is so awful in isolation, it's that they are everywhere you look when you walk down the street. The barbers, the school fête, the cafe, the church. Everywhere.
I like the other posters more, but the first poster probably still conveys the idea of the event better: people having fun, drinking beer, with a live band. You don't get that from most of the other posters unless you first mentally transform those icons into real things, which takes effort.
Designers republic and memphis were the only designs i couldn't immediately see were AI generated.
The only reason i couldn't tell memphis is because it's aping a known design language already, it's just a perfect copy so me not being able to tell it wasn't AI isn't a free pass in this case.
I think if there was a little less "grid" feeling to the layout details then i wouldn't be able to tell on a few of the other designs either.
Edit: the designers republic version is quite a lot different than the others, it's not just that it's the only design to avoid pairing every feature with an icon, it's the whole layout variety - there's different font sizes, the positioning of elements is very well done to my eye. I'm gonna say this has to be another case like memphis, there's some pre-existing design language that i don't know of and it's just aping that. It's much more human than the others which i can believe are straight ai.
It's pretty sad when you realize the average person is just kind of... unaware. They are fine with whatever, they don't really notice most stuff that goes around them.
The Designers Republic one arguably avoids it. Only one of its five is an icon: three are zero-padded numbers and one is a smudge where someone forgot to stamp the icon.
Their very first attempt is arguably the best one there. I was surprised they didn't like it much and kept going. Then the "Stamp / Letterpress Style (Modernised)" was the only other good one.
So of the two designs made, only two were good, the rest was quite bad and lost all meaning.
People dont want to write multiple prompts or write a lengthy one. They want to say create poster x for event y. That's it, that's what they get and that's what they take.
Well, sometimes AI generates pictures that are not bad. Personally though I am tired of AI slop in general, and I don't want to support it. AI literally kills humans. In some scenarios AI is still useful (e. g. if you write a game, say, in javascript and you don't have any designers helping you out, you could generate images that don't suck, quickly, via AI) but other than that the less I get of AI the better. Google now has that problem with AI - tons of AI slop and fake videos. I realised the AI slop just wastes my time but Google does not offer a simple "do not show me any AI slop" videos. After all they want people to waste their time on youtube, by design. So I now waste my time twice by using Youtube, if I watch an AI slop video.
Most AI-generated art is "good enough" for most one-shot designs by now (though still not [always] as good as a good meat-based artist of course)
The problems right now are:
- Maintaining a consistent and coherent style/aesthetic when you have to generate lots of assets for something. For example sprites in a video game.
- Iterating over a design for more than a few passes. For some reason most models keep degrading the entire image if you keep asking for edits to a specific part of the image. Or, some problems are or become impossible for them to fix no matter how you prompt them.
But if a designer improves an AI design and I feel it's fine, does that make me strange? If you ran a blind test on this, I think it would come out with high preference...
If only there was a way to precisely control our output so it matches our taste and imagination. I wonder what that looks like, maybe it will be part of the next generation of art.
AI posters are not horrible, they just expose the person who "commissioned" them as trash. In a way, that is a good thing, since you can avoid them more easily.
I find it kinda funny that even "smartest", most capable models often have a very hard time going beyond surface-level, top-of-mind associations, when faced with creative tasks.
Of course, a "Japanese Minimal Poster" has a sakura and a stylized flag of Japan, duh
A human designer would probably think that "Japan -> sakura" and "Japan -> Japanese flag" are way too obvious, too banal, too stereotypical, and, most importantly too boring. And then they would probably sit for a while and try to think of something fresher and less clichéd.
But AI has absolutely no problem with going with the cheesiest, most overused trope.
I remember seeing a poster for Chinese New Year years ago, and someone had included the kanji for Japan on it (日本). I couldn't resist writing a comment on the poster about it.
It showed whoever did it had no clue about East Asia or Chinese script...
If you understand how curve fitting works, then it is a very predictable outcome.
Sure, but what's interesting is if you tell it to "behave unpredictably" or "don't use tropes" it usually fails down the same curve. Which is predictable, but telling.
The author claims that the AI posters don’t have to be horrible, but fail to see that the dozen variations generated are not distinctive - they might have somewhat different typography or imaginary, but still have the same AI uniformity and smell as the crappy restaurant poster you see on the street. The core issue is not only technical, but also the lack of vision and imagination when creating art or even infographics.
The alternative is WordArt, or just black on white Comic Sans with some bolding and font size variations with bad ClipArt. These small scale events would never hire a professional.
I'm old enough to remember that people also complained about WordArt and Clipart and too many fonts etc.
I see the chatgpt poster style on many small-scale local village events also. But again, what they replace wasn't any better. It's not replacing some beautiful craft that existed before.
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.
> 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.
Like how if you bought a box of chocolates, and it was actually filled with rocks, you wouldn't dislike it until you found out.
Immediate glamor followed by gradual disappointment is AI output all over.
The activities being perfectly aligned and normalized is the big tell here to me
Idk how to express it exactly, but I don't see how a human would have come to something like this
If you think about whether it is AI, are good at recognising those tells, an thinking about whether it is AI, then its probable you will spot things like that.
Most people are not that good at spotting those tells, and when looking at a poster they will not be thinking about whether its is AI or not. If its not obviously AI they are not going to even think about it.
> if you didn't know ahead of time they were AI-generated
You can't be serious... Are we looking at the same posters?
Some level of uniformity is fine and indeed the norm. It was uniform back when posters were hand painted, eg 19th century world fairs or zoo openings or theater posters. They look pretty similar. Carneval posters looked similar.
The expectation of some kaleidoscope of styles is not really grounded in how things used to be ever.
Also, it's just nostalgia, just like how some young people now think audio cassettes and discmans are "cool" and have some revival, some are nostalgic for the back-in-the-day Word posters because "at least back then", but "these days" it's decline etc. Pretty sure in a few years people will be nostalgic for crappy AI slop of 2025-26 because their shittiness will feel like some charm compared to whatever the AI will be able to do.
But sometimes I also purposefully made myself some Comic Sans stuff, exaggerating them in every possible way, as a joke. And it was well received because people knew it was my own work and understood the joke.
If I made this today, it would not be seen the same. People would thought I'm trying to fight gen AI trash or I'm nostalgic of the past. While I'm just trying to make a joke by making something awful on purpose.
And I couldn't do the same joke using gen AI. The "on purpose" cannot be conveyed. People would just see gen AI trash.
> 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.
I am somewhat tired of all the AI posters, but I have to agree with what you are saying. The alternative was not any better. I think there's a persistent and very vocal segment of the population that just want to complain about anything to do with AI with a take no hostage approach. Some instances are understandable but if a local small town event or a low budget restaurant using AI to make a poster draws so much ire, I feel that it may be likely misplaced personal frustrations projected towards others. The response don't seem to be proportional to the offence.
> 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
In the examples above, that’s really your own loss? There will only be one or two events in your local village, it seems self defeating to ignore what they offer because you don’t like the medium. At least these posters are well laid out and easy to read.
I 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.
> 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?
You're just disgusted by the plebs and their taste.
what 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
It doesn't fail, it actually demonstrates how the model can improve the output if the prompt is better. AI generated websites look like crap because developers don't know any design language so they have no idea how to prompt the models to get something good and more unique and creative out of them. This shows that you can actually achieve that with just slightly better prompting. Just like with programming, actually.
> t still have the same AI uniformity and smell as the crappy restaurant poster you see on the street
You have really try hard to see that. It is good enough to not give immediate annoyed reflex of seeing something in the same ubiquitous default chatgpt style.
For goodness sake - these are just a fair posters.
Idk, those are more than alright to my eye. Surely they won't win any design awards, but as a throwaway poster for one time event these are miles better than any amateur work.
They look absolutly well done.
For 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.
Context 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..
Prompt: make me a poster in the "looks like garbage made by someone who doesn't know how to use Microsoft word or what aspect ratio is" style...
> 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.
That's not what OP is complaining about. The issue with AI art isn't how the individual piece look, but the similarities they have in aggregate. One image can look perfectly fine, once you seen a hundred they all start looking extremely similar. Human brains are great pattern recognizer and lock on to those similarities, even when they are covered under different styles.
When all your art comes from a single source, it's difficult to create real diversity and novelty. That's still the big issue when it comes to genAI in general, without a lot of hand holding you'll just bound to end up with slop, since the AI won't get creative on its own.
Did you look at the examples? They're almost ridiculously diverse, and the prompts show very little handholding was required.
They're not novel, but a poster for a spring fair isn't supposed to look like a de Kooning.
These arguments are almost completely detached from reality. Most artists aren't diverse either - they're told to find a style and stick to it, and that's what they do.
Commercial graphic designers are more versatile, but the set of standard looks is still relatively small. Hollywood movie posters and book cover designers are notorious for reusing the same tropes and colour systems, and that's been true for years, long before AI was a thing.
I am not sure. If something is not in the usual AI style its not going to leap out at you that it is AI the same way. Maybe if thought about it, but when someone looks at a poster they typically focus on the information, not the style.
The variations the author generates are night and day better than the "piss filter" era slop in the first batch.
Some of them would have passed as intentionally crafted by a graphics designer before AI.
And let's not forget that before AI, many of these would be word doc printouts with clip art. The alternative wasn't hiring a designer - the alternative was doing nothing special at all.
I 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...
Post Ai example 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/
This isn’t a web UI, it doesn’t need icons.
But more importantly, if you aren’t the kind of person who could make a halfway decent text only poster before, you are going to make the posters at the top of the article. Those are objectively harder to read than something typed up in word.
You aren’t going to know to tell the AI to “ Go for a clean, unfussy, bright layout with a bold striking spring-themed graphic. Avoid pastel/airbrush/oil style art or images of people.”
It’s not complicated - the default style signals low effort. Why should I get excited about the village fete if the organizers put in the barest minimum of effort?
But there’s another reason it drives people crazy - it’s low effort trying to present as high effort. If the sign was simple Comic Sans then it would at least be charmingly honest.
> Why should I get excited about the village fete if the organizers put in the barest minimum of effort?
Because there's no correlation between the ability to organise a village event and the graphic design skills. (Apart from "it's been so successful we can splash money on a design agency") Maybe someone actually liked it and thought it's enough. I've seen groups overthinking posters and it felt similar to groups at uni overthinking funny names instead of doing the work that actually mattered.
To be clear, I'm not saying those designs are good, just that most of the time the design is not the point and minimum effort above "Times New Roman 12pt" is what many people always wanted to do.
Graphic design skills don’t correlate with effort. I’ve seen terribly designed posters that the makers clearly put a lot of effort and love into because they loved whatever it was they were promoting.
I’ve also seen people put a lot of effort and love into poster and stuff because that interests them (doesn’t mean they’re good at it either), then the event is utter crap because they didn’t spend much time on the actual event.
The last paragraph in GP’s comment is the key. Nobody would care about a low effort poster, what they care about is the deception of pretending you put a lot of effort into the poster. It’s dishonest, and it would make me subconsciously question what else they’re being dishonest about.
> Apart from "it's been so successful we can splash money on a design agency"
Which could be an important signal for you to decide if that's the kind of event you want to go to. Maybe the comic sans fayre is preferrable to some.
I think this (low effort posters) rather signals to me that they have the right priorities. A true professional poster would tell me that it's some commercial cash grab instead of real local enthusiasts making something normal.
I am inclined to agree. Small community organisation cannot afford to pay a professional designer. They might be lucky and have a talented volunteer, but in general its a waste of limit resources.
You don't have to get excited by anything. You are welcome to boycott the village fête because you think they didn't put enough effort into their poster. Your choice, my friend.
Personally, I’d prefer people who get upset about “ai slop” to just stay home and complain about the fliers. It’s a great filter.
Making a good poster is bikeshedding. Organizing an event is hard and making better posters than this is a waste of their limited resources.
I live in a village with lots of local events and I do not care about the design of the posters. I just care about what the event. I just want some information.
No one cared about shitty posters before (and yes they are shitty) and no one cares about them now.
No one is praising or collecting them. We just accepted that shitty poster exist.
Now some few people complain about ai slop at situations were no one cares and no one cared /shrug
Ok, don’t go because of the poster. Miss out.
Buried at the end of the article the author linked a library of different art styles applied to the same poster content. Found some new cool art styles to try out in the future. https://john.hartnup.uk/poster-prompts/
What's interesting is that you can't do the same with long-form AI prose. You can ask any given LLM to write in different styles, but it will always fall back on the same rhetorical and structural techniques, so the "new style" is strictly surface-level. In fact, it's getting worse over time -- especially in Claude from Opus 4.6 --> Opus 5.
I suspect that the same thing is happening here -- as other comments note: lack of distinctiveness, uniformity -- but that the low information content of posters prevents it from becoming immediately obvious.
It's a thing inherent to diffusion models I think, a kind of uniformity of content across the image.
The similarity may be partly the image model's fault – especially if it's been post-trained/distilled towards performance, correctness and "quality" (for some value of "quality" anyway) which inevitably occurs at the expense of creativity and variation.
But I think it might be more about the LLM's lack of creativity in coming up with the prompt for the image (or "embellishing" a user's prompt). Then whatever the image gen outputs is simply an instance of the GIGO principle.
But the thing is, all have that icon+text style in the "tombola, cakes and drinks..." part. If I wanted to be distinctive, this is what I would have tried to get rid of at first, not the "visual style" (it's sort of like Windows XP visual styles, no matter how different they are the overall layout is still recognisably Windows).
yeah
although I guess it's that the author used the same context with the original generated image and thus it just reused that icon+text thing
but in general, these models do seem to be kind of just go for an information-dump type of style where its just listing everything and putting as much stuff in that is associated with the words, which is what these LLMs do
so you'd probably need to steer them heavily with explicit instructions on what to do and how to get rid of it, which I'd bet nobody will actually do when making these posters
At a certain point, pottery that looked like a child made it became the high end, because well-executed pottery was coming out of machines.
We've officially reached that point with advertisements. Save your tokens. Hire your 9-year-old niece to draw the poster by hand and you'll likely get a far better reaction from most people. Nobody goes to a fair because the poster had a "modernist / Bauhaus-influenced graphic style".
One of the biggest problems is actually making sure the information needed is on the poster.
Times, dates, location, pricing, parking etc…
As he points out “it added a bunch of text…” now it’s one all the future designs. That’s great - is the text correct?
To be honest this was a problem before AI. People are not very good at communicating.
I think we're in the 'early digital camera' phase of AI art gen.
The real photographers knew they were shit photos. They were grainy, bad lenses, and ugly. A lot of people still liked them because they were much more convenient for a lot of uses than the film ones.
Well, I guess there's still a lot of film people. But film had a ceiling. Digital cameras kept getting better.
The adaptive film photographers eventually adopted the tool. A lot of their skills transferred well to the new medium. Most waited until the cameras got good enough, though.
I'm not sure when that'll be with AI art gen. Seeing scenes broken up into layers in the latest gpt image generation, though, made me think we might be near.
Incidentally, the "early digital camera" aesthetic has been back in style for a couple of years now.
if NOT TRULY personal preference, then all those variations ARE horrible, but if they serve some taste--personal or marketing--then they are likely not to everyone's taste.
to me, they all look like lazy-prompting, which is the only way I ever do genAI imaging, because I fail to see why that "CPU" should be wasted on something I barely even care for.
That said ... let kids do that shit and pay them 50 or 100 bucks ...
The issue is that in my walled garden, I have not seen any of the good AI stuff. My wardens still use some home trained GPT 3.5 for most stuff, including their songs on potify and bootube. And i can't get access to current top level public AIs, either. Had the actual ChatGPT and Claude models for some while but I knew why ... otherwise I might put effort into semantics, syntax, grammar and my image generation prompts, which currently look like some MITM is speedrunning collages using haiku cowork and crayons or something ...
AI is a tool, just like photoshop was. Just because someone bought photoshop didn't mean that they can magically create amazing digital artwork, they had to learn photoshop and also be creative. Otherwise it would have been a horrible poster with comic sans. Same goes for AI, one has to learn to use the tool and be creative.
At least the AI generated posters are better than human-generated t-shirt designs, where you find generic texts such as: "Est. 1984" (or any random year), "I [heart] NY", "Property of [City/School] Athletic Dept.", "Original Trademark", "Authentic Denim Brand", etc., etc.
This feels like an AI trap almost. A lot of the badness comes from people who don't want/can't put effort into it, so we all get a deluge of the sameyness.
Or is it? Could it be the well established low-effort tendency when the dominant culture is shopping centers, vehicles, similar eating establishments, and the style of suburban housing to a large extent? That would surely encourage the LLM to emit in a similar manner. That sameyness provides a signal of comfort and familiarity.
I see, across my city and others I visit, every bar/restaurant/etc now has low effort one shot posters, menus, etc, some with old chatgpt nonsense text / errors. It's everywhere. All that brown-ish hue food 'pictures' etc. I mean 'authentic Pizza napolitana!' and then an AI generated picture of said pizza... One of them (an Italy born Italian restaurant owner here) and he just said; people come in with the very expensive pictures / menus I had before and the same amount of people come in with these free ones. And he actually likes these better as photographing (real, not mcd/burgerking plastic props with poison paint to make it look better) food is hard, even when paid for.
I'd rather not see photographs in the menu then seeing fake images.
Here in Bielsko Biala (southern Poland) I see the same in few pubs, never seen on menus though. Shops seem to be creating lots of marketing images as well with AI and it just looks...off. In any case doesn't make me want to enter the place.
I love how the AI silently injected "A day of fun for all the family" on the hand-drawn by a child design.
PS: Which then survives in the next iterations as "A day of music, making and family fun"
Edit: Ah just saw the call out on the previous iteration.
But still it's a nice display about the semantics encoded in the models.
Is there a way to formalize the space of all possible aesthetics a model knows, in a way that you could randomly sample from it?
The analogy in my mind when I read this post was: you are asking a machine to paint a color, but the machine always paints the exact same shade, deterministically; and you'd like to explore different colors, but somehow you don't know anything about colors, don't know any of their names. So you don't have the language to ask for what you can't name.
Random sampling of colors (without names!) is a solved problem, because we've parameterized the entire universe of colors that can be perceived. It's just a very small three-dimension manifold, and there's even a simple metric on it such that unit-distances in that metric are what humans say are color differences of equal step size.
Does ML have an abstraction for this? "Here's a list of every human art in history: create a coordinate system that uniformly samples every art that can ever exist?"
Everyone's sick of seeing the same default ChatGPT style on posters for everything from village fetes to coffee shops to school plays.
But I'm convinced that just vetoing AI is to throw away the baby with the bathwater. So I set out to prove it.
What do we loose when we ditch generative AI? Easier poster making? What good does that do? So now pop&mom can have a poster in their shop that looks as if some graphic artist was paid for it, but wasn't. Will that drive the economy up? Improve poverty? Halt the war? Make life more tolerable? No, it just adds the pretense of having a professional designer, something that will quickly loose its added value when everybody does it.
That's true. Since ornamentation is effort-signaling, it may get dropped once it's cheap. Same thing that happened with clothing and home decor. The functional part may be beneficial though, even on utilitarian grounds. But yes, a lot of design is not about function but social signaling of taste and money as well as fashion.
every one of them still reeks of AI. especially the trend of icons next to the activities (tombola etc). its just a reskin but they all look AI, just not that triggering minimum effort AI look that is everywhere.
For some of them if you weren't told they're AI I doubt you'd be able to tell, as they look like normal graphic design posters I've seen pre 2022.
exactly. Hindsight is 20/20.
I believe the point is that there is no baby in this bathwater
Have you considered making the model leverage computer use via Work/Codex?
I'd imagine making the agents use the same tools that people utilize would greatly dial back how AI-generated these things look, and it would provide much better control too.
With Astra being genuinely much better at this, it should be more viable than ever.
I think this is a misdiagnosis of the problem. The AI posters are just fine, perhaps even pretty good.
The problem is that using AI to create the posters show a lack of willingness to put in effort, and it makes you question whether the producer cares about the product and whether they care about the large scale societal problems related to the usage of post-2022 transformer based neural networks.
How much effort was put into these things pre-AI? None of these are big professional things, just local events. Those never had professional posters.
Or they would pay a designer to do it for them. Also no effort but just cost more.
> lack of willingness to put in effort
Do you only buy hand-churned butter?
Most fliers put together for community events pre-AI were Microsoft Word or Google Docs plus clip art.
The world is getting better, but before everyone realizes it we have to complain first and reminisce about the good old days of Wingdings and Comic Sans.
It’s actually very amusing to me comic sans is being referred to as “charmingly honest” on this forum, of all places. Shows how much this is all just aesthetic judgement and doesn’t have any connection to reality, just opinions. Before, comic sans was so low effort it earned scorn and derision. Now, it’s charming. Meanwhile, it’s actually the same amount of (low) effort as always. But for some reason now it has been elevated. Seen people say the same about MS paint drawings, and that’s when realized this isn’t serious at all.
Everyone is suffering and not getting what they want to some degree. Life is short, and opportunity runs out. People turn this into bitterness and direct it at external things that are going well that they're not a participant in.
It's not just AI, it's everything. Romantic rivals, celebrities, sports teams, fandoms.
It's a social evolutionary strategy to neg and gossip as it's a low energy tactic to reduce the fitness of rivals, especially when done in group settings. It has little downside.
The algorithm has co-opted this part of our primate brain and turned it into ad dollars.
It's not that the first one is so awful in isolation, it's that they are everywhere you look when you walk down the street. The barbers, the school fête, the cafe, the church. Everywhere.
I like the other posters more, but the first poster probably still conveys the idea of the event better: people having fun, drinking beer, with a live band. You don't get that from most of the other posters unless you first mentally transform those icons into real things, which takes effort.
Designers republic and memphis were the only designs i couldn't immediately see were AI generated.
The only reason i couldn't tell memphis is because it's aping a known design language already, it's just a perfect copy so me not being able to tell it wasn't AI isn't a free pass in this case.
I think if there was a little less "grid" feeling to the layout details then i wouldn't be able to tell on a few of the other designs either.
Edit: the designers republic version is quite a lot different than the others, it's not just that it's the only design to avoid pairing every feature with an icon, it's the whole layout variety - there's different font sizes, the positioning of elements is very well done to my eye. I'm gonna say this has to be another case like memphis, there's some pre-existing design language that i don't know of and it's just aping that. It's much more human than the others which i can believe are straight ai.
these are definitely better.
I really wonder what's going on in the minds of those who make the shitty AI posters? like, are they that unaware?
for me when I see them I just get instantly repulsed
It's pretty sad when you realize the average person is just kind of... unaware. They are fine with whatever, they don't really notice most stuff that goes around them.
All trash, in my opinion. Different flavors of trash.
I remember seeing that default style long before AI. Probably where it came from. At least the default is not Corporate Memphis.
As usual, AI is a tool and will be good in the hands of the wielder. I've been saying this since Stable Diffusion released nearly half a decade ago.
Moral of the story - have taste.
Just like in engineering.
Can you tell your AI to not apply piss filter to everything?
Adding a safety pin to the punk design was too much of a cliché.
That default style is very recognizable. I am seeing it everywhere.
I guess it is like the early days of wordprocessing, where you saw Comic Sans everywhere.
That icon+text row is the tell for me too, though I'd blame the prompt more than the model, nobody ever asks for an awkward layout.
AI posters may or may not have to be horrible, but they absolutely must include [ icon | icon | icon | icon ], apparently
The Designers Republic one arguably avoids it. Only one of its five is an icon: three are zero-padded numbers and one is a smudge where someone forgot to stamp the icon.
Kids are rediscovering typography and pictograms. With AI. Well done!
> They’re OK
No, they aren't.
> They’re OK
They are not OK.
Their very first attempt is arguably the best one there. I was surprised they didn't like it much and kept going. Then the "Stamp / Letterpress Style (Modernised)" was the only other good one.
So of the two designs made, only two were good, the rest was quite bad and lost all meaning.
People dont want to write multiple prompts or write a lengthy one. They want to say create poster x for event y. That's it, that's what they get and that's what they take.
Well, sometimes AI generates pictures that are not bad. Personally though I am tired of AI slop in general, and I don't want to support it. AI literally kills humans. In some scenarios AI is still useful (e. g. if you write a game, say, in javascript and you don't have any designers helping you out, you could generate images that don't suck, quickly, via AI) but other than that the less I get of AI the better. Google now has that problem with AI - tons of AI slop and fake videos. I realised the AI slop just wastes my time but Google does not offer a simple "do not show me any AI slop" videos. After all they want people to waste their time on youtube, by design. So I now waste my time twice by using Youtube, if I watch an AI slop video.
Most AI-generated art is "good enough" for most one-shot designs by now (though still not [always] as good as a good meat-based artist of course)
The problems right now are:
- Maintaining a consistent and coherent style/aesthetic when you have to generate lots of assets for something. For example sprites in a video game.
- Iterating over a design for more than a few passes. For some reason most models keep degrading the entire image if you keep asking for edits to a specific part of the image. Or, some problems are or become impossible for them to fix no matter how you prompt them.
But if a designer improves an AI design and I feel it's fine, does that make me strange? If you ran a blind test on this, I think it would come out with high preference...
If only there was a way to precisely control our output so it matches our taste and imagination. I wonder what that looks like, maybe it will be part of the next generation of art.
AI posters are not horrible, they just expose the person who "commissioned" them as trash. In a way, that is a good thing, since you can avoid them more easily.
The only thing that separates you from trash is that you meticulously hand-craft your posters.