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AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible

1902 points · 961 comments · ereiamjh

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[deleted] · 1789809658 · focus · HN ↗
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ereiamjh · 1789809791 · focus · HN ↗
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.
1. perching_aix · 1789812574 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  1. ereiamjh · 1789833410 · focus · HN ↗
    If you break out more sophisticated tools - give Claude Code some skills, let it work in SVG or PDF, create bitmap assets and composite them with real fonts and vector assets, I'm sure you can achieve a lot.
    But the point of this blog post was to demonstrate what a PTA mum can achieve even with just ChatGPT, if they just prompt a little more creatively.
    The proviso though is that you don't get many tries on free tier. Or if you pay for more tokens, you can fall into a rabbit hole of iterating where it's no longer a quick task.
2. siliconpotato · 1789812768 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  1. satvikpendem · 1789814822 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    BoredomIsFun · 1789815077 · focus · HN ↗
    exactly. Hindsight is 20/20.
3. ares623 · 1789812969 · focus · HN ↗
  I believe the point is that there is no baby in this bathwater
4. tgv · 1789813415 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  1. bonoboTP · 1789813993 · focus · HN ↗
    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 and fashion.
  2. 9dev · 1789817866 · focus · HN ↗
    You seem to think design is mere flourishing, nice colors to make something pleasant to look at, but ultimately superficial and useless. I would strongly object to that--visual presentation can carry a lot of additional information, and improve the transmission as well. Giving more people the ability to present information well leads to more efficient communication, which I wouldn't just dismiss this easily.
    bulder · 1789828493 · focus · HN ↗
    But there isn't any extra information in AI posters. It's necessarily either something that can already be conveyed in writing (that is after all, what they're prompted in), or something the AI pulled in based off of the text unintentionally, at which point no actual information is being conveyed by the added visuals.
    ereiamjh · 1789832895 · focus · HN ↗
    I think you need to remember that most people have no eye for design, and that includes even just presenting the essentials of an event in text.
    And AI can actually do it much better than the average idiot. Of they ask.
    Like, if you ask - "here's the event details, let's make a poster" in the right way, it's going to come back and say "you've supplied the venue name but not the street address, do you want to include that?".
    And then it'll lay the info out with generally sensible relative sizes and positions, better than the average idiot would.
    And, probably about equally as well as the average "I'm not a designer but I know a bit" amateur - and a lot faster.
    The catch there is that the idiot only gets this if their prompt is right - and since they're an idiot, it probably isn't.
    I think there's a gap in the market for a service with system prompts that make it work for people who don't think very hard.
    (That might be what, say, Canva Pro does with its AI features. I don't know because I'm not paying for that.)
    nevertoolate · 1789885978 · focus · HN ↗
    So you want to reduce entropy by “fixing” semantic mistakes and hardcoding some design decisions “by the book” and end up with what exactly? The exact same poster everywhere?
    ereiamjh · 1789928429 · focus · HN ↗
    That's a more interesting question than you might have intended it to be.
    A designer's job has two contradictory aspects. One is knowing the rules and following the rules. The other is having novel ideas, and breaking the rules when it works.
    The balance between those depends on the brief, and the designer's place in the ecosystem. For example the architect I paid to design my extension wasn't in the business having novel ideas - he designs well proportioned buildings in established styles, that work as living spaces, don't fall down, and get approved by planning authorities.
    But other architects are paid to design skyscrapers that look like nothing you've seen before.
    For a school fete poster, you're probably more in the first category - follow the rules. But you want to know where there's room for variety within those rules. Which is where the blog post starts - not every Spring fete poster has to have bunting and daffodils.
  3. maplethorpe · 1789830524 · focus · HN ↗
    If you ditch generative AI you go back to needing to pay an artist/designer for their work, and they likely charge more than ChatGPT because they might have rent/bills and that sort of thing to cover.
    ereiamjh · 1789833055 · focus · HN ↗
    The sort of use cases I was think of (village fête etc.) would never have paid for a professional designer. We're talking about an event that's delighted to raise £500 for the church roof repair fund. Even £50 for a poster is 10% of the fundraising lost.
    If it wasn't AI, it would be Comic Sans and some clipart.
5. ChrisMarshallNY · 1789825235 · focus · HN ↗
  I agree. AI is here to stay. It isn't crypto. There's real utility behind it.
  Trying to deny it is just going to end up fighting the tide, but the future belongs to the folks that learn to harness it properly.
  I enjoyed the post, and I have already sent it to some friends that I think will find it useful. Thanks!
  1. onemoresoop · 1789827095 · focus · HN ↗
    What if AI becomes really expensive to use?
    ChrisMarshallNY · 1789827763 · focus · HN ↗
    It will (for a while). We are already seeing the groundwork being laid.
    It’s unlikely to stay that way, though.
atrus · 1789812490 · focus · HN ↗
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.
1. officialchicken · 1789814504 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
petetnt · 1789812546 · focus · HN ↗
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.
1. bonoboTP · 1789813421 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  1. r_lee · 1789814067 · focus · HN ↗
    > But again, what they replace wasn't any better.
    I would argue otherwise.
    whereas before I'd take a glance and go "hm interesting" or whatever, with these its just "oh look, it's AI slop" and that's all I will notice
    bonoboTP · 1789814379 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    r_lee · 1789814799 · focus · HN ↗
    > who have a visceral reaction to the concept of AI
    why do you think this is the reason?
    should I be cheering and clapping when someone goes on chatgpt and say "make me a poster" and they think they're a genius when this slop comes out?
    bonoboTP · 1789814922 · focus · HN ↗
    You're just disgusted by the plebs and their taste.
    r_lee · 1789815532 · focus · HN ↗
    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
    bonoboTP · 1789816954 · focus · HN ↗
    You just dislike their taste and the fact that they don't subscribe to your political crusade.
    r_lee · 1789817098 · focus · HN ↗
    political crusade? and yes I dislike the taste of the AI slop posters as seen in the introduction of the article
    drstewart · 1789816978 · focus · HN ↗
    God forbid some town volunteer make a poster in 30 seconds instead of taking a college course to please some huffy internet commentators with an axe to grind
    dolebirchwood · 1789850530 · focus · HN ↗
    People take photos with their cell phones instead of painting a scene like Rembrandt. They don't think they are a genius, and nobody cheers and claps. The photos look fine, they get the job done, and everyone moves on with their lives without projecting insecurities online.
    breezybottom · 1789820614 · focus · HN ↗
    Same mentality as people who voted for Trump. No wonder he's become such an AI booster.
    Bootvis · 1789814700 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
  2. dreambigwrkhard · 1789814178 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
  3. wiether · 1789814813 · focus · HN ↗
    > I'm old enough to remember that people also complained about WordArt and Clipart and too many fonts etc.
    We basically had two kinds of posters:
    - those made by someone skilled/savvy (not necessarily a professional) - those made by someone without skills/knowledge
    The later were awful, in the sense that I would never display them in my home as a reminder of a an event I took part in.
    But still, they were nice because you knew someone took the time to create them to promote an event and share the important information about it, and each person was producing their own awful posters.
    Now with gen AI we have something filled with trash, everything looks the same, the important information is hard to find...
    Sure, the variations offered in the article are a bit better and more opinionated, but they still reek AI conformity and I feel sick looking at them.
    jwr · 1789815075 · focus · HN ↗
    > they still reek AI conformity and I feel sick looking at them
    I bet you would not feel sick if you didn't know ahead of time they were AI-generated. Some really are quite good.
    phoronixrly · 1789815386 · focus · HN ↗
    > if you didn't know ahead of time they were AI-generated
    You can't be serious... Are we looking at the same posters?
    ACCount39 · 1789817057 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes. That's the issue: we are looking at the same posters.
    It's just that "seeing this poster for the first time, unaware of the workings behind it" is a very different experience from "seeing this poster after you already saw dozens of other AI generated posters that used a similar style and had similar issues, got canny at spotting both the style and the issues in it, and came to associate them with cheap low quality work".
    The former impression is "wow that's a good poster". The latter impression is "ew, it's posterslop". The poster, in the meanwhile, remains the same.
    AI can often win in art contests - images, short stories, design. But that requires either sharp prompting, or an audience that's not familiar with "AI cliches". The quality is, if removed from the context, fairly good. If embedded in context, it's utter slop. The work is the same. Funny how that works.
    miyoji · 1789823351 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, context matters. The greatest painting in the world is just crushed materials smeared on a canvas, it's nothing too special without the context.
    A computer (not even an LLM, just something generating random pixels) could randomly generate the exact same pixel pattern as the greatest painting in the world, and it would not be the greatest painting in the world, because context matters.
    hardbass · 1789824529 · focus · HN ↗
    Because of what?
    miyoji · 1789824939 · focus · HN ↗
    Context.
    hardbass · 1789825034 · focus · HN ↗
    Is it the lack of hate? I could put all the hate I have into a person or group I hate while composing an AI art piece for instance.
    miyoji · 1789825247 · focus · HN ↗
    No you couldn't, because you can't compose AI art. The AI composes it,and it can't feel hate.
    hardbass · 1789825432 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't paint physically with paint when I use photoshop either. Photoshop doesn't feel hate.
    hardbass · 1789828065 · focus · HN ↗
    The sentience of AI is also an open question.
    numpad0 · 1789887817 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    wiether · 1789815400 · focus · HN ↗
    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
    graemep · 1789815790 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    wiether · 1789816803 · focus · HN ↗
    At least in this case I can't pretend I have some kind of super power since I knew beforehand that it was gen AI.
    And also it's not like I'm saying I love all the man-made posters. Or that I never been "fooled" by gen AI content.
    It's just that as soon as I start seeing some gen AI tells on an image, I can't unsee them and I feel disgusted by it.
    Applejinx · 1789817593 · focus · HN ↗
    If there's nothing to think about they may well not think.
    That's the problem.
    card_zero · 1789815617 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    hardbass · 1789821497 · focus · HN ↗
    Chocolates and rocks are different things.
    Pictures and pictures are the same thing.
    AlienRobot · 1789864108 · focus · HN ↗
    If they were the same thing nobody would complain about it, would they?
    hardbass · 1789875906 · focus · HN ↗
    Haven't yet seen anyone here claiming to be a customer or visitor to this fair so we cannot say that.
    sejje · 1789830215 · focus · HN ↗
    No, it's like if you bought a box of chocolates, and you couldn't distinguish if they were handmade or factory-made, even after you ate them.
    And it took them telling you before you knew.
    And then you decided you didn't like the ones made by the factory as much anymore.
    ACCount39 · 1789816633 · focus · HN ↗
    It's saturation.
    If I saw an Images 2.0 flyer in year 2020? In a world where Images 2.0 didn't exist? I'd be impressed. But if I see it now, today? I'm not impressed at all.
    It's the same image, produced by the same AI and seen by the same person. So, what's the difference? What changed over time?
    Saturation. "I've seen it all before." AI made that specific flyer style plentiful and omnipresent, and that made it "derivative" and "cheap". What used to invoke "cool" and "wow" was turned into a dreary cliche by repetition. Flaws that were easy to overlook when overshadowed by novelty stand out like a sore thumb now that you've seen them before in the same patterns many times over.
    The image is the same - it has the same strengths and the same flaws. But your focus is shifted by familiarity.
    It's the same mechanism that drives trends and fashion. AI just supercharges it.
    Naturally, you can avoid a lot of it by using careful prompting and steering to guide an AI away from the "cliche" style-space. You can get something with both good quality and good identity that way.
    But that requires: being aware of the problem, being really good at prompting, and putting in a considerable effort. It's hard to steer a model away from "AI cliches" if you don't have the eye to spot them in the first place.
    Most AI-generated content doesn't have that kind of skill and effort applied to it - it simply uses the "model defaults", and gets the "model defaults". For all the good and bad that comes with those.
    bonoboTP · 1789815410 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    wiether · 1789815827 · focus · HN ↗
    > Also, it's just nostalgia
    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.
    bonoboTP · 1789816341 · focus · HN ↗
    Making stuff that's bad on purpose is annoying, like acting retarded ironically. Make good stuff or just spend little effort. Putting in effort to look low effort is just trying to be special when you're not.
    dreambigwrkhard · 1789817302 · focus · HN ↗
    I was one of those "skilled friends" that people go to, to make those posters in times of need back in school. And this was many years ago. Didn't enjoy it, but just did it as part of volunteering, or help the student community or a school club out.
    Some people enjoy doing that work, but most people did not, and I was often the last resort because a random club or activity could not find suitable help in time. So had to step up when a friend or acquaintance asked.
    I think there is some misguided view where in "the good old days" people designed everything by hand. From the perspective of someone who had to make 10-20 of those a year as a volunteer, I can say it came at personal cost, often caused distractions from the actual event, and there was not enough people who stepped up to get it done. If it was so enjoyable we would have no problems finding people doing the work and that was not the case.
    The posters and designs were often rushed out late night by the closest person you can find who had a copy of photoshop on their computer. If we had AI back then, I would bet you 100% it would be the preferable solution and no one would bat an eye. It wasn't the type of work a lot of people wanted to do, could do properly and is willing to do for free, at their spare time, rushed for a deadline.
    wiether · 1789847658 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm sorry you keep bad memories of those times.
    I could be mistaken but in my case I never forced anyone to use their artistic skills, it was actually more often voluntary from them.
    Basically everyone was doing their part using their skills if they had some useful for the project, or just their time/sweat.
    The relationship we had (still have, actually) was healthy enough so they could just tell us to piss off if they didn't want to do it. I particularly remember one such instance, because I ended up doing an ugly poster but when asked, I said it was the work of our skilled friend.
    On the other hand I've been spending at least an hour per week doing sysadmin work for various groups/clubs, it's not the funniest thing in the world, particularly in the evening when I already spent the whole day doing it at work, but it's just me doing my part for the greater good!
    nephihaha · 1789816258 · focus · HN ↗
    Sorry, but Walkmans and Discmans were considered cool... At the time.
    Personally I like simple designs. I always remind people who make posters that whoever looks at them will only do so for a matter of seconds. If you want extensive detail, put it in smaller print. Put the main hook in large letters and a brief description.
    bonoboTP · 1789816565 · focus · HN ↗
    But they became uncool when the iPod and mp3 players came out. Nobody felt sentimental about VHS artifacts either, and now it's a genz aesthetic or something. These things cycle, like I'm sure some old folks miss the radio hiss and listening to football matches with just audio.
    elxr · 1789817051 · focus · HN ↗
    If you read the article at all, the "everything looks the same" is easily fixed with just a tiny bit of effort.
    It's not AI causing the sameyness and hard-to-read nature of these posters, it's people being lazy. I personally think there's a few nice looking ones in there (the punk fanzine style for one).
    Sure it's not some 9/10 hand made poster, but considering these take 30 seconds to make, it's impressive.
    miyoji · 1789823531 · focus · HN ↗
    > Sure it's not some 9/10 hand made poster, but considering these take 30 seconds to make, it's impressive.
    It's not impressive. It would be impressive if a human did it, but a human did not do it. Is it impressive when a printer prints out 10 perfect copies of the same flyer, because it would be impressive if a human could do that? No, of course not. It's similarly not impressive when the copying machine makes a plausible copy of something a human once made.
    dolebirchwood · 1789850119 · focus · HN ↗
    > But still, they were nice because you knew someone took the time to create them to promote an event
    Unlike a gift, "it's the thought that counts" doesn't fly with me here. I don't care how much effort the secretary took to cobble some shitty poster together - it still looked terrible. I'd rather look at something clean and aesthetically pleasing produced by AI.
    nevertoolate · 1789851187 · focus · HN ↗
    Prompt1: generate random poster
    Polish: make it nicer
  4. gyomu · 1789815496 · focus · HN ↗
    > 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.
  5. Kreutzer · 1789821239 · focus · HN ↗
    One of my favorite local ice cream shops uses Comic Sans (white on navy blue) on all their signage and this is one of the main reasons I frequent it. If they were to switch to some AI slop I wouldn't step my feet in there again.
    1123581321 · 1789854810 · focus · HN ↗
    Sounds like you could go to a different shop right now, that stands out for its ice cream instead of its signs. :)
  6. nevertoolate · 1789884069 · focus · HN ↗
    I know this is an internet forum, but do you have any experience with posters? There are many great tools to create posters from templates. You can make something in canva for example in minutes from free templates. You upload a photo, play around with it. You can also search the old internet for some tutorials. You know, like a human would do.
2. echelon · 1789813903 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  1. amarcheschi · 1789814364 · focus · HN ↗
    I was honestly ok with the silly looking posters. Where I'm in italy it's common to have sagre, sort of cheap food events sponsored by the municipality. 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 <a href="https://www.sagretoscane.com/sagre/fi/rignano-sullarno/sagra-del-cinghiale-rignano.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.sagretoscane.com/sagre/fi/rignano-sullarno/sagra...
    Post Ai example <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DZiKFZgIwcY/" rel="nofollow">https://www.instagram.com/p/DZiKFZgIwcY/
    Here's an article by the biggest online Italian newspaper, worth reading translated <a href="https://www.ilpost.it/2026/07/26/ai-locandine-sagre/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ilpost.it/2026/07/26/ai-locandine-sagre/
    ChrisLTD · 1789823592 · focus · HN ↗
    Yikes. The old posters had an austere beauty
    amarcheschi · 1789830345 · focus · HN ↗
    And the old fluo ones are more effective than decorated new ones, since they're mostly on road sides and you need to be able to tell at a glance what they're about. I unironically went to a sagra recently because I spotted a similar fluo advert while cycling in Tuscany
3. bspammer · 1789814196 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  1. singpolyma3 · 1789815290 · focus · HN ↗
    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...
  2. _puk · 1789815700 · focus · HN ↗
    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..
    bspammer · 1789818126 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    jasonjayr · 1789818408 · focus · HN ↗
    Now that you mention it, I'm pretty sure I recall a hand-painted "Skydiving" sign at some small rural airport...
  3. Kwantuum · 1790170330 · focus · HN ↗
    I think that's unfair. Many local community fairs happen to have a graphic designer or someone with some of the same chops who's willing to lend a hand to design a decent poster.
4. TacticalCoder · 1789814450 · focus · HN ↗
  > 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.
  1. grumbel · 1789815080 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    graemep · 1789815598 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    TheOtherHobbes · 1789815931 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    grumbel · 1789823080 · focus · HN ↗
    > They're almost ridiculously diverse, and the prompts show very little handholding was required.
    The structure is identically to all of that, big title, graphic, list with icons. As said, they look fine on their own, the problem is only becomes apparent when you had to look had hundreds or thousands of them. It's the em-dash or the "load-bearing" of the AI-art world, the more you look at this stuff, the more apparent the similarities become.
    > Hollywood movie posters and book cover designers are notorious for reusing the same tropes and colour systems, and that's been true for years, long before AI was a thing.
    Exactly, but with AI that issue becomes even more drastic since the models don't create diversity by default.
    > Most artists aren't diverse either
    They don't have to be, since there are millions of them, all coming from different backgrounds, with different art styles and all. While there are only a handful of big AI models, who all come with a pretty generic default style.
    Kwantuum · 1790170608 · focus · HN ↗
    > The structure is identically to all of that, big title, graphic, list with icons
    You're complaining about posters being structured like posters?
    But also the structure is particularly similar between these posters themselves across styles because they use the same prompt to describe the desired content and that's on purpose. The model is not asked to rework or reword any of the content, this lets you compare the styles.
    Gigachad · 1789863081 · focus · HN ↗
    There was some upgrade in tech where the posters had legible text and all used that paint brush text highlight thing. The first time I saw it on Bambulab makerworld I though, "huh thats a neat image". Then I saw it on every low view count youtube thumbnail, and then the exact same thing at the failing sushi business menu and I was no longer impressed. I'm actively repulsed when I see that style of image now.
  2. Applejinx · 1789818232 · focus · HN ↗
    Only at the first derivative. What you're observing is an additional layer of 'but, in genre X!' and then same slop, different prompt.
    You're complaining about what happens when people don't even supply the additional layer, but just go 'make me a poster, no mistakes, it should be a great poster'. When you give no direction at all you get the purest of slop. You start giving directions, you start narrowing down the area you're digging through the slop of, and possibly you ask for something that people aren't familiar with and they're only able to identify that you asked.
    Hence, Chinese posters with a cherry blossom and the kanji for 'Japan' and such. Someone went 'make it Chinese' and the slop associated it with 'Oriental' and what came out was collective unconscious, such that people who weren't thinking and didn't have experience might not look twice, but the meaning turned out tainted.
    Sort of like food depictions that more closely resemble a pile of maggots. Those glisten! (well, I suppose they must.) There's a whole uncanny-valley thing that happens on every level and inspires revulsion. I'm suggesting that is still happening in the other examples but you've not got the experience to register their problems. With the food depictions, all animals eat stuff so we're hardwired to bounce off unsafe foods even if they glisten…
5. BoredomIsFun · 1789814882 · focus · HN ↗
  > 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.
6. AIiscoming · 1789815358 · focus · HN ↗
  They look absolutly well done.
  1. shiandow · 1789836238 · focus · HN ↗
    Well maybe not that, it would have to stop almost aligning text to make it good instead of usable.
7. crazybonkersai · 1789815877 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
8. danpasca · 1789816101 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
9. FuckButtons · 1789886285 · focus · HN ↗
  I don’t think the bauhaus one is horrible, nor is the cubist one. They’re not great works of art, but if I saw one out in the wild, my reaction would not be: “bloody ai art making everything visually putrid again” nor, do I think they’re worse than the clip art and badly taken digital photograph agglomerations they would be replacing.
CraigJPerry · 1789812682 · focus · HN ↗
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.
1. hashstring · 1789819998 · focus · HN ↗
  What is the tell on the punk one?
  1. bariumbitmap · 1789856879 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm not the GP but if you look at actual 1980s zines the difference is obvious, even if it's not easy to put into words. The absence of photos or hand-drawn graphics in particular.
    The origins of the punk movement are in counterculture and DIY, so there's something particularly perverse about using an AI model to generate a poster in that style.
bananaflag · 1789812825 · focus · HN ↗
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).
1. r_lee · 1789814558 · focus · HN ↗
  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
2. davidw · 1789922150 · focus · HN ↗
  It's really impressive how the icons+text carries through every single one of them isn't it.
  1. georgefrowny · 1789987398 · focus · HN ↗
    The thin line between them is also really tenacious (only the punk one dropped it)
JSR_FDED · 1789812882 · focus · HN ↗
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.
1. viraptor · 1789813210 · focus · HN ↗
  > 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.
  1. _def · 1789813500 · focus · HN ↗
    > 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.
    eterm · 1789835745 · focus · HN ↗
    It's a village fete, what kind of signals do you want from the poster?
    That's why the "Look here's a 100 identical village fete posters" memes are kind of missing the point, it's actually not a bad thing that I can tell from a glance what it is, I don't actually have to read any of the details to know it'll have a tombola, because it's a given.
    My bigger issue is all the posters calling it Fayre, not Fete, which is the weird part, particularly the "Craft Fayre" which should definitely be "Craft Fair", but misspellings and greengrocers apostrophe's are part and parcel of a good hand-made poster too.
    Pannoniae · 1789843586 · focus · HN ↗
    its an antique (english) spelling for "fair", it's basically the event equivalent of "ye olde shoppe" which is just "the old shop" in a very antiquated phrasing
    Walf · 1789879751 · focus · HN ↗
    Except "ye olde" was always "the olde", but for a time printing machines were produced outside of England and lacked the thorn "þ" character, so the y was used as a substitute.
    ereiamjh · 1790074417 · focus · HN ↗
    Spring/Summer/Christmas "Fayres" are just a British thing. I'm not sure whether it's emerged as a spelling in recent years, or whether it's always been the case. But churches, village halls, schools, they've been doing it for ages.
    That's not something AI has invented.
  2. nkrisc · 1789814177 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    oefrha · 1789816048 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
  3. bspammer · 1789814489 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    materielle · 1789834480 · focus · HN ↗
    Tech people seem to have a really difficult time grasping that the average person is not a utilitarian.
    People are really bothered by perceived inauthenticity and injustice. And care about more things than the utility of the end product.
    On top of that, we have a very out of touch political system that has continually ignored the will of the electorate. So then the tech people will say “see, the masses voted with their feet, they love the utility of AI generated art!”. Completely ignoring the perverse incentivizes and regulatory capture that led to that outcome.
    If you were to poll 100 people on the street, they would be very against replacing human artists with AI.
  4. michaelchisari · 1789830905 · focus · HN ↗
    Or is this consumers intuitively recognizing a brown M&M situation?
    <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IxqdAgNJck" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IxqdAgNJck
  5. leokennis · 1789837039 · focus · HN ↗
    1000% agree.
    If I’m looking for a handyman on (the Dutch equivalent to) Craigslist, either very short text with spelling errors or something obviously AI are both a positive signal. These are people too busy doing actual jobs, to fret over smoothly copywritten ads.
  6. WD-42 · 1789839184 · focus · HN ↗
    It feels particularly bad for a local arts faire. Like maybe ask one of the local artists if they could design a poster instead of defaulting to the plagiarism machine? If I saw this ai poster for a local crafts faire I’d immediately dismiss it.
    InvertedRhodium · 1789849627 · focus · HN ↗
    Do you offer to pay them in exposure? Or do you offer them actually money commensurate with the work and skill they provide?
    Because if it’s the latter we’re back to money being the barrier. And if it’s the former you should go and check with your local artists how much they love working for exposure.
    lemmetellya · 1789851192 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    Gigachad · 1789862559 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, running an event has work and expenses involved in it. An AI slop poster is a sign the event is not serious and has other more major issues under the surface.
    InvertedRhodium · 1789867437 · focus · HN ↗
    It’s a local craft fair. By every reasonable definition of the word, it’s not serious.
    alpineman · 1789886443 · focus · HN ↗
    I assume you haven’t lived in a village before? These fairs have absolutely no money, and often not even much time as it’s fully volunteer led
    Gigachad · 1789887703 · focus · HN ↗
    Making a poster is free and easy. Literal children do it in school.
    I’ve made posters for events. Affinity is free now, it takes you like an hour to learn it from scratch and make your poster. If you couldn’t be bothered doing that, then that’s a signal the event itself is low effort slop. I'm not sure why people are acting like it's impossible to run an event without AI tools that literally didn't exist until right now.
  7. lemmetellya · 1789851028 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
  8. asdff · 1789852790 · focus · HN ↗
    The thing though with deferring to AI slop though is that it signals to me a sort of negative effort now being put in. I mean don't these people also recoil at this stuff? No? They have some screw loose I guess. I don't need to give them my money.
  9. m4rtink · 1789895169 · focus · HN ↗
    So I saw a public poster exposition called "Hihlights of moder design in industry" in the middle of a busy square, with high quality panels that must have been pretty expensive with sponsor logos plastered all over. It was mostly photos, most of them quite interesting - cool machines, research project, factories.
    But that's where the good stuff ended - all the text was total cheesy AI slop, expanding what should have been just "masive steam turbine fan calibration table" into a wall of text - the same for all the nice photos.
    And worst of all was the title poster introducing the exposition - a horrendous AI slop image of a high tech motorcycle, whit a chan fused together with the body, asymmetrical wheels fused to the frame.
    I find this really insane, someone with enough money, representing a serious project just decided to use an AI instead of doing their job & the garbage they produced was not stopped by anyone sane until it was presented to people as an achievement...
  10. xnx · 1789977862 · focus · HN ↗
    Not always correlated, but often. I don't want to go to an event (or restaurant) organized by people with bad taste.
2. bonoboTP · 1789813540 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  1. graemep · 1789815243 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    dgellow · 1789835024 · focus · HN ↗
    But nobody needs a fancy poster. A small org doesn’t have to pay for a designer. They can literally open Word, and make something in half an hour that communicates the details of the event
    bonoboTP · 1789835757 · focus · HN ↗
    They like how the AI poster looks better. They have no visceral anti-AI reaction to it because they don't spend their lives in online bubbles where AI is the new heresy.
    lemmetellya · 1789851249 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    tavavex · 1789854155 · focus · HN ↗
    Have you spoken to a young person recently? Like at all? Say what you want about thinking that an AI-gen poster actually signals high competency to you, but acting like there's not a huge swath of people that hates AI and trying to dismiss them out-of-hand as an extremely online fringe just seems irrational. No, there are a lot.
    graemep · 1789837116 · focus · HN ↗
    I would class something quickly run up in a word processor as much the same as the AI "slop" in comparison to a professional designer. I would prefer it but the basic signal that its not professional work is the same.
    tavavex · 1789853040 · focus · HN ↗
    The difference between them, as pointed out elsewhere in the comment thread, is authenticity. A basic, unassuming poster made by an amateur conveys a simple, grassroots event with no frills. A professional poster made a by a graphic designer signals effort and attention to detail. The average AI-generated poster says that the organizers don't have time or money, but really want to seem like they do. It's like how people tend to perceive someone who wears or owns an obvious knockoff of an expensive status item - it's seen as worse than having the real deal and worse than having nothing at all, because that person is trying to create an appearance of something that's not true.
  2. matsemann · 1789842404 · focus · HN ↗
    To me it's the opposite. If the poster is something typed up in Word, I know the Farmer's Market is the real deal. If it's AI generated, I immediately get Temu dropshipping vibes.
    alex43578 · 1789862307 · focus · HN ↗
    But neither is an actual signal. The Word-market can just be selling fruit from a wholesaler at a mark up, and the AI poster could be coming from an established "real" farmers market who's organizer has tried to promote it with the tools and design knowledge they have access to.
    The factors behind branding (or a lack of) are multi-causal and not correlated to the actual quality of a farmer's market.
3. floodle · 1789813740 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  1. ModernMech · 1789814271 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    [deleted] · 1789836172 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
4. zulban · 1789814213 · focus · HN ↗
  Making a good poster is bikeshedding. Organizing an event is hard and making better posters than this is a waste of their limited resources.
  1. GlacierFox · 1789836268 · focus · HN ↗
    "Organizing an event is hard..." Not with AI. You could use AI to organize it and make some AI posters. Ask AI to design everything. Make it digital and have only AI's come.
  2. tavavex · 1789853439 · focus · HN ↗
    Bikeshedding at an event is something like arguing about where to put the snack table. Raising awareness in the community about the event is vital, because this is what decides who will come. If you spend your time solving other problems and then few people come because they were put off by posters that to them signal "This is something we don't really care about", then it did matter after all.
    zulban · 1791040486 · focus · HN ↗
    You've missed the point so I'll try to spell it out.
    Bike sheds are important. Their color is not.
    Event promotion is important. The color of the poster is not.
5. Chance-Device · 1789814732 · focus · HN ↗
  Ok, don’t go because of the poster. Miss out.
6. graemep · 1789815109 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  1. GlacierFox · 1789836634 · focus · HN ↗
    Well, that's you. A lot of people like posters to be designed by real people, no matter how rubbish they look, especially if it's a cultural event or something based around people and human connection. AI posters, with AI stall signs, with AI flyers, with AI descriptions. Fucking depressing, man.
    lemmetellya · 1789851365 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
7. AIiscoming · 1789815499 · focus · HN ↗
  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
8. gus_massa · 1789817704 · focus · HN ↗
  > Why should I get excited about the village fete if the organizers put in the barest minimum of effort?
  Beer? The first example is about a beer festival. People go there to drink beer, not to see posters. A blank piece of paper that says 250 kinds of beers would get more excitement than any AI or handcrafted poster.
  1. sonar_un · 1789848742 · focus · HN ↗
    I literally saw that poster today in London and had this conversation about AI posters with my wife. I had no clue it would literally be a post today.
9. interleave · 1789820794 · focus · HN ↗
  I agree.
  This week, I created a video for a personal project using AI.
  And, as the creator, I honestly can not say if it's "slop or not."
  So I created a "behind the scenes" page that shows the process I went through before final cut, warts and all. You can find it at <a href="https://alexisrondeau.me/mosey-site/making-of/" rel="nofollow">https://alexisrondeau.me/mosey-site/making-of/
  Do you think this helps you decide if it's slop or not?
  1. fleshdaddy · 1789839613 · focus · HN ↗
    I mean this page kind of looks like AI slop. If that’s the case, making more slop explaining how you made the original slop seems…misguided.
    interleave · 1789841224 · focus · HN ↗
    Gotcha, that makes sense. Thank you very much for the feedback.
    I asked Claude to go through all the previous committee, the chat history and the 100 or so intermediate assets and create a timeline of sports assemble the current page as you see it.
    It's AI-generated as are the assets, the process and decisions depicted are human.
    And still you're reaction is "it's slop". Noted!
    echoangle · 1789856521 · focus · HN ↗
    > And still you're reaction is "it's slop".
    The text on the page sounds really AI written so I can see why people think it’s slop.
    interleave · 1790165337 · focus · HN ↗
    Yup! Sorry to not reply sooner. I took all y'all's feedback in and decided to replace all of it. You can now read the full, UNREDACTED conversation. Now there's zero AI-generated page-filler, just raw input/outputs.
    <a href="https://alexisrondeau.me/mosey-site/conversation/" rel="nofollow">https://alexisrondeau.me/mosey-site/conversation/ - (You can skip the letter and the final cut since you already know all of that)
    My question still remains: Slop or not?a
  2. ereiamjh · 1789840682 · focus · HN ↗
    Love this. This is exactly the dilemma I had with fiction I had created with AI. Am my I the author? Did I just commission it? Something in between?
    So now I don't say. I show my workings and the reader can decide. And to be poncey, I made a manifesto. <a href="https://kladde26.org/" rel="nofollow">https://kladde26.org/
  3. jdlshore · 1789841313 · focus · HN ↗
    I have to agree with @fleshdaddy. The explainer page itself looks like slop. I haven’t seen the original project but I’m afraid this makes me less interested, not more.
    interleave · 1789842484 · focus · HN ↗
    Thank you as well, just wrote below to the same point.
    And I agree with your impression.
    My goal here is to understand how can I demonstrate that I did in fact put work and care into the "thing" (video in this case).
    Basically show that I did spend energy over time, that the final product took a few dozen iterations with a lot of dead ends (as opposed to a lazy one-shot "make good video, no mistakes")
    So I do think this route can have merit given there is actual work, but how would a page like this look if the current one is not yet giving you a trustworthy vibe?
    interleave · 1789843317 · focus · HN ↗
    Idea: Just show the full Claude Code transcript on the left side and the incremental outputs (images, clips, videos) on the right side?
    You'd definitely see some raw and embarrassing stuff there.
    Is that maybe what we need to see to believe that a human (me n this case) was involved meaningfully?
    interleave · 1790165529 · focus · HN ↗
    So funny, I didn't even expect the page itself to be such a blocker/issue!
    I replied to another sibling: Based on your feedback, I scrapped it all and started over with the actual, unredacted Claude Code transcript plus a personal letter.
    <a href="https://alexisrondeau.me/mosey-site/conversation/" rel="nofollow">https://alexisrondeau.me/mosey-site/conversation/ (Feel free to skip the letter and the final cut)
    How does this feel?
  4. allenu · 1789847491 · focus · HN ↗
    You might be a little too close to the work to judge, but to me it still looks off. I suppose I might not immediately think it was AI, but there's something not quite human about it. The video contents are a little too sterile and clean, lacking character. The room is quite empty and the composition doesn't cause me to focus on any one thing. That said, you could probably improve a bit of it with some prompting.
    The making-of post itself also is clearly LLM generated, probably by Claude, judging by the language used.
  5. jimbobimbo · 1789861193 · focus · HN ↗
    Behind the scenes is completely unreadable.
  6. fittingopposite · 1789887582 · focus · HN ↗
    Standard Claude typography :(
10. duckmysick · 1789827147 · focus · HN ↗
  There were lots of tumblr blogs (now defunct) that ridiculed Comic Sans used in signs and posters. Later on the same thing happened to the Lobster font.
  Reasons were the same as now: low effort and overuse.
11. dasil003 · 1789829577 · focus · HN ↗
  Low effort signals for recognizing effort in creation have all been scrambled. Now it's high effort just to identify real effort, not to mention most people in most cases would not have the expertise to recognize real effort anyway. I don't think this is entirely new from AI either, we already had so much media vying for attention that we could scant attend to more than a vanishing sliver of it.
  Also just because someone used AI doesn't mean they didn't put in effort, so I don't think reflexive rejection of any AI smell is the answer. Sure, at work in a corporate white collar job where you have so many talentless strivers looking for any shortcut to climb the corporate ladder, raw AI smell actually is a highly valuable negative signal. But when it comes to local event organizers for example, there's a realness and human factor there that goes beyond anything a programmer or designer in a "scalable" context does with or without AI. We need to give our local humans grace, because humans are what it's all about.
12. giarc · 1789831118 · focus · HN ↗
  >If the sign was simple Comic Sans
  I remember the days when people would make fun of a sign like that. Then people would make fun of Wordart, then Canva. It appears that unless you spend $1500 on a graphic designer to create your poster, people will shit on your effort.
  1. jdlshore · 1789841198 · focus · HN ↗
    You’re almost there.
    People shit on things that are low effort, and especially low-effort trends. And especially especially when the low-effort trend involves something that offends them in some way, for example if they think AI is taking jobs, hurting the environment, etc.
    Of course people are shitting on low-effort AI. It would be more surprising if they didn’t.
    ereiamjh · 1790074510 · focus · HN ↗
    Ironically, Comic Sans is more effort than Times New Roman.
    But people would shit on a Comic Sans poster more than a Times New Roman poster.
13. paulcole · 1789860192 · focus · HN ↗
  I mean let’s get real. You probably were looking for a reason to smugly not go to the village fete and this gave you one.
  Otherwise you would be excited about going to the village fete and realize that the poster doesn’t make it a bad event.
andrey_chmerev · 1789812908 · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
hnacobsxph · 1789812948 · focus · HN ↗
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.
hermitcrab · 1789812963 · focus · HN ↗
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.
1. ssl-3 · 1789817076 · focus · HN ↗
  [delayed]
  1. hermitcrab · 1789826355 · focus · HN ↗
    You obviously didn't have access to a Mac SE. ;0)
jdw64 · 1789813172 · focus · HN ↗
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...
agnishom · 1789813209 · focus · HN ↗
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.
1. bonoboTP · 1789813732 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  1. portly · 1789815461 · focus · HN ↗
    Or they would pay a designer to do it for them. Also no effort but just cost more.
  2. Gigachad · 1789864031 · focus · HN ↗
    Deception is certainly part of the problem. Imagine if your friend sent you a paragraph personal text message on your birthday. Then imagine you find out they didn't write it at all, their AI agent just went through the contact list, saw your birthday and generated a message based on previous conversations.
    The message you received is the same either way, but it's clearly different.
2. echelon · 1789813987 · focus · HN ↗
  > 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.
  1. ModernMech · 1789814860 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    echelon · 1789816225 · focus · HN ↗
    Everyone is suffering and not getting what they want to some degree. Life is short, and opportunity runs out. People turn this into bitterness and direct it at external things that are going well that they're not a participant in.
    It's not just AI, it's everything. Romantic rivals, celebrities, sports teams, fandoms, choice of IDE or programming language.
    It's a social evolutionary strategy to neg and gossip about people and things you don't like or are jealous of. It's low energy, has little downside, and can reduce the fitness of rivals, especially when done in group settings.
    The algorithm has co-opted this part of our primate brain and turned it into ad dollars. It's also twisted discourse to be sour and negative by default because it activates these perverse reward pathways.
  2. asdff · 1789853787 · focus · HN ↗
    You at least had to think. Let me put a winging here. Let me choose this clipart and drag it over there. This looks alright I think, I'll go with it.
    Now people just shut the brain off. Prompt AI. Get thing. Done with task. Ugga gugga.
    I mean isn't it a known thing where older people get more senile when they stop intellectually challenging themselves? And now we are doing it for ourself for all these low hanging fruit mental exercises we used to bake into our lives where we did have to, gasp, think for a moment, even if the task was unimportant or stupid.
A_D_E_P_T · 1789813295 · focus · HN ↗
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.
1. HPsquared · 1789814070 · focus · HN ↗
  It's a thing inherent to diffusion models I think, a kind of uniformity of content across the image.
  1. Sharlin · 1789816174 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
2. tavavex · 1789855039 · focus · HN ↗
  You can't really do this with images either. The least AI-looking images in the post are ones that have the least amount of content, the fewest things to mess up. Once you introduce more detail, it starts converging on the same flaws you usually see, just covered up by a thin veneer of a different artstyle.
akk0 · 1789813338 · focus · HN ↗
AI posters may or may not have to be horrible, but they absolutely must include [ icon | icon | icon | icon ], apparently
1. chrismorgan · 1789813987 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
anonzzzies · 1789813440 · focus · HN ↗
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.
1. Tox46 · 1789813644 · focus · HN ↗
  I'd rather not see photographs in the menu then seeing fake images.
  1. astura · 1789825564 · focus · HN ↗
    The funny thing is, 10 years ago, people said photos on menus was a sign of extremely poor quality.
2. epolanski · 1789813712 · focus · HN ↗
  Here in Bielsko Biala (southern Poland) I see the same in few pubs and shops.
3. Jolter · 1789837453 · focus · HN ↗
  TBF the food places here that have photos on the menus are either chain restaurants or really bad fast food. In the latter case, the photos are flat, grey and unappetizing. (Because food photography is hard.)
  Good restaurant in my locale do not have photos of their food.
dude250711 · 1789813550 · focus · HN ↗
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.
1. 468854259853 · 1789814230 · focus · HN ↗
  The only thing that separates you from trash is that you meticulously hand-craft your posters.
lloydatkinson · 1789813569 · focus · HN ↗
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.
RomanKornev · 1789813642 · focus · HN ↗
Moral of the story - have taste.
Just like in engineering.
r_lee · 1789813847 · focus · HN ↗
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
1. redox99 · 1789815067 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
Razengan · 1789813850 · focus · HN ↗
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.
hellobuddy9 · 1789813893 · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
userbinator · 1789813944 · focus · HN ↗
I remember seeing that default style long before AI. Probably where it came from. At least the default is not Corporate Memphis.
walthamstow · 1789814033 · focus · HN ↗
It's not that the first one is so bad in isolation, it's that there are hundreds of them everywhere you look when you walk down the street. The barbers, the school fête, the cafe, the church. Everywhere.
satvikpendem · 1789814617 · focus · HN ↗
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.
amelius · 1789814694 · focus · HN ↗
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.
I'm starting to think that icons are in fact the low-effort way to convey information. It's design you can just throw in anywhere without adapting it to context (except for maybe changing color).
1. HarHarVeryFunny · 1789824814 · focus · HN ↗
  I really don't get any sense of what these events are from the look-alike posters. They are all just a wall of color and excessive detail.
  For a poster to catch your eye and be informational it needs to be way simpler - should be able to take it in at a glance, not have to pore over it like a "where's waldo" exercise.
AyanamiKaine · 1789814736 · focus · HN ↗
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.
lifestyleguru · 1789814764 · focus · HN ↗
Kids are rediscovering typography and pictograms. Well done!
samuba · 1789814773 · focus · HN ↗
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. <a href="https://john.hartnup.uk/poster-prompts/" rel="nofollow">https://john.hartnup.uk/poster-prompts/
1. jedilance · 1789863538 · focus · HN ↗
  that's great, worth trying
wiseowise · 1789815008 · focus · HN ↗
> They’re OK
No, they aren't.
sajithdilshan · 1789815011 · focus · HN ↗
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.
wiseowise · 1789815020 · focus · HN ↗
> They’re OK
They are not OK.
throwawayffffas · 1789815198 · focus · HN ↗
I love how the AI silently injected "A day of fun for all the family" on the hand-drawn by a child design.
feverzsj · 1789815236 · focus · HN ↗
Can you tell your AI to not apply piss filter to everything?
1. ereiamjh · 1789830683 · focus · HN ↗
  I've done a lot of experimenting, and with the GPT image AI, it's quite hard to prevent the piss filter, though you can reduce it.
  It's easy to colour balance it in post though - if you have the aesthetics and the knowledge to do that.
ls-a · 1789815322 · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
iamflimflam1 · 1789815458 · focus · HN ↗
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.
1. ereiamjh · 1789844596 · focus · HN ↗
  This is something I actually cover in the follow-up project's how-to. Ask the AI to sense check the info you've supplied. It can tell you "hey, maybe you should mention venue address".
  <a href="https://john.hartnup.uk/poster-prompts/how-to-use/" rel="nofollow">https://john.hartnup.uk/poster-prompts/how-to-use/
  But as with all of it, it's no use if you don't ask the right questions.
throwaway13337 · 1789815470 · focus · HN ↗
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.
1. Sharlin · 1789815671 · focus · HN ↗
  Incidentally, the "early digital camera" aesthetic has been back in style for a couple of years now.
  1. rubidium · 1789820167 · focus · HN ↗
    It’s the same cultural response as the analog movement. The collective sense that everything Covid on stole our future, and AI is only making it worse.
  2. breezybottom · 1789821116 · focus · HN ↗
    No, it hasn't. You're confusing digital cameras with Polaroids.
    Sharlin · 1789822497 · focus · HN ↗
    No, I’m not. Old digital point-and-shoots, and the harsh direct flash aesthetic, have been very popular. Some specific camera models that some random popular TikToker happened to recommend have been selling at quite a mark-up.
    Two-ish decades is the standard length of a trend cycle. 00s is now retro in a cool way. Gen Z/Alpha, who have grown with phone cameras, want a different look, and having a real flash is particularly attractive because it allows taking reasonable photos in night clubs etc. Just like we did back in the day. (browsing old Facebook photos)
    breezybottom · 1789822904 · focus · HN ↗
    How do you quantify that as a trend? Prices change all the time. How many people actually bought it?
    The stuff about "generations" and trend cycles is nonsense.
    Sharlin · 1789823584 · focus · HN ↗
    Ok.
    breezybottom · 1789824009 · focus · HN ↗
    That's a bold statement on HN. Perhaps you confused this with reddit.
    seekling · 1789850243 · focus · HN ↗
    Speaking as Gen Z; yes, "early digital camera" aesthetic has been in vogue, along with Y2K as a whole. Polaroid was a trend when the right about when the Instagram logo looked like one. If you will not be open to a new idea without "quantitative evidence", you are free to use Google Trends to substantiate my claims.
    breezybottom · 1789856794 · focus · HN ↗
    As if we needed any more proof that "generations" are nonsense, now people claim to have omniscience regarding their generational cohorts.
    poolnoodle · 1789850817 · focus · HN ↗
    You're acting like a fucking asshole
    wizcaps · 1790024506 · focus · HN ↗
    Read the rest of their posts. They are one.
    Got proven wrong and can’t handle it.
    kowbell · 1789829568 · focus · HN ↗
    Polaroids are much bigger but I've also seen a resurgence in crappy early digital cameras in young adult spaces. There's been a slow rise in all things Y2K in some spaces and getting a crummy digital cam from a thrift store or ebay is a sick find.
    breezybottom · 1789832084 · focus · HN ↗
    Quantify this. What constitutes a resurgence, or a slow rise?
    Gigachad · 1789863743 · focus · HN ↗
    No one is compiling sales charts on second hand cameras at thrift stores. But I can tell you from personal experience going to parties that more people are taking photos with old digi cams or modern old style digi cams like the kodak charmera than phones.
    When gen z does use phones they end up running the images through apps like 1998 cam to make it look like digicam photos or using effects to turn video in to VHS camcorder style video.
    breezybottom · 1789906059 · focus · HN ↗
    Your personal experience means nothing.
    numpad0 · 1789888844 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
  3. lawsthro0532 · 1789867801 · focus · HN ↗
    I saw the coolest bunch of kids in giant pants on the subway taking photos and looking at them on what was essentially my old Olympus and was transport back 25 years.
2. eloisant · 1789821251 · focus · HN ↗
  Also remember the days of the first color printers.
  People were so proud to show off their colors that every single word was in a different color.
3. bariumbitmap · 1789835363 · focus · HN ↗
  Did digital take over because of quality or convenience?
  A 35 mm film camera is still much better quality than my smartphone's digital camera, especially more than a few meters away or in lower light conditions. But my smartphone is the camera I actually have with me, I don't have to buy film or wait for it to be developed, so that's what I use.
amelius · 1789815575 · focus · HN ↗
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 meant to imply heritage and tradition), "I NY", "Property of [City/School] Athletic Dept.", etc., etc.
meindnoch · 1789815673 · focus · HN ↗
All trash, in my opinion. Different flavors of trash.
beloch · 1789815714 · focus · HN ↗
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".
1. jappgar · 1789824348 · focus · HN ↗
  I think there are sadly a huge number of people who don't care about art or creativity at all. They like the idea of AI and sterility and everything else. Increasingly these people dominate the economy because they are the most willing to hurt their fellow man in pursuit of status.
  These people don't go to fairs, it's true, but they do bulldoze the fairgrounds to build a data center. To build a semblance of consent, they need to host brainwashing events like "fairs" and so on where they can propagandize and threaten citizens. They can't hire a local artist to advertise it, because literally none of them will do it. AI comes in handy when you're absolute evil.
  1. hardbass · 1789824725 · focus · HN ↗
    I would be interested in the income percentile of people visiting fairs, and the prices of items there vs commercial items on a grocery store or mall. I have a feeling 'fairs' are a very different demographic today than 200 years ago.
    asdff · 1789853140 · focus · HN ↗
    I mean it isn't wealthy people coming to eat fried chicken on a stick or see the show hogs. Sure its a bad and exploitative deal where you probably are out $25 for that fried chicken on a stick but it doesn't mean the underlying demographics have changed from the "people of the earth" as they've always been. If you have to guess, close your eyes and imagine the sort of people that live in the rural townships 40 minutes outside your nearest major city. That is who you will find at your state or county fair, those people and their teenage kids smuggling in booze in gatorade bottles.
    hardbass · 1789876182 · focus · HN ↗
    People of the earth don't seem to care much for ai art or not. What I was trying to say is that fairs aren't places targeting the lower classes trying to sell the cheapest items possible. The lower classes are served by industrialized mass production today: injection molding, factory farming, etc. So I don't see why they want to hate one businessman (the builder of a datacenter) over another (the fair shop owners).
  2. beloch · 1789846659 · focus · HN ↗
    Those people run stalls at fairs. The amount of slop I see at fairs is really on the upswing.
    Gigachad · 1789863462 · focus · HN ↗
    The people making AI posters are the same ones selling Ali express bulk buys as "hand made jewelry" or selling 3D printed dragons.
loopydosuette · 1789815739 · focus · HN ↗
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 ...
jfewhfuehg · 1789815770 · focus · HN ↗
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 is the next generation of art.
1. esafak · 1789880442 · focus · HN ↗
  The problem is that not everybody has it but they still want the end result. If everybody could draw nobody would hire designers.
  1. jfewhfuehg · 1789895740 · focus · HN ↗
    Oh you mean that bad thing where you pay people for a skill?
    esafak · 1789925544 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, that bad thing. Often a consequence of another bad thing called "limited budgets".
vova_hn2 · 1789815795 · focus · HN ↗
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.
1. jfewhfuehg · 1789815896 · focus · HN ↗
  If you understand how curve fitting works, then it is a very predictable outcome.
  1. Avicebron · 1789816130 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
2. nephihaha · 1789816073 · focus · HN ↗
  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...
  1. refactor_master · 1789824080 · focus · HN ↗
    Are you insinuating those 1970s fonts takeout fonts aren’t actually how Chinese people communicate? I knew they were AI!
3. danpasca · 1789816446 · focus · HN ↗
  > But AI has absolutely no problem with going with the cheesiest, most overused trope.
  Considering your prompt fits exactly that description I think the AI delivered perfectly. Try using some actual design language and see how well it does.
  1. afpx · 1789818584 · focus · HN ↗
    The thing is, they aren't creative. When I ask an LLM to go beyond the mean, it has no idea what to do and returns incoherance. Its responses seem to have N latent dimensions of information. But, the value of each of those dimensions is always the midpoint. With creative prompting, I can push it to respond in ways that go beyond the mean, but it can't tie them together cohesively. It doesn't have anything in its training data to fill the hole in space. No ability to extrapolate.
    danpasca · 1789819591 · focus · HN ↗
    My point is that those kinds of prompts are dumb and I actually expect the model to produce slop. In programming we write these huge prompts that go into a lot of detail, and when we do that, it actually works. I've never asked a coding agent to go beyond the mean, that just sounds like a dumb thing to do. Apply this rule in design and I'm sure you'll get better results. Kinda what the blog post is all about.
4. mysterydip · 1789816637 · focus · HN ↗
  Isn’t the most overused trope the most statistically weighted to be chosen from a group of options? It makes technical sense but as you say leads to boring outcomes
  1. glenstein · 1789821954 · focus · HN ↗
    I see what you mean, but I think you can draw (no pun intended) a distinction between trope following and having a skill, or at least should notionally be able to.
  2. minimaxir · 1789836607 · focus · HN ↗
    If given an underspecified option, yes. Which is why it's good to specify options.
5. boredhedgehog · 1789816659 · focus · HN ↗
  The masses love clichés and stereotypes, which is why these "artiste" designers frequently miss their target audience.
  1. diego_moita · 1789819301 · focus · HN ↗
    Best comment in this thread, by far.
    It applies to every kind of taste : music, food, industrial design, clothing, ...
    There is a famous book on UI design whose title defines people's attitude towards design: "Don't make me think".
    [deleted] · 1789820120 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
6. enriquto · 1789818289 · focus · HN ↗
  > Of course, a "Japanese Minimal Poster" has a sakura and a stylized flag of Japan
  Now, try to obtain Paris-themed images without the tower
7. oliwarner · 1789818301 · focus · HN ↗
  That's a prompt problem.
  If you named a Japanese artist or style rather than giving an adjective derived from a country, you might get something that wasn't national wank.
  Yes, a human might do this step for you. A mediocre one might not.
  1. bluefirebrand · 1789823828 · focus · HN ↗
    > Yes, a human might do this step for you
    An artist (even a mediocre one) almost certainly would do this step for you
    raincole · 1789825707 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah because... AI is a tool, not an artist. In other words water is wet.
    kalleboo · 1789829051 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    MichaelZuo · 1789830188 · focus · HN ↗
    Of course they have ulterior motives to push the message that it can replace high quality human artists, even though that would be ridiculous under any serious analysis.
    That doesnt mean you have to believe them.
  2. phoghed · 1789829148 · focus · HN ↗
    Ah yes they should have gone with that one wave
8. micromacrofoot · 1789823990 · focus · HN ↗
  for the price you pay ai you would 100% get a cherry blossom tree from an inexperienced designer
  1. edude03 · 1789826834 · focus · HN ↗
    Ai costs under $10 though, you wouldn’t be able to hire a human for that
    xp84 · 1789833869 · focus · HN ↗
    Pretty sure 90% of the posters of the type at the top of the article are made for $0. I bet for $10 you could get real artists from non-Western countries to make a simple poster, but these days people would probably claim those $10 jobs and then have AI generate them anyway.
    micromacrofoot · 1789854660 · focus · HN ↗
    right, even worse... even if you paid 5X that you'd still be at the caliber of whatever the first thing someone thinks of
    alex43578 · 1789861992 · focus · HN ↗
    Destroyed or democratized? I'd question the financial judgement if a local fair actually paid a designer for a poster and revisions, versus just literally typing something in Word and adding some clip art.
    micromacrofoot · 1789915114 · focus · HN ↗
    obviously a lot of nuance, but depends on the scale of the fair at least
    you could still use clip art so this isn't democratizing shit, it's laundered copyright theft
    it's also destroying the market for royalty free stock art by essentially cloning copyrighted art
9. ereiamjh · 1789831377 · focus · HN ↗
  Author here.
  Well of course Spring + Japan = Sakura. In a way the model would be faulty if it didn't reach for that cliché. That's what it's meant to do.
  If you want originality, you need to supply it. AI fills the vacuum with the obvious thing.
  And in a way that's a feature. If I was creating a poster myself I'd think "nah, can't use sakura it's too obvious". AI gets you past that hurdle. "Yeah, we used the cliché, it looks nice, let's move on".
  This is if it's for a school fayre, village fête, etc. - brilliant originality isn't the goal. But it's nice when your poster doesn't look the same as three other posters on the same noticeboard (I have seen this).
  If brilliant originality is needed, a human has to bring it. Although an LLM with the temperature turned up can offer some nice seeds.
  1. ManuelKiessling · 1789832265 · focus · HN ↗
    "AI fills the vacuum with the obvious thing."
    I like that a lot.
    Maxion · 1789845749 · focus · HN ↗
    It literally is how they work. They look for the next most probable token. Always keep that in mind when writing a prompt or reading output. If you don't supply it, it will fill it in with the most obvious stuff.
  2. iandanforth · 1789832701 · focus · HN ↗
    If you need pseudo-originality I have a skill for that: <a href="https://github.com/iandanforth/force-associations" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/iandanforth/force-associations
    aleksiy123 · 1789840118 · focus · HN ↗
    Tyty I was thinking about something similar
    mohamedkoubaa · 1789841898 · focus · HN ↗
    I love it. Entropic prompt injection
    gavmor · 1789845339 · focus · HN ↗
    Nice! I use an old madlibs library I built for D&D: <a href="https://github.com/gavmor/Dunmanifestin" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/gavmor/Dunmanifestin
    johnsillings · 1789855257 · focus · HN ↗
    that's very clever
    gavmor · 1789864637 · focus · HN ↗
    Thanks, it introduces a little "jitter" that keeps the egg from rolling down the same face of the ridge every time. Possibly, the same could be accomplished with a judicious application of the temperature parameter.
    But how to tell the model which section is supposed to be populated with spicy tokens?
    4gotunameagain · 1789853184 · focus · HN ↗
    Association clouds.. Routes.. Whatever this is..
    pigeon-footed → splayed toes → several directions → indecision → ambivalence Do not cross the two clouds until each has several branches. Reject commemorate + dulcigenic → a sweet memorial. Prefer A monument can turn bitterness into sweet nostalgia without changing what happened. Reject preindicant + sclerotical → a hardened omen. Follow foretelling → divination and hard anatomy → bone to knucklebones.
    It is a prime example of esoteric LLM incantations, if not -excuse me- nonsense
    b473a · 1789866961 · focus · HN ↗
    Off topic and a little whimsical, but LLM incantations is a really fun idea.
    In a world where one hyper intelligent AI controls everything, hackers work tirelessly in secret off-grid, doing extreme math by hand, finding the right series of tokens that magically coerce the AI into carrying out certain actions. Spell books are copied out by hand and distributed in dark alleyways. Itinerant wizards travel the land on horse drawn carriages, travelling from town to town, casting spells on people's devices to bend the AI to their will.
  3. [deleted] · 1789897692 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
  4. dreambuffer · 1789953090 · focus · HN ↗
    But that is the criticism being made, that if you must supply the originality, the AI is not very intelligent.
10. thordenmark · 1789833865 · focus · HN ↗
  That's on the prompt, not the AI. You could be specific about what imagery to use like a torii or a Japanese castle, and so on. Whatever you leave to the AI you're most likely going to get the most generic version. If you're low effort in the prompt yet get low effort results, if you put some effort into the prompt you can get better results.
11. gretch · 1789842105 · focus · HN ↗
  Personally I think if you were going to make a poster for a Japanese themed spring festival, and you did NOT include some sakura, you completely misunderstood the assignment.
  Your promotional poster for a community gathering should not be subverting the western gaze on Japanese culture, or any other concept from art criticism 101.
  It's supposed to get average people in your neighborhood to glance at it for 5-10 seconds and say, "cool looks like a good time"
  1. sm-silversight · 1789845069 · focus · HN ↗
    Artist here. I'd rip off Kawase Hasui 100 different ways without using sakura or subverting anything.
  2. atomicnumber3 · 1789847053 · focus · HN ↗
    More like 100ms or less as their visual field coincidentally sweeps over wherever the ad is posted in the physical world. In this regard, it's even more important to use something people subconsciously associate with your thing.
  3. wiether · 1789848459 · focus · HN ↗
    YMMV but my experience tells me that the more cliché something looks, the more likely it's bad/cheap.
    I've never been in a cliché-looking restaurant that is actually decent.
    Meanwhile, the best restaurants I know have, at best, a flag or some kind of small drawing to give a clue about their nationality, but otherwise they look like a regular local one.
    ddosmax556 · 1789849258 · focus · HN ↗
    Right, but the best restaurants are not most restaurants. The best high end events are not most events. Most events and restaurants could be improved a lot by AI already
    jere · 1789863180 · focus · HN ↗
    > I've never been in a cliché-looking restaurant that is actually decent
    You either have an absurd standard for "decent" or this is one of the weirdest comments I've ever read here.
  4. dreambuffer · 1789953551 · focus · HN ↗
    You just don't know what it's like to live in a place where art and culture is truly valued. Take Japan, for a relevant example. Many things in japan are given an extra small twist to aesthetically elevate them. The food looks a little prettier, their packages are just a bit neater, their technology is cute, they put little doodles on everything, aside from new-age products or architecture everything has a little bit of personal touch and care. This is because there is some tradition of taking pride in small details and not reaching for the most obvious solution.
    A society that values culture is taking the extra 3 minutes to think of or look up some Japanese iconography that would make the poster a bit more interesting than a sakura even if brainless people cannot figure out how it is relevant to Japan, the hope being that all of us learn and appreciate these things a bit more.
    gretch · 1790007116 · focus · HN ↗
    > Take Japan, for a relevant example. Many things in japan are given an extra small twist to aesthetically elevate them.
    I've been to Japan. How would you comment on the aesthetic of this "Little Texas" bar in Tokyo: <a href="https://www.littletexas.jp/" rel="nofollow">https://www.littletexas.jp/
    Do you think they are valuing the true culture of modern Texas? Because in my opinion this bar is filled with the most basic Texas cliches I can think of: cowboy hats, longhorn skulls, etc. Probably a lot more egregious than putting a sakura on a poster.
    dreambuffer · 1790379166 · focus · HN ↗
    I said new-age products are an exception, the bar was opened in 2005. It also kind of proves my point, once Western culture ingratiated itself into Japan the art culture got a bit worse.
12. nomilk · 1789879929 · focus · HN ↗
  > But AI has absolutely no problem with going with the cheesiest, most overused trope
  I genuinely wonder if this can be addressed (at least partially) as simply as prompting: "don't rely on overused tropes", or something to that effect.
  1. ereiamjh · 1790074225 · focus · HN ↗
    This is actually quite hard to achieve, at least in a one-shot LLM prompt.
    You could engineer it by asking for a list of subjects sorted by obviousness, then pass that list to a script that discards the top 30% and randomly picks from the rest.
    Even if you prompt an LLM to pick one at random, it usually won't, without an external randomness tool like that - which is curious, isn't it, when non-deterministic-ness is so inherent to LLMs.
13. x1n13y84issmd42 · 1789921124 · focus · HN ↗
  Yet there are countless extremely banal posters, made of sakuras, flags, red sun rays and purely random hieroglyphics that mean nothing, made by humans for the entire history of poster-making.
  Most illustrators available to most businesses for hire would do worse job for more money and much more time than an LLM would do.
  Probably an unpopular opinion, but advertisement does need a creative bar too high. No one cares about it. It’s enough to have a black text on a white background saying what is happening, when and where. The rest is optional, and most of the time gets in the way of understanding the poster info.
  Y’all terribly overestimate quality of human art (as well as how informed humans are and how accurate their answers are) while riding the LLM hate train.
peri-cl · 1789815862 · focus · HN ↗
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 same shade of (idk) orange, deterministically; and you're struggling to get around this because you don't know much about colors, don't know any of their names.
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 three-dimension manifold, and we even know a metric on it 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?"
nephihaha · 1789815896 · focus · HN ↗
Adding a safety pin to the punk design was too much of a cliché.
shevy-java · 1789815955 · focus · HN ↗
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.
sarchertech · 1789816092 · focus · HN ↗
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.”
pizzaballs · 1789816311 · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
mrob · 1789816545 · focus · HN ↗
The only ones that aren't horrible manage that because they're so bland there's nothing to go wrong. Look at an example with some detail, the "Now please make one in the style of a 90s drum n bass gig flyer, with early 3D/fractal computer imagery" poster.
At the top of the page we have a deformed wireframe sphere. A wireframe sphere is stylistically appropriate, but the incorrect rendering is not. The "CGI" aesthetic requires obviously computer generated lines, which in the 90s meant accurate and regular lines.
Next we have a messed-up stellated polyhedron, and a messed-up dot pattern. These also fail for the same reason. The main 3D rendering is also obviously broken, as are many other small details.
But the biggest failure is the complete misunderstanding of the culture. 90s DnB was absolutely not about "good vibes". The smiley face logo is completely inappropriate; that's associated with late 80s/early 90s rave culture, pre-DnB era. 90s DnB was much darker and edgier in tone. The scene was almost exclusively male, and it maintained a aggressive vibe carried over from jungle.
A 90s DnB event would never advertise "bringing communities together". Audiences would be repelled by such messaging. This is despite it actually doing just that, as the scene was racially integrated in a way that mainstream music at the time was not. If there's going to be pro-social messaging on the poster it has to be there only implicitly.
skybrian · 1789816625 · focus · HN ↗
[delayed]
glemmaPaul · 1789816661 · focus · HN ↗
Only the last poster kind of gave me vibes, the other ones are absolutely soulless and slop.
I guess it works for the target audience.
hn9zmdcaou · 1789817089 · focus · HN ↗
Yeah, and adding an explicit "no sakura, no rising sun" list does half the work.
bob1029 · 1789817439 · focus · HN ↗
[delayed]
ajjenkins · 1789817481 · focus · HN ↗
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.
1. sevenzero · 1789817893 · focus · HN ↗
  >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.
  1. Kim_Bruning · 1789819005 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
  2. netsharc · 1789820878 · focus · HN ↗
    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: <a href="https://imgur.com/a/fbM8Akb" rel="nofollow">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?"
  3. CobaltFire · 1789822073 · focus · HN ↗
    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 · 1789822719 · focus · HN ↗
    >Given that any advertisement with AI generated food would be illegal there
    So you never actually walked the streets ive been in recently lol
    CobaltFire · 1790434712 · focus · HN ↗
    Sorry for the late reply:
    I'm in Japan more than a month out of the year, as that's where my wife's family is. At least in that area, which I just returned from, I didn't see anything but the usual food displays that have been omnipresent for decades.
  4. CuriouslyC · 1789822172 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
  5. ErneX · 1789834281 · focus · HN ↗
    You reminded me of this tweet I came across recently
    <a href="https://x.com/tylerglaiel/status/2099382887045108154" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/tylerglaiel/status/2099382887045108154
    sevenzero · 1789862114 · focus · HN ↗
    This is exactly what I meant.
2. ha-shine · 1789817919 · focus · HN ↗
  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!
  1. sevenzero · 1789818423 · focus · HN ↗
    Creativity does not have to be expensive to be good. Yall just dont want to bother dealing with it.
    sammularczyk · 1789818562 · focus · HN ↗
    Exactly. Sad to see another industry getting decimated by AI just to save a bit of cash.
    w4yai · 1789819512 · focus · HN ↗
    A bit ? A lot.
    sevenzero · 1789822663 · focus · HN ↗
    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 · 1789829232 · focus · HN ↗
    Then you get Chick o' Fish.
    It is not, in fact, more pleasant to look at.
    rpdillon · 1789837097 · focus · HN ↗
    > 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".
    Barrin92 · 1789859624 · focus · HN ↗
    the point of advertising is to communicate something. If your kid draws your menu, you signal family values. If you pay a local artist, you signal investment in the community.
    If ChatGPT churns out your ad you've signaled nothing. And that's obviously why you can criticize AI for every imaginable reason. That's indeed the difference and why people, regardless of how 'good' your AI art will be, will attempt to hide it, because it defeats the purpose of advertising as such.
    rpdillon · 1789909325 · focus · HN ↗
    And every person I talk to has a different take. In one case, it's that you don't respect the brand and you're lazy and you're cheap. In another, it's that you're signaling your values.
    Maybe the reality is a lot of people have different feelings about this. Most people don't care and I'm mostly engaging with the loudest detractors, each with their own reason for hating AI.
    sevenzero · 1789917733 · focus · HN ↗
    >And every person I talk to has a different take.
    Maybe every person you talk to is autistic with no sense for creativity at all. Thats what most of this dogshit website consists of. Programmers with no values, no creativity, no friends, no life and no self awareness. People who actually should be replaced by AI because they lack human values.
    Barrin92 · 1789932677 · focus · HN ↗
    >Maybe the reality is a lot of people have different feelings about this.
    yes that is the reality, but what I was saying was is that the abstract reason for that is what's called costly signalling in economics, biology or even religious studies.
    When you want to display, advertise or communicate to earn yourself trust, it must cost something. Whether that's proof of work, or money, or reputation or skill, what all AI criticisms have in common is that AI costs nothing. Signalling values isn't 'another thing', it's what underlies every motivation for an ad or display and the better your AI tools get the less of a costly signal it is.
    opem · 1789818865 · focus · HN ↗
    These people just doesn't have a good taste, imo.
    masfuerte · 1789819521 · focus · HN ↗
    This is like anything. If you want good and inexpensive it's going to be a pain in your arse one way or another.
    dreambigwrkhard · 1789819852 · focus · HN ↗
    I was the person who "had to bother dealing with it" many years ago before we had AI, Canva, or even Adobe cloud.
    I volunteered and designed a good amount of posters for student organizations.
    Don't enjoy it but did it to help my peers and friends out.
    I find it ironic that back then we had a lot of trouble finding people who were willing to design posters and promo media on print.
    Now the comment section on this post has people mourning AI taking over poster making in 2026. Where was the help back then?
    From the perspective of someone who had to burn the midnight oil to do it for years, trust me, I would rather not do it and spend that time with my family and friends. And judging from how hard it was to find others who were willing to do it, I think its a reasonable argument that most people were not actually willing to do the work either.
    So mourn away but I wouldn't cry if I "missed out" on making posters. If we had AI back then, I would not take on any of those poster making requests.
    breezybottom · 1789820380 · focus · HN ↗
    Back when? The 1970s? I don't believe that you couldn't find poster making services in the last 10-20 years.
    fn-mote · 1789822440 · focus · HN ↗
    You missed the “I volunteered” part. They were working for free.
    breezybottom · 1789822981 · focus · HN ↗
    "I find it ironic that back then we had a lot of trouble finding people who were willing to design posters and promo media on print."
    I don't see the word free here. Of course you'd have trouble finding people to do anything for free.
    adwn · 1789828413 · focus · HN ↗
    They said: "I volunteered and designed a good amount of posters for student organizations." What do you think how many student organization have the excess money to hire a professional designer for a one-off poster? Of course they needed someone to do it for free, or else it wouldn't have been done at all!
    breezybottom · 1789856879 · focus · HN ↗
    That doesn't even make sense. If you volunteered, then you did find someone. Yourself.
    adwn · 1789889365 · focus · HN ↗
    Are you being intentionally obtuse? Try reading their comment in its entirety, and not just as individual fragments taken out of context: They most likely didn't have the budget to hire a professional designer and no one else would do it for free, so they had to do it themselves. They didn't enjoy it, and they would've gladly passed that work to an AI, had one existed back then.
    It's not that hard to understand. Here, I've linked it for your convenience: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49765890">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49765890
    dgacmu · 1789821984 · focus · HN ↗
    One of my best memories from an art class in high school was that a student organization came into our class and asked if any of us would be willing to design a poster. I ended up designing and silk-screening their poster for them and it was a fantastic experience.
    I can totally see how doing more than a couple would start to feel like work, but having one or two experiences like that was awesome.
    dreambigwrkhard · 1789823302 · focus · HN ↗
    oh my. from my perspective, this is the most useful comment on this post.
    we should have asked the arts students! (and find a way to return the favor) i did not think about that.
    that being said there were some intense rivalry between various studies, my presence may not be have been well received.
    and judging how i am here, you can guess what i studied :-)
    thank you for this. really feel like i got a missing piece of a puzzle reading this.
    jryle70 · 1789822079 · focus · HN ↗
    For every human good art that is cheap I can show you ten that are not. The problem is you don't know which version you'd get. Someone charges less because they are unknown. Fixing AI art is much less hassle than human one.
  2. spinach · 1789818692 · focus · HN ↗
    This technology is super new and I've only seen AI posters really proliferate in the past few months and suddenly... people don't know how to live without it?
    sejje · 1789829059 · focus · HN ↗
    Well, no. Before genAI, I used fiverr, and I was also shamed for hiring those humans.
    rpdillon · 1789836832 · focus · HN ↗
    They're not saying they can't live without it, they're saying it's helpful. If you've been walking to the well for years to get buckets of water, and suddenly have running water in your kitchen, going back to trudging buckets doesn't sound very appealing.
  3. bossyTeacher · 1789820399 · focus · HN ↗
    > we just don't have the money!
    You don't have ANY money? Plenty of students would do a great job for a little money and a professional reference. Now you just helped the workforce, helped the local economy and cost you little.
    hardbass · 1789821335 · focus · HN ↗
    Depends on which economy the buyer and the seller respectively come from.
    bartvk · 1789821377 · focus · HN ↗
    What is your experience with design done by students? Because mine isn't great. It's not bad either, but it's just... mediocre.
    slig · 1789821406 · focus · HN ↗
    Have you ever tried doing that? In my experience, art students don't like to work for "little money" and "professional reference" and stablished artists don't like when you try to pay "little money" to students.
    micromacrofoot · 1789823880 · focus · HN ↗
    the problem is that AI does better than those students, especially if you don't know what good design looks like... which is most people
    but of course this means the entire market will dry up because no one pays students anymore
    oytis · 1789824388 · focus · HN ↗
    In year 2026 you are likely going to pay for a meat proxy who would still use the same model just without you controlling the prompt.
    SoftTalker · 1789828236 · focus · HN ↗
    These days a cheap designer is just going to be a meat proxy for AI anyway.
    AI, at least for now while it's still free/very cheap, enables producing a lot of very low-value content that in the past you never could have justified spending money and human labor on. The cost or time needed to make a poster or a flyer acted as a value-based gatekeeper. Today, it costs nothing to make an AI slop image and blast it out on social media, so we're drowning in it.
    rpdillon · 1789837221 · focus · HN ↗
    Just a note about language: when folks say they "don't have the money" or "don't have the time", it's almost never the case that they don't have any of the resource in question...it's about priorities. What they are saying is that there are far more effective ways to spend their money than incidentals like this, especially when cheap alternatives exist.
  4. carlosjobim · 1789824569 · focus · HN ↗
    You have the money, you just don't have the contacts or skills to find a good designer which charges you a fair price. Big design firms will rip you off. Their job is to get corruption contracts from the public sector or big enterprises, and then reward their insider later with a nice fake job.
    Saying you don't have the money for a designer is a bit like saying you can't go on business trip because the company can't afford to purchase a jet airplane right now.
  5. fzeroracer · 1789833251 · focus · HN ↗
    Damn, how did businesses survive decades without being able to pay some intern or someone in the office to quickly put up a poster? Like come on, claiming 'budget' is the issue here when I can see indie bands operating with twigs and some chewing gum figure out how to put together a poster for their band is embarassing.
3. michaelbuckbee · 1789818300 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  1. nasseri · 1789818790 · focus · HN ↗
    Yea these look bad you don't need to be a pro designer to see that.
4. berkes · 1789818932 · focus · HN ↗
  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)
  1. afavour · 1789819559 · focus · HN ↗
    > 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 · 1789819739 · focus · HN ↗
    > Because a lot of “everyday” folks really strongly dislike AI.
    A lot of everyday folks also strongly dislike vaccines. I’ve decided that I’m going to treat these two groups the same going forward.
    afavour · 1789819922 · focus · HN ↗
    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 · 1789821783 · focus · HN ↗
    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 · 1789822059 · focus · HN ↗
    > 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.
    <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/03/12/key-findings-about-how-americans-view-artificial-intelligence/" rel="nofollow">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.
    fn-mote · 1789822263 · focus · HN ↗
    I bet those poll respondents are worried about their jobs, not seeing some random AI art on a bus.
    bluefirebrand · 1789823343 · focus · HN ↗
    Maybe they see the random AI art on the bus and they realize that meant a real human artist probably didn't get paid to make it so society is worse off. Maybe those poll respondents have empathy, in that they are worried about their jobs and feel bad for other people who have lost work to AI too
    orangecat · 1789828316 · focus · HN ↗
    they realize that meant a real human artist probably didn't get paid to make it so society is worse off
    This is a form of the broken window fallacy. Society is not worse off when production requires less labor, any more than it's worse off when someone uses an open source library rather than paying someone to reimplement it.
    bluefirebrand · 1789829260 · focus · HN ↗
    > Society is not worse off when production requires less labor
    Society is definitely worse off when people who exchange their labor for capital have no opportunities to do so
    Chance-Device · 1789829599 · focus · HN ↗
    > This is a form of the broken window fallacy.
    I’m not sure I see it, can you elaborate?
    orangecat · 1789831289 · focus · HN ↗
    The broken window fallacy is the idea that it's good when your window gets broken because you have to pay someone to fix it and it increases their income. If that were true, then it would be bad if you could easily repair windows without spending time or money. It's false because we're better off if we can spend our resources on things we actually want rather than constantly maintaining our windows, even if that means some window repairmen need to find other jobs.
    Chance-Device · 1789831639 · focus · HN ↗
    Sure, but if we run AI all the way to its endpoint, it’s not just about window repairmen anymore. Our current notions about economics assume there’s always another job class for people to move to, here eventually there won’t be.
    So here you never have to pay anyone to fix your windows, because they fix themselves, but conversely nobody will give you money to fix their windows! And then you have to pay your self-fixing windows a rent in tokens without an income.
    rpdillon · 1789835829 · focus · HN ↗
    > here eventually there won’t be.
    That's a pretty big leap.
    bluefirebrand · 1789837320 · focus · HN ↗
    It is a stated goal of several prominent AI business leaders. Altman, Amodei, and Musk at the very least have had mask-off moments where they said as much.
    Chance-Device · 1789837464 · focus · HN ↗
    I don’t think so, even if the whole “AI exponential” idea is wrong, that’s just the shape of the curve. There still is a curve. Even if these things take 50 years to happen instead of 5 (which would be better and which I doubt will be the case) it still happens eventually. I think the current capabilities of AI are enough of a heuristic for us to assume this is going to happen.
    bluefirebrand · 1789834214 · focus · HN ↗
    What do we do when former window repairman can't find other jobs? Just fuck em, right?
    The narrative we're seeing around AI and current automation isn't "we're going to automate one category of jobs". If it were then sure, we could be relatively confident that the excess labor from that industry would be absorbed by other segments
    But that's not what the future looks like to me. The future to me looks like "we want to automate a large majority of labor"
    So what then? If tons of labour is displaced then the Broken Window Fallacy doesn't really apply, because it is based on the assumption that there will always be something for displaced labour to do.
    Call it the Excess Labor Corollary. If there's no way to absorb excess labor in other segments, then what.
    ereiamjh · 1789839340 · focus · HN ↗
    When there really aren't any jobs for the former window repair man to do, we are in a "post scarcity economy", which could be a utopia where everyone lives in comfort and has more leisure time.
    Or of course, a few billionaires could hoard the wealth.
    There's a Wikipedia page about it.
    We could be in a post scarcity economy now, except that generally instead of realising we all have enough of we share, we raise the threshold of what we consider to be enough comfort and stuff.
    johnnyanmac · 1789853611 · focus · HN ↗
    >could be a utopia where everyone lives in comfort and has more leisure time.
    It definitely could be. With current trajectory as of now, do you think it will be?
    >except that generally instead of realising we all have enough of we share, we raise the threshold of what we consider to be enough comfort and stuff.
    I see the opposite sentiment. I see previous basic necessities further out or reach then they were last generation. People aren't raising their standards, they are sinking towards poverty.
    But then their worries are dismissed because they can get a flatscreen TV for 200 dollars. A TV that is likely feeding your data back to corporate to make thousands off you.
    ereiamjh · 1789890920 · focus · HN ↗
    You're going back one generation, and I'm thinking further back.
    Like, if we all settled for a 1950s British living standard, using current manufacturing technology, we could achieve that while everyone works a little bit less.
    But, we'd prefer to keep labouring and have nicer things.
    johnnyanmac · 1789891454 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    ereiamjh · 1789992373 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm from Britain, where in the 50s you might well have had an outdoor toilet, and still had food rationing.
    johnnyanmac · 1789853321 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    afavour · 1789838643 · focus · HN ↗
    Why not both? I didn’t lose my job in 2008 but watching people all around me lose theirs made it clear that my own economic situation was not a safe one.
    Chance-Device · 1789829452 · focus · HN ↗
    People aren’t feeling the benefits of AI. Where there are any benefits, they aren’t causing prices to decrease or supply to go up, instead the excess value is being absorbed by profit taking.
    If most people aren’t shareholders but instead workers whose jobs are threatened by AI, we should expect this response.
    It has nothing to do with artists, it has everything to do with trying to mount a collective response to the apparent threat, poorly expressed as crowds tend to do.
  2. eloisant · 1789820144 · focus · HN ↗
    Because there is a big anti-AI movement and some people will think you're destroying the planet and putting people out of a job if you make one prompt to a chatbot.
    Avicebron · 1789820458 · focus · HN ↗
    Maybe if there were fewer people foaming at the mouth to enrich themselves while destroying the planet, and putting people out of work, there would be less pushback.
    jryle70 · 1789821534 · focus · HN ↗
    So it isn't really about art?
    andrewflnr · 1789826213 · focus · HN ↗
    It's also about art. AI is a multi-faceted problem.
    daveguy · 1789826365 · focus · HN ↗
    It's all of the above. The unreliable empty garbage they barf out, the threats to destroy jobs for oligarch asshat profit, and the resource hungry pillaging of neighborhoods. Oh, yeah, and also the crappy mush up of stolen art.
    doug_durham · 1789848092 · focus · HN ↗
    Hyperbole much? When I see this type of low-effort, low-care response I ignore it. Perhaps take more time to express your thoughts.
    indoorfish · 1789848674 · focus · HN ↗
    Your comment gives strong "temporarily embarrassed oligarch asshat" vibes. Is that intentional?
    tt24 · 1789929556 · focus · HN ↗
    This is not a comment appropriate for this venue. I flagged it
    daveguy · 1789852302 · focus · HN ↗
    Seems these things about genAI are fairly well established at this point. Hence the the vast majority disapproval of genAI being forced on the users and rejection of AI data centers. Did you have a substantive response, or just low-effort, low-care dismissal?
    necovek · 1789894030 · focus · HN ↗
    I believe rejection of AI Data Centres is nothing but "local" protectiveness (a bit like NIMBY); like lithium mining, nuclear plants, and any other "dirty", destructive activity.
    I want the products of it (how many phones with lithium batteries in those protests), but not the side effects.
    Which is not to say these are wrong perspectives to hold, but it's important to understand where the root of the complaint is before you try to come up with generic solutions.
    Barrin92 · 1789859126 · focus · HN ↗
    > Perhaps take more time to express your thoughts.
    bit of a problematic argument in this context given that the entire usage of generative AI rests on people's unwillingness to do just that
    johnnyanmac · 1789853077 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    necovek · 1789893719 · focus · HN ↗
    While this is a side comment on a somewhat frivolous topic, it did make me reframe a lot of my justice, transparency and reason (as in being reasonable) complacency I am seeing around me.
    Yes, the fact that we are in a low trust society makes us behave we do. Can we change this? Should we even try?
    I've seen societies band together in the face of (acute) natural disasters (floods, wildfires...) or big disasters like wars, but how do we get to — if not high trust — not-low trust society when all is good and is it even worth pursuing?
    johnnyanmac · 1789900033 · focus · HN ↗
    > Can we change this? Should we even try?... and is it even worth pursuing?
    It's perfectly possible. Another aspect of humanity pointed out to me from others is that we are surprisingly sensitive not to the current "quality of life", but to the rate of change in that QoL. So we don't necessarily need to fix all of humanities woes to restore trust, we need to get on a trajectory where people believe a better future is coming. That optimism and morale makes all the difference in building momentum towards restoring trust.
    But whether we should ultimately comes down to your own personal paradigm. Do you feel you succeed when you reach your goals and lifestyle you desire, or do you get more satisfaction helping others succeed and survive where you can? Would you rather feel more secure wandering around your neighborhood, or are you fine paying for extra protection (directly or indirectly) to get by your day-to-day? Do you prefer a variety of public places to take your family to or would you rather have a nicer dwellings to invite friends over to? There's no correct answer to such questions, but they affect the trust of your community.
    >how do we get to — if not high trust — not-low trust society when all is good
    Not to sound snide, but: you increase trust by doing actions that make people more trustful. There's no magic to building trust, but it's also not complicated. You simply perform genuine, intentional actions made primarily to help others. I won't say altruistic, but the more altruistic the better the effect.
    To break it down a bit more, I'd say there's 3 main layers of trust to build: local, institutional, and societal. Unless you have outsized influence already and a passion to lead the charge, you generally need the lower layer's trust improved before it expands to the next layer.
    1. in your local community, with people you interact with in your day-to-day. Simply being more available to meeting up with people and doing small actions to assist helps to build up trust. As well as in what kinds of activities and groups you join to meet such people. It's the layer you most likely have the most power over
    2. in the institutional level, to influence structures you directly interact with. The school your kids goes to, the emergency services, the platforms you consume media on, the businesses you go to regularly, your local town initiatives. Having trust that these systems (at the bare minimum) aren't actively trying to make you or your family worse off builds trust that the structures around your immediate community will improve and benefit everyone. Many of these are influenced by local policy, either through coalitions to get such proposals to leadership or getting leaders in who care about such factors. They can't do something like giving people a 4-day workweek, but it can make a park cleaner or create more/better public transportation.
    3. Then on the societal level, to influence wider culture well beyond your sphere. This is all the larger level thinking concerning economy, technology, environment, this topic here on the trustworthiness of AI generated posters, etc. that the internet often talks about (which make sense, as a medium well beyond your sphere), so I won't need to expand on this much. This is pretty much exclusively larger policy issues to enact in laws, so influencing wider state/federal law requires larger populism movements.
    necovek · 1789915886 · focus · HN ↗
    I believe you ask the right questions, but the answers are both very personal, and even then, not so clear cut — and also opportunistic (at some point in life, I might have the energy/time to do it; at others, I might not). I'd personally want all of those, and if I must make a choice, that's where it becomes tricky.
    Especially when you see a lot of talk and no walk from everyone around you — yes, I could also be the agent of change, but life sometimes has other ideas.
    johnnyanmac · 1789917428 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
  3. RiverCrochet · 1789823401 · focus · HN ↗
    AI generated visuals are becoming a signal of A) low-effort, B) and/or unwillingness or inability to spend resources to genuinely present your product or brand.
    Both of these communicate that I will probably not get a good value for my money when buying your product or service.
    parpfish · 1789830704 · focus · HN ↗
    The AI art is also a class/status marker.
    If a business markets itself with these AIgen posters, you get wildly different responses from different groups.
    boomers that spend all their time on Facebook will think “this is such a nice pretty poster” and be oblivious to the fact it is even ai. Even if they knew it was ai they don’t care.
    Young people will think it is low class/trashy. Some hate it because it’s ai, others hate it because the poster is ugly/busy/confusing.
    rpdillon · 1789834575 · focus · HN ↗
    > Both of these communicate that I will probably not get a good value for my money when buying your product or service.
    This is where I stop following. Businesses should focus on where they differentiate, and I really don't care how they generate signage if I can read it. I don't get anything by them paying Banksy to make their menu instead of having Gemini generate it. And if there is any connection to getting good value, it's the inverse: I'm more likely to get good value when I'm not paying for fancy advertising. See: every drugstore that puts generics alongside brand names for cheaper.
    pynappo · 1789838345 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, generics are better value, but at least from the big drugstores and pharmacies they still have clean design - they just make it clear what their active ingredient is in what dosage, mention the branded equivalent, and then put the standard drug label on it, and that's about it.
    The worst generative AI posters and restaurant menus I'm seeing from newer small businesses do not instill the same feeling that I'm getting generic-like value. To keep with the drug analogy, they feel like the combo pills you find somewhere in the back of a gas station which combine 10+ random supplements to help with 20+ different symptoms. Especially for new restaurants where real reviews are limited, menus with terrible AI generated food drawings really give me the same ick - that they might not be providing any good value at all.
    However, i do admit that part of this is also that i live in an area where there is tons of competition for most cuisines I'm interested in, so I can use menu quality as a differientiating factor in the first place. If enough places around me were using sloppy AI menus i would probably ignore it.
    RiverCrochet · 1789851149 · focus · HN ↗
    You're free to ignore signals of cheapness if you want, as well as not care about quality. If you want generic restuarant food I guess you can go to McDonalds instead of a burger place; it's all the same value to you I guess.
    rpdillon · 1789859401 · focus · HN ↗
    You're using rhetoric to try and change the subject -- you're making a jump from "good value" to "lack of quality", and painting them with the same brush.
    I'm saying I don't particularly value businesses that focus on things that are low impact for me. I'd rather my barista focus on sourcing good beans and making good coffee than paying someone to do a fancy custom menu for them. We see this all the time when we visit new areas. It's considered naive to follow whatever looks most glitzy -- every seasoned traveler will tell stories about all the tourist traps, and how the real quality is the hole-in-the-wall place all the locals gather.
    What I'm saying is we shouldn't conflate quality with marketing and advertising, which is what posters are. You seem dead set on doing so anyway, and I'm not sure why.
    RiverCrochet · 1789944057 · focus · HN ↗
    > You're using rhetoric to try and change the subject -- you're making a jump from "good value" to "lack of quality", and painting them with the same brush.
    Correct, I am. I apologize if I gave the impression I was debating. I will absolutely "conflate" quality with marketing and advertising when it's the only signal I have about a company and I don't have the resources to research further. For example, if I'm in a new place, out and about, and looking for somewhere to eat, and only have an hour or so, yes I'm choosing the place without AI slop ads unless I have additional information - especially if the food is generically AI generated. I'd love to have time to deeply research all businesses and companies and ignore ads entirely but that's not always practical.
    Me learning of your company on Instagram or similar through an AI slop poster ad that looks exactly like the 10 preceding monster-truck-rally AI slop poster ads is a bad impression to me. From comments I've seen on similar Instagram ads, I'm not alone.
    williamcotton · 1789871694 · focus · HN ↗
    There’s some level of irony around the fact that McDonalds spends quite a lot on branding and design.
    doug_durham · 1789847985 · focus · HN ↗
    You are conflating the use of AI with effort. It does not need to imply low effort or low care. I’m hoping this tired narrative dies out soon.
    RiverCrochet · 1789850773 · focus · HN ↗
    "AI = low effort" is becoming a heuristic regardless of the assertion's absolute accuracy. It's probably not going to die soon as long as it keeps appearing in scammy or low-margin business places.
    AI-generated visuals aren't the first to go through this. I'd say the early-to-mid 90's "desktop publishing" went through this too - as soon as everyone could make ads and flyers cheaply with Word, everyone did.
    zahlman · 1789863048 · focus · HN ↗
    > "AI = low effort" is becoming a heuristic regardless of the assertion's absolute accuracy.
    If you can tell that it's AI, that's probably because it is low effort. Higher-effort attempts pass more easily.
    (Of course, that also requires an understanding that there are ways to apply effort to making a short request; and believing that it would make a difference; and noticing for yourself that the first output is bad; and trying. Quite a lot of people seem to lack at least one of these.)
    johnnyanmac · 1789852717 · focus · HN ↗
    >I’m hoping this tired narrative dies out soon.
    It won't die off until AI stops being used with low effort. Which it is the majority the time used for.
    poulpy123 · 1789979320 · focus · HN ↗
    Of course AI is low effort, it's the entire point of AI to be low effort.
    berkes · 1789995976 · focus · HN ↗
    Low effort, or low friction?
    If I send a single email "subject: poster" "make me a poster for our event, details below, we need 200 printed" that's also low effort. If I do this on fiverr, it's also "unwillingness or inability to spend resources"
    > your product or brand.
    I think you are conflating a wide audience with a narrow idea. We aren't talking about just the large coorporations, or the popular rockband. There are local bookclubs, a carbootsale, a group of hobby-foo-bars showing their foo-bars at the local pub next month. A concert by "amateurs". Someone looking for an appartment. A cat that got lost.
    Do all of these need to show high-effort and/or willingness to spend resources?
  4. minimaxir · 1789838150 · focus · HN ↗
    > Why would someone want it to be unrecognizable as AI?
    If we operate under the assumption that the AI generated posters are bad (which this HN thread is), then making them not look like AI generated posters would be directionally toward making them not bad. That doesn't necessarily mean it's good though, it could be average and fulfill that constraint.
  5. zahlman · 1789863209 · focus · HN ↗
    > Why would someone want it to be unrecognizable as AI?
    Because the reason for any given AI work being "recognizable as AI" is considered inherently a quality issue.
5. exitb · 1789819016 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  1. mattmanser · 1789819221 · focus · HN ↗
    They asked the AI for a list of different styles.
    The author then picked them out, not the AI. For curiosity I assume.
  2. zetanor · 1789821550 · focus · HN ↗
    The Spring Fair is a lorem ipsum, here.
  3. doug_durham · 1789847890 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
6. alerighi · 1789819236 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  1. goatherders · 1789820653 · focus · HN ↗
    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 · 1789820807 · focus · HN ↗
    AI irritates people. This is fine if you're making political cartoons or racist memes, but not so fine for ad copy.
    jryle70 · 1789821475 · focus · HN ↗
    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 · 1789827405 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
  2. sobiolite · 1789821438 · focus · HN ↗
    > 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.
    FWIW, statements like this are so patently ridiculous that it actually hurts your cause.
  3. CuriouslyC · 1789821655 · focus · HN ↗
    This is provably false. AI YouTube thumbnails trounce human thumbnails (often nearly doubling the click-through rate according to A/B testing), and people rate AI art more highly than human art on average when they don't know that it's AI.
    Just admit that you are scared of the future that's coming and it's eliciting irrational hatred, and that's causing you to lash out. At least that'd be honest and we'd understand where your coming from even if we didn't share your views.
    malfist · 1789822236 · focus · HN ↗
    Not engaging with your second argument, it's just trollbait. But for your first argument, there is a big difference between info graphics trying to convey information and video thumbnails trying to trigger a click
    dspillett · 1789823045 · focus · HN ↗
    > trounce human thumbnails (often nearly doubling the click-through rate according to A/B testing)
    That stat sounds more than dubious. Do you have a reference for it that isn't published by someone with a vested interest in people using AI?
  4. raincole · 1789825332 · focus · HN ↗
    > 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.
    Sorry, if it's a joke it doesn't land very well.
    Before AI, if a 10yo did these posters for a school project, people would just tell their parents to not do the homework for their kid. These are far above what 99.9% 10yo can do.
  5. kmoser · 1789826499 · focus · HN ↗
    > a 10 years old kid and give him a PC with Microsoft Paint
    You'd run afoul of child labor protestors. I'd just prompt the AI to generate a poster in the style of a 10-year-old with Microsoft Paint.
7. wiederholen · 1789819738 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
8. eloisant · 1789819980 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  1. jcelerier · 1789823841 · focus · HN ↗
    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 <a href="https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/music-poster-wall.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/music-poster-wall.html or <a href="https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/france-poster-wall.html?pseudoid=943AE081-1E9F-4158-A6AF-5FAE6EEE58B9&sortBy=relevant" rel="nofollow">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 · 1789825542 · focus · HN ↗
    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 · 1789827515 · focus · HN ↗
    > 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 <a href="https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/music-poster-wall.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/music-poster-wall.html or <a href="https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/france-poster-wall.html?ps" rel="nofollow">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.
    jcelerier · 1789827604 · focus · HN ↗
    As I said, "Today's AI makes it look even worse". But the post makes me hopeful than in a couple years, actually good graphic design can come out from AI. It still looks terrible and AI even for the best posters it highlights, but noticeably less than the random ice cream or coffee shop where I live with fully ai-generated interior design, memorabilia and menus.
    totallymike · 1789866685 · focus · HN ↗
    I’d rather look at the most amateurish indie posters plastered all over a wall than waste even a second looking at machine-generated nonsense.
    wat10000 · 1789831390 · focus · HN ↗
    Your links are supposed to be examples of bad posters? They're awesome!
    decidu0us9034 · 1789861679 · focus · HN ↗
    All of these look perfectly acceptable and even good. Balanced and legible but visually distinctive. To be honest I wouldn't trust most people on this site to know what they want in terms of design any more than they'd trust a designer to do SWE. Gatekeepers often exist for a reason and you may not realize what it is until you get rid of them.
  2. ereiamjh · 1789831911 · focus · HN ↗
    This is very true and after rendering 100 prompts twice for <a href="https://john.hartnup.uk/poster-prompts/" rel="nofollow">https://john.hartnup.uk/poster-prompts/ I realised that the prompts could be improved by asking for much less clutter. The best examples on there pick out one main visual subject, but many of them are too fussy.
    I may do a V2 one of these days.
    Clutter comes with the territory to some extent though. I was recently asked to do a real world PTA fayre poster, and the client (my wife) very firmly wanted 12+ attractions mentioned on the poster. Tombola, hook a duck, bar, BBQ, blah, blah, blah as well as date, location, sponsor, ...
    To get a really clean design, you need to edit it down to the essentials. I don't know what pro designers do - convince the client to say less?
    Unless the prompt says otherwise, AI will try to get a visual element in for every single word too.
    vintagevibe · 1789835897 · focus · HN ↗
    Pro designers are generally paid because they’re extremely good editors. And they’re an intermediary between clients and their consumers.
    So when you put the capability in the hands of the client without the editing (or taste) and no way to evaluate the result, you get the passable, homogenous thing.
    It mostly doesn’t matter because there’s no economic incentive for it to matter, which is why much of our aesthetic world is the way it is.
    cruffle_duffle · 1789842000 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    cruffle_duffle · 1789842042 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    johnnyanmac · 1789848922 · focus · HN ↗
    >It mostly doesn’t matter because there’s no economic incentive for it to matter
    Very generous way to say "executive greed has drained bespoke design out of society. I've been seeing more videos on such a topic, but this one was by far the best one I've seen yet: <a href="https://youtu.be/HgjXjPP_p3s?is=yVsto8SCnY-SsnVY" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/HgjXjPP_p3s?is=yVsto8SCnY-SsnVY
    (Just in case, don't let the thumbnail fool you. The car simply frames as it expands to general society).
    ChickeNES · 1789861475 · focus · HN ↗
    That's a really backwards explanation for styles that executives commissioned, funded, and popularized in the first place
    johnnyanmac · 1789877887 · focus · HN ↗
    I think it's in fact forward thinking, in that modern executives lost the taste their older elites had. Or at least they fired the tastemakers for those who pleased them personally, to the sacrifice of proper design. Probably a bit of both, along with other factors.
    The more charitable perspective (that falls more important point #2) is simply that taste is different now among the modern billionaire. Someone who can wander onto a stage in a turtleneck and denim jeans simply won't be the type of person who wants a "loud and bold" car. But they might still want to say that they had Ferrari make it. Jony Ive's perspective on design may simply be the product of the people and environments he surrounded himself with.
    ereiamjh · 1789887140 · focus · HN ↗
    I can't remember where, but there was an article about the luxury homes billionaires are building themselves. They tent to have he design aesthetic of a bland, but expensive, corporate hotel.
    vintagevibe · 1789862483 · focus · HN ↗
    I tried to give this video a good-faith watch, but found myself disagreeing with much of the evidence, conclusions, and research. It seems to be trying to diagnosing cleanslop — the minimalistand flat trend, which renders poorly as being clinical and lifeless. My point was that economics drive aesthetic, and in that framing, I think we both agree corporations will deliver the least amount of design tolerable.
    Design-differentiated products still exist (Apple as mentioned, IKEA, Nike, Linear to name a few), but they're outnumbered in the current landscape and arguably still greedy.
    johnnyanmac · 1789878318 · focus · HN ↗
    >Design-differentiated products still exist (Apple as mentioned, IKEA, Nike, Linear to name a few), but they're outnumbered in the current landscape and arguably still greedy.
    I believe that was ultimately what my response wanted to emphasize, and partially the call to action of the video. There is great design out there, but you need to wander through oceans of slop to find it. I had no clue about "Superblocks" until that video.
    Likewise, to link the ideas back to Herr; AI is creating an ocean of slop that will make it nearly impossible to find the truly innovative used of AI out there. Curation was already a hard problem pre-AI and this only increases such difficulty by magnitudes. Among reducing said slop (which is nearly impossible now), the call to action is to have proper tastemakers lead the charge and bring out good ideas. Not just ones that generate the most money. Curation by definition almost always lowers view traffic to increase customer satisfaction, and that's not something our ad-based datascape wants.
    mitxela · 1789869008 · focus · HN ↗
    De-tracked link: <a href="https://youtu.be/HgjXjPP_p3s" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/HgjXjPP_p3s
    yellowapple · 1789851621 · focus · HN ↗
    Designers having that artistic taste, and clients lacking it, is exactly why I don't think generative AI is going to do much to replace (skilled) designers anytime soon. Likewise for other creative professions, and indeed for knowledge work in general.
    vintagevibe · 1789854191 · focus · HN ↗
    Taste is a great solution for abundance, so I agree. Also, there's definitely a rubberband effect where products & designs need to differentiate on their design to stand out in a homogenous world, and you truly do need creative professionals having that judgment. Even using AI as a tool, you have to have the sayable vocabulary (at the very least) to agitate the aesthetic status quo.
    joquarky · 1789859691 · focus · HN ↗
    Knowing what is in the realm of possibility can help you get much more out of genAI.
    For example, you have to know about a style to know to ask for it or some variation on it.
    papa-whisky · 1789863050 · focus · HN ↗
    And low-skill graphic design had already been mostly replaced by Canva, so I don't think AI is really having as much impact on the design industry as people might suppose.
    MentalM · 1789872829 · focus · HN ↗
    I think we ALREADY at the point when AI is capable to replace like 99.7% of designers. It is only a question of market inertia and personal brands that prevent it from happening right now.
    mikae1 · 1789839425 · focus · HN ↗
    Say you want to add an artist or change some information. Regeneration will end up with another poster altogether, right?
    minimaxir · 1789841098 · focus · HN ↗
    A new image at a technical level, but all modern autoregressive image models are skilled at only changing what is absolutely necessary if asked to make edits.
    Huppie · 1789840390 · focus · HN ↗
    Just taking one of your prompts and adding
    > N.B. Make sure all the important information pops out (is visible at first glance) like an expert designer would, the information is more important than the design.
    Already have me a much better result with the 'Arts & Crafts style', but N=1 so YMMV
    tayo42 · 1789842744 · focus · HN ↗
    Tangent I guess, it would be interesting to have like a AI/not AI quiz. They still look AI to me but idk if it's because I know
    ereiamjh · 1789851601 · focus · HN ↗
    It should be clear in the text, disguising as non-AI is not a goal. It's allowed to look like AI. It's just trying not to look shit.
    And that default look - that might not be shit either. Except we've now seen it repeated so many times that we're sick of it.
    tayo42 · 1789859007 · focus · HN ↗
    Am I biased to thinking it looks like shit because I know it's ai though and I think the AI look is overdone?
    atoozy · 1789895706 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    NinjaTrance · 1789855585 · focus · HN ↗
    Suppose you have a budget of $20.
    Do you think you will find good artists working for that price?
    I don't think so, unless they work almost for free to prove a point (that humans can be as good as AI).
    And that's the problem:
    Humans can be as good as AI, but they are much more expensive.
    tayo42 · 1789859478 · focus · HN ↗
    Maybe you have a friend that's trying to get started in design and could do a favor for a chance to build a portfolio.
    NinjaTrance · 1789891464 · focus · HN ↗
    Would someone who's "trying to get started in design" be able to make anything as good as these AI posters? And how would they survive in a world where machines can do their job for free?
    I suppose human artists will continue to exist, but they will be like chess players: they will continue to exist simply because they love art, but they won't be able to compete with AI.
    ETA: less than 2 years.
    blub · 1789845633 · focus · HN ↗
    Well, low-stakes clients are usually poor clients because they’re clueless and overly demanding.
    Real designers would avoid them in the first place.
    lazyasciiart · 1789850358 · focus · HN ↗
    And that’s why they want to use AI.
    tomcam · 1789845859 · focus · HN ↗
    Those posters all look pretty damn good to me. Thanks for that page. Super helpful for me and I need that right now.
    smusamashah · 1789850117 · focus · HN ↗
    There is very often a certain softness to the fonts in generated images. Why is that and is there a name for it?
    Thinking more, I thinking the softness is actually inconsistency. Because the letters are generated, no two letters will be exact same and if zoomed in some edge might not even be perfectly straight. Another thing we can do these days (I think author should really try out in V2) is to use code to generate. You may have seen examples of generating Javascript based videos with Claude. Same can be done with posters. Generate a font sheet and use that in code generated poster with image generated background.
    ereiamjh · 1790001096 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm fascinating by how image models draw text.
    I've a designer friend who's very distracted by the text on even a text-only gpt-image generated poster, because it looks like a font he knows, but differs in subtle ways.
    I'm thinking, good, it's escaping from the tyranny of fonts. A font is limited by what a font layout engine can do. A human drawing letter shapes can decide that one 'f' ought to look different from another 'f' in the same layout, if that works for them. And so can AI.
    This clearly works in styles like "60s psychedelic" where it's all swirly "hand drawn" letters. But I see no reason why it shouldn't work for "type". Perhaps bulk text would be more readable if the engine had that kind of freedom? If only we knew how?
    The current generation of image generating AI probably isn't doing as good a job as it possibly could right now, but with the right training, all sorts of things are possible.
    zahlman · 1789861041 · focus · HN ↗
    Are these "fayre" events some kind of UK thing? I also didn't know offhand what "tombola" is and it comes across like it's part of a collection of standard activities for a "fayre" that have no cultural significance to me.
    (Canadian here. Not everything is shared across the Commonwealth, I guess.)
    rossriley · 1789862431 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, fayres are popular in the UK especially in schools and small villages. A Tombola is a type of raffle where people buy tickets and the winning numbers are picked from a rotating drum. Normally done to raise small amounts of money for local causes.
    ereiamjh · 1789925642 · focus · HN ↗
    Tombola: ahead of the event you ask for donations of prizes. We do it for a PTA, so it's a "no school uniform if you bring a Tombola prize" thing. Sweets, booze, trinkets, etc.
    Then you get two matching sets of raffle tickets. You put all of one set folded up in a drum. You take perhaps the ones ending in 0 or 5 from the other set, and tape them to prizes.
    Then you sell 5 draws for £1, if you draw 5 or 0 you win the corresponding prize.
    Very popular, big money spinner, legal without tedious admin.
    A common meme is that a lot of the prizes get regifted time and time again, especially unwanted weird booze - the strawberry liqueur someone aunt brought home from Spain.
    ar_turnbull · 1789881927 · focus · HN ↗
    I’ve been working on a thing where a bunch of raw content goes through a summarization pipeline and then gets manipulated with a bunch of checks to clean up copy and reduce clutter.
    And then the visuals get added with a set of fixed templates. It’s not fully there but is reducing a LOT of the clutter.
    Some of the results are even what I’d call good (and I’m a designer).
    ricksunny · 1789884776 · focus · HN ↗
    As one of the AI-wielding amateurs, I got positive feedback from an audience member on this Ai-gen poster for a talk I gave earlier this summer <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MaawQcupC5XHqWBiTujSpKOKohx4oy7O/view?usp=sharing" rel="nofollow">https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MaawQcupC5XHqWBiTujSpKOKohx...
    The clutter is there yes - it's not a sparse 1970s kitsch cultural event promo or 1970s sci-fi book cover (random example I found in 2 minutes <a href="https://www.etsy.com/listing/715136429/david-bowie-moonage-daydream-1970s-sci" rel="nofollow">https://www.etsy.com/listing/715136429/david-bowie-moonage-d... ) that's for sure - but I wouldn't want to remove any of mine's elements as each one informs the viewer at a glance their decision whether to attend or not.
    KptMarchewa · 1789986499 · focus · HN ↗
    God no. This has pretty much all of the slop elements save for jizz drops. Paint brush strokes, icon -> caption -> text, ai divisors... pretty much zero effort, compared to OP's posters.
    jakeydus · 1789999922 · focus · HN ↗
    Well, you're right that it informs me whether I want to attend or not...
    rpdillon · 1790112355 · focus · HN ↗
    I like this, looks good.
    I wasn't aware of it until AI came around, but apparently there's a cult around how much effort you put into your event posters. Didn't know advertising was something people felt folks should be putting tons of effort into.
    ricksunny · 1790149226 · focus · HN ↗
    The OP article is surprisingly candid about their critique - not that the AI-generated style they've identified is bad, but that it is so common. Therein apparently lies one frailty of our human condition - if everyone can do it, it becomes out of fashion at best, or even stigmatized at worse. I feel there's a place where that's a rational instinct, but under an extensive backdrop where the instinct is irrational - aka, 'art'. If someone needed an explanation for 'why can't we have nice things', I think OP's article articulates it very well.
    basch · 1789912619 · focus · HN ↗
    youve got to get rid of the list with the icons as bullets. vertical or 3-4 of them horizontally is a dead giveaway.
    your posters also dont suffer it, but most of the ones in the wild have 3-7 extra catchphrases or taglines thrown all over the poster. same but different. this but that. not this that. chatgpt just really likes to add phases and annotations all over posters.
    ereiamjh · 1789984982 · focus · HN ↗
    Well, all the HN chat put me in the mood, so I did V2.
    There is a lot more empty space, and lot less clutter, and a lot less over-literal interpretation of event details (just because a gig is at a venue called The Anchor, doesn't mean the poster needs a picture of an anchor)
    dwd · 1790059704 · focus · HN ↗
    > To get a really clean design, you need to edit it down to the essentials.
    I recently needed an "avatar" for the wall at work. The actual one I went with was a Tatakovsky-inspired minimalist avatar that was settled by the 4th prompt.
    But I kept exploring and in the process had developed a canonical identity model definition which could then be transformed according to various art movements and other ideas, by the end focusing more on the light and materials than specific artists.
    Some of my favourites and surprising ones out of the hundreds of images were:
    - Prairie School with my portrait expressed as faceted timber - Czech Cubism where my face was merged with the architecture - Japanese sumi-e and ukiyo-e prints - Delaunay triangulation - Turing morphogenesis - Magnetic fields
  3. lifter3101 · 1789838150 · focus · HN ↗
    > too busy, you have to look for information
    Have you ever seen a bus schedule, or a parking sign, or a list of events at a local library or an “open hours” sign at a restaurant? Those are 99.9% unreadable, busy, and you have to look for information. And even then it’s not always clear if you got it right. And that was all before the AI.
    eddythompson80 · 1789840177 · focus · HN ↗
    There is a difference between busy for no reason and busy because of information density. The busy examples in this article aren’t information dense. They just have a ton of different flower types, random animals, background characters, unrelated structures, many different colors and many different shades of those colors, etc. But the information they are trying to communicate is minimal.
    A bus schedule or a parking sign is very information dense. It’s trying to communicate a lot in a limited space and as a result require getting used to.
    enraged_camel · 1789840310 · focus · HN ↗
    Bus schedules are not a good comparison because they have to fit a ton of information into a single page. And I disagree that they are unreadable. Speaking as someone who commuted by bus for years in many different cities, they tend to be quite easy to read because the tabular layouts make them very easy to scan quickly. Once your eyes anchor on the page, you can find what you're looking for without effort.
    BobaFloutist · 1789842329 · focus · HN ↗
    None of those are primarily marketing tools, they're things you use after you've already decided you want to use the product. They don't need to grab and hold attention and convince you that they have what you want, they just need to convey information.
    Gigachad · 1789861691 · focus · HN ↗
    Those examples are filled with real info. The AI posters are filled with meaningless three word slogans, lists of meaningless copy and art where everything is labeled.
  4. sir_brickalot · 1789842802 · focus · HN ↗
    The biggest problem in my view is: It's not editable by hand. There is no production data I could open in InDesign, Illustrator or Photoshop (Layers) and change things to my or my clients liking.
    jostylr · 1789843813 · focus · HN ↗
    You could try having, say Astra, use one of these programs via computer use to design it. I haven't tried it, but I hear it is really good at computer use. Might even have more of a dialogue as it creates, so dictating choices at each stage. Would take longer, but does not require someone who has expertise in the tool, just good design notion.
    wouldbecouldbe · 1789846212 · focus · HN ↗
    It can probably ransform most to html.
    NinjaTrance · 1789855924 · focus · HN ↗
    Wait 6 months...

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