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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.
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.
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.
Outside of a small joy of the organizing committee, is an incrementally "better" (which is almost entirely subjective anyway) worth the trouvle?
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)
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.
The author then picked them out, not the AI. For curiosity I assume.
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.
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.
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.
But I recall this simple looking promotion: 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?"
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.
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.
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.
It showed whoever did it had no clue about East Asia or Chinese script...
I'm old enough to remember that people also complained about WordArt and Clipart and too many fonts etc.
I see the chatgpt poster style on many small-scale local village events also. But again, what they replace wasn't any better. It's not replacing some beautiful craft that existed before.
But still, they were nice because you knew someone took the time to create them to promote an event and share the important information about it, and each person was producing their own awful posters.
Now with gen AI we have something filled with trash, everything looks the same, the important information is hard to find...
Sure, the variations offered in the article are a bit better and more opinionated, but they still reek AI conformity and I feel sick looking at them.
I bet you would not feel sick if you didn't know ahead of time they were AI-generated. Some really are quite good.
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.
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.
??
The alternative is people just taking some markers & a sheet of paper, or chalk and a blackboard.
If you travel around east Asia you’ll be delighted by the variety and creativity of these handmade signs. Way better than anything produced digitally.
But of course their relationship to handwriting is completely different there compared to the west.
I 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
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.
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.
Before ai example https://www.sagretoscane.com/sagre/fi/rignano-sullarno/sagra...
Post Ai example https://www.instagram.com/p/DZiKFZgIwcY/
Here's an article by the biggest online Italian newspaper, worth reading translated https://www.ilpost.it/2026/07/26/ai-locandine-sagre/
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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 https://alexisrondeau.me/mosey-site/making-of/
Do you think this helps you decide if it's slop or not?
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.
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
These posters don't have the feature of readability. They inconsistently apply the required design principles for this. Removing some of the clutter helps, but a WordArt poster from 1992 is still a better final product for the purpose.
Taking the last poster as an example (1940s cubist style), the graphic seems almost designed to draw your eye towards blank space. This, very precisely, detracts from the goal: the graphic is providing negative value!
Whereas, genuine 1940s cubist art exhibition posters are really astonishingly good at communicating the key information. As one example, https://artposterarchive.com/products/edward-wadsworth-vorti...
We've officially reached that point with advertisements. Save your tokens. Hire your 9-year-old niece to draw the poster by hand and you'll likely get a far better reaction from most people. Nobody goes to a fair because the poster had a "modernist / Bauhaus-influenced graphic style".
I 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.
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), or directly the embedding vector if the LLM is itself the image model's text encoder. Then whatever the image gen outputs is simply an instance of the GIGO principle. It would be interesting to test whether similar cliches and motifs also occur if you ask the model to create an SVG rather than a raster image.
They were/are not great. While I agree that spending extra 10 minutes improves the results, AI stuff are also not amazing. I think there's nothing surprising about this.
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
But that's how the algorithm behind LLMs functions. It simply cannot create something unique by stepping out of its existing knowledge base. It has to refurbish existing data, because, well, that's all it has.
One might argue that a human artist also is refurbishing data, made out of experiences and knowledge it has gather throughout its life.
The difference I think comes from something extra (that we're entirely dumb-founded on) that the human mind can contemplate and extrapolate from, to be able to generate something truly unique and different.
I hope (and believe) this extra magical capacity is what will not allow AI (at least in its current statistical form) to be able to match us in terms of creativity & uniqueness.
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.
The real photographers knew they were shit photos. They were grainy, bad lenses, and ugly. A lot of people still liked them because they were much more convenient for a lot of uses than the film ones.
Well, I guess there's still a lot of film people. But film had a ceiling. Digital cameras kept getting better.
The adaptive film photographers eventually adopted the tool. A lot of their skills transferred well to the new medium. Most waited until the cameras got good enough, though.
I'm not sure when that'll be with AI art gen. Seeing scenes broken up into layers in the latest gpt image generation, though, made me think we might be near.
If you're short on time, you can ask AI to summarize into a certain time and craft the prompt from there. But it's better to figure out what you really like.
ChatGPT tends to fall to the same things, but many of the other image generators do much better.
However, you must retain control over the scene graph and its composition. Use the output of the AI to guide how you work it. Do not assume the AI system has the ability to simulate world space with any meaningful fidelity. You can move transforms around in Blender and Unity with floating point bit increment/decrement operations if you wish. LLMs will never have this level of control.
Lighting systems are an entire universe of reasons you should do it the hard way too. Being able to iterate light placement and intensity with nanometric precision starts out looking like a brick wall, but it turns into a superpower once your scene is halfway decent.
I can usually tell when someone used AI to do things like generate steam store art because their camera doesn't change in a physically plausible way between the horizontal and vertical layouts. When you have access to the raw scene you can place the same camera in multiple orientations without altering any other aspect of the scene. The header capsule and vertical capsule are very difficult to make look coherent if you are using an LLM to generate these assets. Your best bet with AI art is to render something so big that it can be cropped for both, which is also quite obvious and ugly. Being able to instrument a scene as if it were a real place is way more productive than an LLM once the scene is ~done.
Except for the "professional graphic designer has added typography to a poster paint drawing by his young child" one, I'd go as far to say that I actually like it, especially if you were to remake it with the assistance of an actual child.
But I'm convinced that just vetoing AI is to throw away the baby with the bathwater. So I set out to prove it.
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.
The only reason i couldn't tell memphis is because it's aping a known design language already, it's just a perfect copy so me not being able to tell it wasn't AI isn't a free pass in this case.
I think if there was a little less "grid" feeling to the layout details then i wouldn't be able to tell on a few of the other designs either.
Edit: the designers republic version is quite a lot different than the others, it's not just that it's the only design to avoid pairing every feature with an icon, it's the whole layout variety - there's different font sizes, the positioning of elements is very well done to my eye. I'm gonna say this has to be another case like memphis, there's some pre-existing design language that i don't know of and it's just aping that. It's much more human than the others which i can believe are straight ai.
For legibility: the first examples are bad because they fail to easily communicate what/when/where/details in a couple seconds, mainly because the profusion of visual clutter obfuscates the message. The latter examples fare much better on that regard.
Usability is a constraint maybe more applicable to websites like the discussion I saw the other day on the design of claude-written pages (all look the same, feels ok but good UX probably lacking).
This seems to be the crux of the issue. It's not that the AI posters were bad, but has all the hallmarks of low effort. And if the organizer can't be arsed to put effort in their poster, why should anyone think it will be an event worth attending? The quoted prompt is not something someone can think of off the cuff. It requires someone who have seen enough posters to know what they would like and what not to put in. That takes effort. It's called AI slop not because it looks bad (though I do think it is), but no effort is put into them.
Similarly, it would be nice if there were common styles for posters that you could just use and an AI could generate and nobody would criticize you for. Not everything has to be an original design.
I don't often say this but those jobs are ripe for replacement by AI. It won't do worse!
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 ...
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.
Guess it’s subjective. I’m looking for fair info. He is looking for design uniqueness.
PS: Which then survives in the next iterations as "A day of music, making and family fun"
Edit: Ah just saw the call out on the previous iteration.
But still it's a nice display about the semantics encoded in the models.
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.
Do you only buy hand-churned butter?
Most fliers put together for community events pre-AI were Microsoft Word or Google Docs plus clip art.
The world is getting better, but before everyone realizes it we have to complain first and reminisce about the good old days of Wingdings and Comic Sans.
It's 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.
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
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).
Just like in engineering.
The problem with a lot of AI is that the baseline is already past "good enough" for many folks.
But you can also imagine a very different approach:
Imagine if you start with a vision, and just happen to use AI tools as part of your process to realize that vision, just-like/along-with many other implements. I've seen examples where people put together many layers in photoshop or gimp, and mix with rendering, hand drawn art, photographs, etc. Very much like how some of the better programmers work with AI assist.
His attention is biased by the practice of seeing and understanding dozens of visual languages. But he doesn't understand that, unlike a painting, a poster isn't the purpose, the end. A painting in a museum exists for itself. A poster in a street exists at the service of a commercial message. The poster isn't the focus or the point, the message is.
He looks for visual languages, but most people would look just for information: what, who, where, when, why. If they need to spend more than a tenth of a second to decode the visual language of a poster then the poster failed.
There is a famous book on UI design whose title defines very well the design principle for things that should face the masses: "Don't make me think".
Normal people love the bland and repetitive precisely because it is familiar. That's the reason there are so many more McDonald's and similar franchise chains than fine French/Italian bistros and unique shops. That's why people listen to dumb pop and country music but not Stravinsky. People choose boredom because that's something they can easily understand.
Peopel are dumb, they don't want to think.
I guess it is like the early days of wordprocessing, where you saw Comic Sans everywhere.
The analogy in my mind when I read this post was: you are asking a machine to paint a color, but the machine always paints the exact same shade, deterministically; and you'd like to explore different colors, but somehow you don't know anything about colors, don't know any of their names. So you don't have the language to ask for what you can't name.
Random sampling of colors (without names!) is a solved problem, because we've parameterized the entire universe of colors that can be perceived. It's just a very low dimension manifold, and there's even a computable metric on it such that unit-distances in that metric are what humans say are color differences of equal step size.
Are there more general versions of this? Like: "Here's a list of every human art in history: infer a coordinate system that uniformly metricizes every art that can ever exist?"
So of the two designs made, only two were good, the rest was quite bad and lost all meaning.
They are not OK.
I wasn't a fan of the Memphis one as it reminds me of the worst eighties and nineties designs.
I guess it works for the target audience.
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.
No, they aren't.
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.”