AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible

It is kind of sad that whenever you see art now, whether it's good or "bad", it's uncertain if the artist actually made it, or just prompted AI.

The second options seem very similar to the popular templates in canvas.

So, I think this article is circling something a lot more foundational when it comes to people’s disdain for AI. If you put more thought, more effort, and more originality into your work, you get something that starts to feel like an actual artistic expression. If you just type in a basic prompt and accept whatever comes back, that shows too. And I think that is a large part of why people feel insulted by this stuff in the first place.

It’s hard to respect a piece of work or take it seriously when it feels like the person who made it didn’t think it was worth giving much consideration. You’re asking someone to stop, look, and care about your poster and whatever it represents, but you haven’t given them much reason to believe you cared about it yourself. If you can’t take it seriously, how should we? It isn’t really about whether it took five minutes. It’s about whether there was any thought behind those five minutes.

So, I read this article as if it had the following title: “If you insist on using an LLM to generate visuals, you still have to put some thought into them.” But then, that starts to defeat the point for anyone who was using an LLM to avoid that effort in the first place, doesn’t it? You can make the process easier, but you can’t just assume that having produced something means you’ve made something worth sharing.

At the end of the day, I think there are valid uses for LLMs and there are uses that don’t add much of anything. As a consumer of content, the ones I respond to tend to be the ones where the LLM’s involvement isn’t the most obvious thing about the work. I want to see the person’s idea come through. A very light touch, not a deluge. This can absolutely apply to creating visuals, but it requires judgment, revision, and a willingness to do more than accept the first thing you’re given.

And it seems like a lot of people aren’t willing to put in that effort. That’s fine. Their work will continue to be distinguished by that lack of care, while people who are willing to put more into it will stand out. The initial novelty only carries something so far. Once you start picking up on the familiar patterns, that sense of something being slightly off becomes hard to ignore.

So, moving forward, I’m not so sure human creativity and input are things that can simply be outdone and made irrelevant. Maybe they’re an additional layer that keeps giving us somewhere further to go. An LLM can imitate what people have already brought to the table, but given access to that same LLM, we can bring our own experiences, ideas, and judgment into the mix. The tool gives us a starting point. I don’t see why we should assume it also determines how far we can take it.

My eyes immediately move away from AI generated graphics. If it does manage to fool me, I get irritated and the thing you are trying to promote gets associated with that feeling. Make a poster with crayons if you will, but spare us from more cognitive polution.

Can you tell your AI to not apply piss filter to everything?

What is the new phrase? The moat was always ‘taste’, or something?

All trash, in my opinion. Different flavors of trash.

those actually don't look half bad

Some people only have taste in their mouth

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.

> They’re OK

They are not OK.

If it's a craft festival, you should pay one of the crafts people to craft a poster. Any stench of AI (and in particular, the weirdness of an AI generated punk-ish poster) for a craft event makes me think it's a scam because I know for sure they had contacts of people that could've done a better job, and been supported while doing it... which is the moral pitch of the event. Even if the craft was basketmaking or something totally non-poster-related, use a close-cropped photo of a basket as the background or something. You've got artistic people around you. The outcome is going to be better, universally. (I don't really want to debate this honestly. We can agree to disagree if you think this isn't universally applicable.)

But I'm fine with the beer festival phoning it in. I guess my only issue with the in-the-wild poster example you found is it does look... bland and just aestetically bad. Your example AI poster styles would be a huge improvement! I can't say they're like, impressive in anyway or winning any awards since they're also bland, but aestetically they hold up and IMO, actually communicate the info better than the ez-slop original.

Maybe to put it another way: if it was 2015, and an craft festival and a beer festival both used the same incredibly lame looking Word template for posters, I'd have the exact same opinion.

interesting to see a prompt post getting so upvoted

I’m convinced that almost nobody that is saying to hire cheap designers instead of AI has actually done so.

Think of the absolute worst, dogshit offshore developer contractors you have worked with. It’s the same thing for design. In the 1% chance they can even understand what you want them to do, you then have a 1% chance that they are capable of executing it in a barely satisfactory way.

Kids are rediscovering typography and pictograms. With AI. Well done!

Not a great sentence.

bunch of haters in these comments.

I've been telling people to be thankful the posts are blatantly AI.

Soon enough it will be harder and harder to tell, and all their feedback is being scraped to improve the next model.

This already demonstrates 2-3 extra sentences of prompting and you get a completely different style that is harder to call out.

This is one example of how knowledge is still useful, even in the world of AI. If you know about different art movements, aesthetics, etc. you can prompt images using them, and make stuff that doesn't look like the generic slop that uses that recognizable round-corners style.

so who is going to the spring fayre?

the ones in the article that aren't complete eyesores are just what you get out of Canva with no changes except busier (which, by the way, is worse)

this is dumb as hell. Instead of feeding it through an LLM just make it plain text comic sans and it'll be better. Word clipart looks more palatable than this

Slop is slop because people put in zero effort so the LLM just produces the first thing it was trained to do. You can absolutely get good results out of AI but it takes taste and a little work.

the biggest issue is NO WHITE SPACE.

The irony is that the less appealing posters would take a human artist much more skill and time to create.

Humans actually prefer minimalist designs with basic flat shapes with flat colors which ironically is trivial to create and can be done without AI or talent. Most people can’t even create anything remotely close to the less appealing posters by hand.

> Go for a clean, unfussy, bright layout with a bold striking spring-themed graphic. Avoid pastel/airbrush/oil style art or images of people.

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.

AI posters is like using the Papyrus font.

just spend hours tweaking the prompt and it will look like you spent hours making the poster. Isn't AI great

Adding a safety pin to the punk design was too much of a cliché.

I wasn't a fan of the Memphis one as it reminds me of the worst eighties and nineties designs.

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...

Beautiful. Now this is how to work with an LLM, not castigate it.

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.

These are still terrible. It's painfully obvious they are AI. And that's the whole problem. AI posters feel soulless and like nobody put in the work to make something nice. I mourn our pre-AI world with its showcases of human creativity.

So AI slop is in reality prompt slop

The beige / slightly faded Claude design trend is atrocious.

> They’re OK

No, they aren't.

once again judgment comes into play.

judgement + taste is the difference maker.

That post was written by a designer judging designs.

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".

As a designer, the post author seeks the unexpected. Normal people just overlook and avoid it.

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. That's why so many people watch Hallmark movies. People choose boredom because that's something they can easily understand.

Peopel are dumb, they don't want to think.

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.

Please stop.

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.

If only there was a way to precisely control our output so it matches our taste and imagination. Some might call this technology, drawing.

This is hilarious.. The bad examples are ai slop. The final "good" one they make is corpo slop, lol!

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