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.

It's not tracking a real thing as much as people would like to think.

As he states, he isn't trying to make stuff that doesn't "look like AI did it," he just wants to introduce variety, and has proposed a disciplined way to do that.

[0] https://john.hartnup.uk/poster-prompts/

Except we have all seen really awful human made posters long before AI. People are just upset just to be upset at this point.

Code was nosediving before AI badly.

For programmers, sure SV startups and actual software-first shops are probably only augments with LLMs and not replacing. But what % of software engineers are employed in such shops? Well, from my graduating class in CS, approximately 30% of grads all went to the same contracting shop whose business model seems to be, take the bottom 30% of each CS class, underpay the fuck out of them, bootcamp them into something vaguely usable + teach the house style of CRUD/LOB app framework, then throw them at clients. And this seems to still be a step above "offshore to barely baseline capable (or worse) body shop for extremely dubious results."

That entire bottom 50% is probably about to be eviscerated. The "offshore + pray" approach is probably going to be completely zapped, much easier to just vibe code for probably better (or at least not worse) results. And the onshore-but-cheaper contracting shops are probably going to need a lot fewer people whose main contribution is translating low-ambiguity tickets into syntactically valid java spring code.

Similarly, for artists, disney is probably not going to use AI in a way that substantially speeds them up because they won't tolerate the quality loss at all. But how many artists work for disney? And how many make anime waifus for the gacha apps? The latter of which I can only assume has already switched substantially to AI assets.

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.

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"

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.

It showed whoever did it had no clue about East Asia or Chinese script...

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.

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.

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.

I do have one way of telling: my wife's a designer, and she has many artist and designer friends so I see how they work first hand. AI is largely used for edits that need to be done quickly rather than from-scratch generation.

You talk about aesthetics but that's very secondary to communicating the precise thing you want to communicate. AI just isn't there.

Who is imagining that?

> No, you silly geese. What you are able to spot is somebody using AI poorly. That's not you developing taste.

Again, I'm not really sure that the 'spotting AI' endeavour is always supposed to be a flex of someones own taste.

> You have absolutely no way of telling when a good designer created something entirely using AI (unless they are fine with you knowing that) and that has always been true.

I have trouble parsing your entire comment, but you have lost me completely at 'always been true'. I don't know how many hours your 'good designer' would waste on creating only with AI something able to fool everybody 2 years ago. It would surely be too many to be practical.

Speaking only for myself, that is absolutely accounted into my despair when I see an AI poster. Not just the fact that we're having a wide range of cultural and regional artifacts being stamped out and homogenized by the convenience of AI posters, but the fact that I'm only able to point them out right now because the public backlash is somewhat limited to the online sphere, so most people are okay with the default result it spits out. And we're one default ChatGPT/Claude "curated diversified aesthetic selector" feature away from making my current discernment completely useless.

Of course there's an argument of "if it's so good you can't tell, is there really a problem?", but here I'm responding specifically to the argument of a negative reaction to AI posters not taking the above into account.