I'm fascinated by how AI poster designs have taken over local advertising in seemingly just the last six months - presumably because ChatGPT Images and Gemini Nano Banana finally got good enough at outputting text without obvious defects in the typography.

The posters all look good - much better than their desktop publishing predecessors. And yet they also eat away at the credibility of the event or business for me.

It's hard to trust a poster when the quality of the design has zero relation to the amount of effort that went into creating it.

But is that a widespread feeling, are the vibes bad for regular people, or is this effectively just old man shouting at clouds?

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couchand 39 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Not just you. There's been a huge pushback in the local music community around this. Concerts listings now prominently feature the name of the poster designer! Humans FTW.

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jodacola 17 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My perspective on this, as someone skeptical of (but also bullish on) AI, is complex and I haven't completely nailed it down.

My knee-jerk reaction is instant credibility loss for the business/person/thing.

Follow-on is sadness (what are we losing in society because of this?), and curiosity: if a polished appearance (even if it is mega plastic) is no longer a sign of quality, then what is? What signals do I need to look for now?

But, wait! Was a high degree of polish ever truly a sign of quality? I've certainly had experiences where a place made every effort to look polished and professional (and generally did a good job at it), but quality missed the mark. In the case of restaurants, a common refrain of mine used to be, "they're trying too hard in the wrong places." Now, I guess, they don't have to try too hard... but they're still not focusing in the right places.

I don't know what to make of it and I go back to still trying to figure out new (or old?) signals for quality.

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vkou 13 minutes ago | parent [-]

A high degree of polish was tangible evidence that someone in the organization gave a shit about their work.

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jodacola 8 minutes ago | parent [-]

Or a third party was paid a one-time fee to make something look good - which still isn't a testament to the quality of the first party's service they're providing.

	▲	vkou 4 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Sure, but it means that they managed to pick third-parties they work with that give a shit. They could have always picked ones that didn't. When you're buying a pig in a poke (which is always the case when you're a first-time customer), this is a positive signal.

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tgv 26 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> how AI poster designs have taken over local advertising

Tale as old as time: a race to the bottom. Businesses trying to cut corners, thinking they can offset it against losses from exiting customers. If it wasn't, a lot will just cut more corners.

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simonw 15 minutes ago | parent [-]

I don't think it's a corner cutting thing though.

These businesses weren't paying someone to make a flier. The business owner was sweating for an hour in Microsoft Word and producing something that looked terrible.

I expect they are now investing approximately the same about of time iterating in ChatGPT and producing something that genuinely looks like a huge improvement to them.

	▲	joshstrange 9 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		This. I said it elsewhere in this thread differently but people want to pretend the options are: 1. Paying a local designer to make a bespoke beautiful poster OR 2. Use AI It's not, the money is often just not there to pay someone. So you get whatever the intern or the owner can slap together in whatever tool they know best (which is rarely the best tool for the job). It's completely understandable that they would reach for LLMs to help improve their posters. So many people are anti-AI/anti-LLM just because it is AI/LLM, not because it's objectively worse than the alternative. It's tiring. It's the Electron vs Native argument all over again. Sure, we'd all love hand-crafted, beautiful, low-resource native applications for everything, that takes a lot of time and/or money. It's a decision between Native and Electron, it's a decision between Electron or nothing (or at best only 1 OS supported).

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OtherShrezzing 32 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>But is that a widespread feeling, are the vibes bad for regular people, or is this effectively just old man shouting at clouds?

A cursory glance at YouGov strongly suggests that people have bad vibes about AI in basically every territory where they're asked about it, and for basically every use-case

	▲	simonw 13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		How many of the people who answer polls like that also have the ability to look at a poster and instantly clock that it was AI-generated?

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bigfishrunning 7 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I definitely roll my eyes whenever i see a poster with that obvious-AI-generated cartoon-people style. or the "edgy rock-and-roll poster" style that seems to be so prevalent. It seems that everyone generating posters is using the same 3 prompts! it's maddening.

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throwaway613746 30 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

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