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.

▲

tgv 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

▲

9dev 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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 2 hours ago | parent [-]

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 17 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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.)

▲

maplethorpe an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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.

▲

bonoboTP 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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 of taste and money as well as fashion.

▲

siliconpotato 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

▲

satvikpendem 5 hours ago | parent [-]

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 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		exactly. Hindsight is 20/20.

▲

ChrisMarshallNY 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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!

▲

onemoresoop 2 hours ago | parent [-]

What if AI becomes really expensive to use?

	▲	ChrisMarshallNY 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It will (for a while). We are already seeing the groundwork being laid. It’s unlikely to stay that way, though.

▲

ares623 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I believe the point is that there is no baby in this bathwater

▲

perching_aix 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

	▲	ereiamjh 8 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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.