It’s not complicated - the default style signals low effort. Why should I get excited about the village fete if the organizers put in the barest minimum of effort?

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.

> Why should I get excited about the village fete if the organizers put in the barest minimum of effort?

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.

I think this (low effort posters) rather signals to me that they have the right priorities. A true professional poster would tell me that it's some commercial cash grab instead of real local enthusiasts making something normal.

Low effort signals for recognizing effort in creation have all been scrambled. Now it's high effort just to identify real effort, not to mention most people in most cases would not have the expertise to recognize real effort anyway. I don't think this is entirely new from AI either, we already had so much media vying for attention that we could scant attend to more than a vanishing sliver of it.

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.

You don't have to get excited by anything. You are welcome to boycott the village fête because you think they didn't put enough effort into their poster. Your choice, my friend.

>If the sign was simple Comic Sans

I remember the days when people would make fun of a sign like that. Then people would make fun of Wordart, then Canva. It appears that unless you spend $1500 on a graphic designer to create your poster, people will shit on your effort.

> Why should I get excited about the village fete if the organizers put in the barest minimum of effort?

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.

There were lots of tumblr blogs (now defunct) that ridiculed Comic Sans used in signs and posters. Later on the same thing happened to the Lobster font.

Reasons were the same as now: low effort and overuse.

Making a good poster is bikeshedding. Organizing an event is hard and making better posters than this is a waste of their limited resources.

I agree.

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?

No one cared about shitty posters before (and yes they are shitty) and no one cares about them now.

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

Ok, don’t go because of the poster. Miss out.

I live in a village with lots of local events and I do not care about the design of the posters. I just care about what the event. I just want some information.