Yes. That's the issue: we are looking at the same posters.

It's just that "seeing this poster for the first time, unaware of the workings behind it" is a very different experience from "seeing this poster after you already saw dozens of other AI generated posters that used a similar style and had similar issues, got canny at spotting both the style and the issues in it, and came to associate them with cheap low quality work".

The former impression is "wow that's a good poster". The latter impression is "ew, it's posterslop". The poster, in the meanwhile, remains the same.

AI can often win in art contests - images, short stories, design. But that requires either sharp prompting, or an audience that's not familiar with "AI cliches". The quality is, if removed from the context, fairly good. If embedded in context, it's utter slop. The work is the same. Funny how that works.

Yes, context matters. The greatest painting in the world is just crushed materials smeared on a canvas, it's nothing too special without the context.

A computer (not even an LLM, just something generating random pixels) could randomly generate the exact same pixel pattern as the greatest painting in the world, and it would not be the greatest painting in the world, because context matters.