Well, no. Before genAI, I used fiverr, and I was also shamed for hiring those humans.

Have you ever tried doing that? In my experience, art students don't like to work for "little money" and "professional reference" and stablished artists don't like when you try to pay "little money" to students.

In year 2026 you are likely going to pay for a meat proxy who would still use the same model just without you controlling the prompt.

These days a cheap designer is just going to be a meat proxy for AI anyway.

AI, at least for now while it's still free/very cheap, enables producing a lot of very low-value content that in the past you never could have justified spending money and human labor on. The cost or time needed to make a poster or a flyer acted as a value-based gatekeeper. Today, it costs nothing to make an AI slop image and blast it out on social media, so we're drowning in it.

What is your experience with design done by students? Because mine isn't great. It's not bad either, but it's just... mediocre.

Depends on which economy the buyer and the seller respectively come from.

the problem is that AI does better than those students, especially if you don't know what good design looks like... which is most people

but of course this means the entire market will dry up because no one pays students anymore

I was the person who "had to bother dealing with it" many years ago before we had AI, Canva, or even Adobe cloud.

I volunteered and designed a good amount of posters for student organizations.

Don't enjoy it but did it to help my peers and friends out.

I find it ironic that back then we had a lot of trouble finding people who were willing to design posters and promo media on print.

Now the comment section on this post has people mourning AI taking over poster making in 2026. Where was the help back then?

From the perspective of someone who had to burn the midnight oil to do it for years, trust me, I would rather not do it and spend that time with my family and friends. And judging from how hard it was to find others who were willing to do it, I think its a reasonable argument that most people were not actually willing to do the work either.

So mourn away but I wouldn't cry if I "missed out" on making posters. If we had AI back then, I would not take on any of those poster making requests.

For every human good art that is cheap I can show you ten that are not. The problem is you don't know which version you'd get. Someone charges less because they are unknown. Fixing AI art is much less hassle than human one.

This is like anything. If you want good and inexpensive it's going to be a pain in your arse one way or another.

Exactly. Sad to see another industry getting decimated by AI just to save a bit of cash.

These people just doesn't have a good taste, imo.