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.
Because if it’s the latter we’re back to money being the barrier. And if it’s the former you should go and check with your local artists how much they love working for exposure.
I’ve made posters for events. Affinity is free now, it takes you like an hour to learn it from scratch and make your poster. If you couldn’t be bothered doing that, then that’s a signal the event itself is low effort slop. I'm not sure why people are acting like it's impossible to run an event without AI tools that literally didn't exist until right now.
Which could be an important signal for you to decide if that's the kind of event you want to go to. Maybe the comic sans fayre is preferrable to some.
That's why the "Look here's a 100 identical village fete posters" memes are kind of missing the point, it's actually not a bad thing that I can tell from a glance what it is, I don't actually have to read any of the details to know it'll have a tombola, because it's a given.
My bigger issue is all the posters calling it Fayre, not Fete, which is the weird part, particularly the "Craft Fayre" which should definitely be "Craft Fair", but misspellings and greengrocers apostrophe's are part and parcel of a good hand-made poster too.
But that's where the good stuff ended - all the text was total cheesy AI slop, expanding what should have been just "masive steam turbine fan calibration table" into a wall of text - the same for all the nice photos.
And worst of all was the title poster introducing the exposition - a horrendous AI slop image of a high tech motorcycle, whit a chan fused together with the body, asymmetrical wheels fused to the frame.
I find this really insane, someone with enough money, representing a serious project just decided to use an AI instead of doing their job & the garbage they produced was not stopped by anyone sane until it was presented to people as an achievement...
People are really bothered by perceived inauthenticity and injustice. And care about more things than the utility of the end product.
On top of that, we have a very out of touch political system that has continually ignored the will of the electorate. So then the tech people will say “see, the masses voted with their feet, they love the utility of AI generated art!”. Completely ignoring the perverse incentivizes and regulatory capture that led to that outcome.
If you were to poll 100 people on the street, they would be very against replacing human artists with AI.
If I’m looking for a handyman on (the Dutch equivalent to) Craigslist, either very short text with spelling errors or something obviously AI are both a positive signal. These are people too busy doing actual jobs, to fret over smoothly copywritten ads.
The factors behind branding (or a lack of) are multi-causal and not correlated to the actual quality of a farmer's market.
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.
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.
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.
People shit on things that are low effort, and especially low-effort trends. And especially especially when the low-effort trend involves something that offends them in some way, for example if they think AI is taking jobs, hurting the environment, etc.
Of course people are shitting on low-effort AI. It would be more surprising if they didn’t.
Reasons were the same as now: low effort and overuse.
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?
The making-of post itself also is clearly LLM generated, probably by Claude, judging by the language used.
I asked Claude to go through all the previous commits, the chat history and the 100 or so intermediate assets and create a timeline of sorts, the current page as you see it.
It's AI-generated as are the assets, the process and decisions depicted are human.
And still you're reaction is "it's slop". Noted!
The text on the page sounds really AI written so I can see why people think it’s slop.
And I agree with your impression.
My goal here is to understand how can I demonstrate that I did in fact put work and care into the "thing" (video in this case).
Basically show that I did spend energy over time, that the final product took a few dozen iterations with a lot of dead ends (as opposed to a lazy one-shot "make good video, no mistakes")
So I do think this route can have merit given there is actual work, but how would a page like this look if the current one is not yet giving you a trustworthy vibe?
You'd definitely see some raw and embarrassing stuff there. Like frustration, anger, greed, ignorance, incompetence, creativity, curiosity.
Is that maybe what we need to see to believe that a human (me n this case) was involved meaningfully?
So now I don't say. I show my workings and the reader can decide. And to be poncey, I made a manifesto. https://kladde26.org/
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
Otherwise you would be excited about going to the village fete and realize that the poster doesn’t make it a bad event.