[tgv]

> how AI poster designs have taken over local advertising

Tale as old as time: a race to the bottom. Businesses trying to cut corners, thinking they can offset it against losses from exiting customers. If it wasn't, a lot will just cut more corners.

[simonw]

I don't think it's a corner cutting thing though.

These businesses weren't paying someone to make a flier. The business owner was sweating for an hour in Microsoft Word and producing something that looked terrible.

I expect they are now investing approximately the same about of time iterating in ChatGPT and producing something that genuinely looks like a huge improvement to them.

[joshstrange]

This.

I said it elsewhere in this thread differently but people want to pretend the options are:

1. Paying a local designer to make a bespoke beautiful poster

OR

2. Use AI

It's not, the money is often just not there to pay someone. So you get whatever the intern or the owner can slap together in whatever tool they know best (which is rarely the best tool for the job).

It's completely understandable that they would reach for LLMs to help improve their posters.

So many people are anti-AI/anti-LLM just because it is AI/LLM, not because it's objectively worse than the alternative. It's tiring.

It's the Electron vs Native argument all over again. Sure, we'd all love hand-crafted, beautiful, low-resource native applications for everything, that takes a lot of time and/or money. It's a decision between Native and Electron, it's a decision between Electron or nothing (or at best only 1 OS supported).

[dinfinity]

Lost me at the last paragraph. Comparing billion dollar companies to small businesses does not make sense.

The real reason for Electron apps being a thing is that there is very little competition where they are used. If chatting applications could properly communicate with each other based on international standards instead of being silos, nobody in their right mind would use the trash clients that Slack and Whatsapp produce, for instance.

[inigyou]

Contributing to this is DMCA anticircumvention. Make a WhatsApp app that doesn't suck? Straight to jail. It's only legal if you make your own entire WhatsApp.

[simonw]

What's weird here is that I should be in total agreement with you.

I love it when AI tools are used to give people the ability to solve problems that previously they could not solve well.

For the fliers I'm talking about here (think a hardware store promoting their summer sale) I don't think the impact on the local poster design community is meaningful.

And yet... the resulting posters put me off. I'm trying to figure out why that is. I think the best explanation I have is the lack of intention behind them - knowing that none of the visual details - the illustrations, the typographic flair - had anyone thinking about them while they were constructed.

[ryandrake]

> And yet... the resulting posters put me off. I'm trying to figure out why that is. I think the best explanation I have is the lack of intention behind them - knowing that none of the visual details - the illustrations, the typographic flair - had anyone thinking about them while they were constructed.

I think that's exactly it, and it's not really hard to articulate. You are simply noticing the lack of effort, lack of care, and lack of craftsmanship that is inherent in AI-produced slop. This isn't mysticism and it doesn't take a sixth sense to detect. When someone puts no effort into creating something, that lack of effort carries through the entire work, and is (or should be) obvious and easy to spot.

Ask a schoolteacher. They can spot when someone half-asses a term paper, and, at least I hope, they can spot AI slop term papers.

[steveklabnik]

Okay I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and here's my "I'm currently drinking my coffee" take on this. I'm willing to be significantly wrong here, but for the sake of discussion, here's where I think I'm at.

I also agree with

> I love it when AI tools are used to give people the ability to solve problems that previously they could not solve well.

But I also really hate these menus, I see them all the time as well. I think that my conclusion is slightly different than yours: in my opinion, just not a lot of people have taste. That's sort of like, true by the definition of taste, but what I mean is something more specific: it's not because of AI that I dislike these signs. It's because of what you said above:

> producing something that genuinely looks like a huge improvement to them.

While it looks like a huge improvement to them, it does not to me. Our tastes differ.

Here's a version of this that doesn't involve AI at all: last night I ate sushi at a place I'd never been before. Their menu was a bit chaotic, and had a bunch of annotations, along with a guide to those annotations. One section had both "2" and "2 pieces" listed under the options, and so I was confused: what was the difference here? Turns out it's basically just a typo, both mean that. Combine that with some spelling mistakes, and yeah, I had a pretty bad impression of the menu. The sushi was fine though, I'd go back. But this wasn't a super low-end place, so the attention to detail being off made me a bit worried before I actually ate the food.

Same problem, same issue, AI is really the only variable here. And it is the natural downside of "democratization" or "helping more people do more things", naturally, there will be a lot more low-quality stuff out there than before. That's not actually inherently a bad thing. But it can feel weird.

[joshstrange]

I guess I see very little "soul" in most marketing/advertising in the first place. It was slop well before LLMs entered the scene. If my local hardware store wants to put up a poster for their summer sale I don't care if it's black comic sans on white paper or if it's a AI-generated advertisement. Either way I'm not looking that closely at it and neither version were going to show up in an art museum or recieve design accolades.

There is so little intention in anything (again, even before LLMs) so I don't begrudge places for using LLMs to try and produce similar quality to what larger chains/corps are able to commision.

I see this as similar to things like people wanting "clean ingredients" or "sustainable packaging" or "healthy food" in restaurants/bakeries/etc. They _say_ they want that but they are not at all willing to _pay_ for it. To be clear, I do wish those things were the baseline, but they are not and unfortunately it is near-impossible to compete with other businesses that don't care about those things. At the end of the day consumers see "$15 hamburger" vs "$10 hamburger", the better/fewer ingredients, the better-paid labor, the recyclable packaging, etc simple don't matter. This is _not_ an argument to underpay workers, kill the environment, and fill your hamburgers with sawdust, it's simply a statement on how hard it is to compete when consumers very rarely reward companies for doing things "right" no matter how much lip-service they pay to it.

I've watched a close relative have people say "you should do X thing!" where X is something like "fewer ingredients" or "low calorie" or "healthy"-type things, only to see sales crater after an initial boost. People try it, they feel good about themselves, then they go right back to buying the thing packed with sugar.

There is a wide gulf between "what people say that want" and "how they actually behave". LLMs are currently in a category where people can have visceral reaction and claim "I'd never buy something from a company that does that" but I can tell you right now that won't last. Be anti-bad-design, be anti-bad-code but don't be anti-LLM because that opinion isn't going to age well (and yes, I know _you_ simonw, aren't anti-LLM, I'm speaking generally).

[customguy]

> LLMs are currently in a category where people can have visceral reaction and claim "I'd never buy something from a company that does that" but I can tell you right now that won't last.

Because people are struggling to make ends meet as wealth gets more and more concentrated. It reminds me of that really disgusting joke: why do sheep farmers like to fuck their sheep just at the edge of a cliff? Because they push back.

So yeah, people often make choices they'd rather not make. Doesn't mean anything, just like that sheep doesn't love the farmer and is grinding up against him, it doesn't want to fall of a cliff and die.

And these companies take a few cherry picked snapshots, never show the video, never show the aftermath, and brag about acceptance. Fuck all of that, so much.

People don't want all of humanity to be stolen from by companies who then turn around and sue you if you violate their copyright. That settles all of it, already. All this stuff about quality and economics is irrelevant. We hate people who steal from the little man to enrich the wealthy, always did, always will. Where there is a "we" that isn't just isolated people playing pretend, you will find this as the bedrock, maybe a layer above hating child abuse. And making the "accept child abuse or robber barons" option 10%, 20%, 50000% cheaper doesn't change that in the slightest.

I'll go you one further: the very few ones who do, or don't care, don't matter, because when it comes to ethics and society they already checked out, and can stay checked out. They got old, they lost what they were supposed to hold on to if they ever had it, and that's tragic, but mostly their problem which they want to extend onto the people who don't have it.

[numpad0]

> So many people are anti-AI/anti-LLM just because it is AI/LLM, not because it's objectively worse than the alternative. It's tiring.

no, it's because the SNR of AI slop is worse than human creations.

  hamburger: $4.99
  S̵u̸p̸e̷r̷s̶l̵o̷p̵ ̸S̶i̴g̸n̷a̴t̸u̷r̵e̵b̷u̷r̶g̵e̸r̶:̶ ̷$̴4̸.̴9̸9̷(̵b̴a̵s̷e̸ ̵c̴o̸n̵f̷i̶g̶u̵r̶a̵t̴i̴o̸n̴)̴

  The amount of data hasn't changed - it's presentation. The noise is real. Presenting just the prompt to patrons may suffice, but dressing it up with an LLM output is mast^C

I mean, to say something at least somewhat constructive sounding, they could put an EEG cap on a person and show them bunch of AI slop so to establish a vector and a bias term for less offensive and more focused feeling AI generated data, but I don't believe they're doing it.

[zoltanse]

Exactly. And it's not even only the LLM generated stuff. There was once a consultant who advertised the website of his (one-man) company when he applied -- pre-LLM. Ok, nice, some info upfront. But looking at the site I was put off: Just a couple of stock photos and generic marketing blurb. Nothing special, nothing personal - just noise.

[sebastiennight]

As someone who was using TTS to listen to this thread, I can tell you this specific post is about 8 minutes of life I will never get back. I'll email you the bill

[numpad0]

okay, I'm sorry, and I'll be more aware of the fact from now on that TTS software used by not negligible number of users[1] might not be well equipped to handle "zalgo decoration" of text.

1: this is not even the second time I've seen someone here mention TTS or legal/literal blindness, so I suppose this actually isn't negligible, not sarcastically

[sebastiennight]

It did, however, perfectly get across your point about SNR, in a way that regular browsers can't possibly appreciate.

[bccdee]

You're ignoring the third option, which is to make a PowerPoint slide with a stock photo and print that. Or use an online template. There are a million ways to make a cheap, adequate flyer.

Look at this poster template. You could make it yourself in 10 minutes, with PowerPoint or any of a million other drag & drop poster-makers. https://s3.amazonaws.com/thumbnails.venngage.com/template/1b...

People may think, "oh, it's a bit simple. I guess they're a small business," but so what? If we rule out the option of hiring an actual designer, it's gonna be that or "ew, look at that shitty AI poster."

[oeitho]

> I said it elsewhere in this thread differently but people want to pretend the options are:

> 1. Paying a local designer to make a bespoke beautiful poster

> OR

> 2. Use AI

You are wrong and trying to make people you disagree with sound stupid. Stop it.

I’ll tell you then that the options I believe in are:

1. Paying a local designer to make a bespoke beautiful poster

2. don’t

3. Use AI

And I accept both option 1 and 2.

[vunderba]

I called it out a while ago but the largest market to get destroyed by gen AI was never the professional market - it was the gig economy.

The quality of generative AI may not be top-notch, but it presents an easy drop-in replacement for one-off tasks that people previously outsourced to platforms like Fiverr (voiceovers, logo design, clip art, copy editing, translation, etc).

[sebastiennight]

> These businesses weren't paying someone to make a flier.

My very first gig out of engineer school was updating the website and flyers for some nightclub in Paris. I was terribly paid, badly treated, blamed for everything despite them always giving me the elements at the very last minute, but they did pay someone.

> I expect they are now investing approximately the same about of time iterating in ChatGPT

They are definitely _not_ spending an hour iterating with ChatGPT... I would bet a large amount of money that the overwhelming majority pick one of the n options provided from the very first generation result with no further refinements.

[customguy]

To me nothing a human makes has the capacity to be as terrible on an existential level as genAI slop.

> something that genuinely looks like a huge improvement to them

Of course they think it's great, or they wouldn't be doing it. That goes for everyone, with anything, ever. And some customers probably think it's great, too. But if you want me as a customer, to whom all those other opinions are completely irrelevant, you'd be better off just putting a turd glazed with boogers. Doesn't matter what it advertises, I'll know a human made this, and look at the product description.

[inigyou]

"You can't shrink your way to growth"