Why you shouldn’t use AI to generate your poster.
Over the Easter weekend I was taking a stroll down the Rhos-on-Sea promenade, and noticed the following community noticeboard promoting local events. I stopped, took a photo, and went on my merry way.
Of the posters, I can confidently say that there is a Betws-Y-Coed antique and vintage fair held regularly thoroughout the year (which is the top left hand poster) and a Llandudno transport festival (whch is the bottom centre poster).
The rest? not a scoobies off the top of my head.
Sure, do I remember the dates of these events? No. But I remember from the time it took me to take the photos those events exist. If I was interested in either event, or know somebody who would, I could find out details and plan from there.
People use AI to scaffold websites, do art, or write blog posts. These feel like they fill a gap, rather than serve a purpose – a checkbox on a task list that needs to be filled.
However, in today’s attention based economy, why would you want your stuff to look the same? Janky websites with unique designs are more fun than every AI generated site out there, and whilst your kids art isn’t Rembrandt, you still hang it on the fridge, don’t you?
It’s been nice seeing other talented folk raise this, and the backlash has begun. I’ve even begun to switch off reading some prolific bloggers that use AI for the feature images. Even if they wrote every word, I think the images show a lack of creativity. So if you can’t guarantee that the featured image is slop, why should I trust your text?
So open up VS Code, or Canva and build that bloody poster, logo, or website. It may not be as polished as what ChatGPT can do, but you can maybe stick around in another person’s head longer than any slop can.
As someone who will happily admit to use AI to produce the graphic for the featured image for his posts, I’ll gentle push back. I am not artistic, I am not good at creating visual art. Words I’m fine with.
I guess the ‘better option’ is then to not have the images at all, or use photos that I have created. But part of my using AI was to ‘play’ with it in what I thought was a non-important way.
Hmmm is there a hint of ‘don’t judge a book…’ at play here maybe?
My comment was aimed at a specific couple of bloggers I know who have gone from writing similar length posts to yourself, less regularly than yourself, to now regularly churning out 1000+ word articles every couple of days, so it looks suspicious. There’s also a bit of “I can’t really keep up with what you are saying here too”, creeping in.
So I may have caught you in the crossfire, sorry Gordon.
I agree if it was me I’d avoid a featured image, or have a fallback one, or aim for a photo. But I understand that’s my position.
Completely agree. We’re now heading to a time where jank is a sign of quality, because it shows that it was actually made, and not just nightmare’d up by an over-engineered autocorrect.
I just read
👤
Rhys Wynne
’s post Your Crap is More Memorable Than Your Slop about how AI design, even physical posters, are convergent & forgettable. He makes the point that human, imperfect design is what stands out, and holds meaning.
I enjoyed the post, which reminded me of some thoughts I had when generative AI entered public consciousness, on related lines.Convergence is a property of AI, of course. The objective function is designed to meet expectations, not exceed them. Most of all, they are trained to make the user happy with the result. They learn, by pattern-matching, to manipulate.The age of the social media algorithm brought us the influencer. Corporations could speak to us directly, but instead individual creators garnered our attention. We rejected corporate manipulation in (ostensibly) connective spaces. Corporate capture of the influencer economy proves that being a human is about the most valuable marketing asset there is.We are sensitive and resistant to corporate manipulation of the human spaces we engage with. And I see this rejection extending to AI-generated content too.I don’t want to read AI’s novels any more than I want to read a corporation’s life updates. They are coldly calculated. The infinite capacity to manipulate our emotions is a frightening prospect.
I don’t want to watch a film that was engineered by super-parameters to make me cry.Image and story are uniquely human creations, for all time. Vehicles to express & share the condition of living, to help us understand one another. It feels perverse that AI would participate in this act. Like the description of coffee from someone who has only read a Nescafe label. Slop of the purest kind.We surely are already consuming such
contentwithout knowing (which I quote because it is content in the most literal sense of occupying space, our time & attention, while being ultimately empty, void). But, like Rhys, I expect it to become convergent and forgettable, and recognisably vapid.Though we are likely stuck with generated output, I don’t believe it overlaps artistic creation. I also expect the distinction of AI-generated content to become more important and apparent. The label “Human Made” will hold a premium.Real humanity differentiated influencers on social platforms. An imperfect design differentiates you from conformist bots, as Rhys points out.And a beating heart is what differentiates art from even the neatest slop.Ahhh I see, yeah that makes sense. I’m kinda wedded to the featured image from a visual point of view… I think… but definitely one for me to ponder so thanks for giving me that point of view! Always learning.
I completely agree with the premise of this article. If people want to use AI to generate an image I am not going to get offended but it does make me less interested in the article – to me it is just looks cheap and unprofessional.
For my own blog posts I often just include a quick sketch to liven up my leaden prose. They are uniformly terrible but everyone can see they are mine. In the past I have even just doodled on paper and scanned the result.
The world needs more unique looking blogs, not more uniformity. Keep up the good work here.