alt Hacker News > I'm old enough to remember that people also complained about WordArt and Clipart and too many fonts etc.
- those made by someone skilled/savvy (not necessarily a professional)
- those made by someone without skills/knowledge
But still, they were nice because you knew someone took the time to create them to promote an event and share the important information about it, and each person was producing their own awful posters.
Now with gen AI we have something filled with trash, everything looks the same, the important information is hard to find...
Sure, the variations offered in the article are a bit better and more opinionated, but they still reek AI conformity and I feel sick looking at them.
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> But still, they were nice because you knew someone took the time to create them to promote an event
Unlike a gift, "it's the thought that counts" doesn't fly with me here. I don't care how much effort the secretary took to cobble some shitty poster together - it still looked terrible. I'd rather look at something clean and polished produced by AI (no matter how "generic" people here claim the OP's posters look).
If you read the article at all, the "everything looks the same" is easily fixed with just a tiny bit of effort.
It's not AI causing the sameyness and hard-to-read nature of these posters, it's people being lazy. I personally think there's a few nice looking ones in there (the punk fanzine style for one).
Sure it's not some 9/10 hand made poster, but considering these take 30 seconds to make, it's impressive.
Some level of uniformity is fine and indeed the norm. It was uniform back when posters were hand painted, eg 19th century world fairs or zoo openings or theater posters. They look pretty similar. Carneval posters looked similar.
The expectation of some kaleidoscope of styles is not really grounded in how things used to be ever.
Also, it's just nostalgia, just like how some young people now think audio cassettes and discmans are "cool" and have some revival, some are nostalgic for the back-in-the-day Word posters because "at least back then", but "these days" it's decline etc. Pretty sure in a few years people will be nostalgic for crappy AI slop of 2025-26 because their shittiness will feel like some charm compared to whatever the AI will be able to do.
> they still reek AI conformity and I feel sick looking at them
I bet you would not feel sick if you didn't know ahead of time they were AI-generated. Some really are quite good.