The biggest problem that I have with most AI posters is that they are too busy, you have to look for information instead of seeing it popping right away.

Amateurs posters of before AI didn't have this problem. White background, the important info in big letters, maybe one clipart or to. So I'm not talking about how pro artists could make a better job, but even the small local non-profit used to produce better posters. Not in the sense of "better looking", but in the sense that they were more readable.

At least the examples of this blog are more readable than what we usually see.

It sure seems like, while LLMs and diffusion models won't completely eradicate the middle class, the bar has now risen significantly to actually contribute in a lot of areas.

For programmers, sure SV startups and actual software-first shops are probably only augments with LLMs and not replacing. But what % of software engineers are employed in such shops? Well, from my graduating class in CS, approximately 30% of grads all went to the same contracting shop whose business model seems to be, take the bottom 30% of each CS class, underpay the fuck out of them, bootcamp them into something vaguely usable + teach the house style of CRUD/LOB app framework, then throw them at clients. And this seems to still be a step above "offshore to barely baseline capable (or worse) body shop for extremely dubious results."

That entire bottom 50% is probably about to be eviscerated. The "offshore + pray" approach is probably going to be completely zapped, much easier to just vibe code for probably better (or at least not worse) results. And the onshore-but-cheaper contracting shops are probably going to need a lot fewer people whose main contribution is translating low-ambiguity tickets into syntactically valid java spring code.

Similarly, for artists, disney is probably not going to use AI in a way that substantially speeds them up because they won't tolerate the quality loss at all. But how many artists work for disney? And how many make anime waifus for the gacha apps? The latter of which I can only assume has already switched substantially to AI assets.

There's an amazing viral twitter thread where someone claimed a real Monet painting was an AI generated imitation, and it got an avalanche of comments from people who claimed it was an obvious fake and a poor imitation at that.

It's not tracking a real thing as much as people would like to think.

I've worked with some of the top designers in the world. I don't think that AI will beat them (for now), but the examples in his sample page[0] beat the junk that I've seen a lot of non-top-designers do.

As he states, he isn't trying to make stuff that doesn't "look like AI did it," he just wants to introduce variety, and has proposed a disciplined way to do that.

[0] https://john.hartnup.uk/poster-prompts/

> a human artist would do better.

Except we have all seen really awful human made posters long before AI. People are just upset just to be upset at this point.

Code was nosediving before AI badly.

There aren't small problems in these posters though. They're huge, obvious, and an indicator that the one who made the flyer didn't care whatsoever.

When it includes an American Flag with more than 50 stars + the bottom row is cut off, you know they didn't even bother to proofread it.

This is the kind of garbage we're suffering with.

If the AI makes a “better” poster that everyone hates because it’s AI, and a person makes a “worse” poster that everyone likes because it’s human, isn’t the business better off with the “worse” poster?

You said it - and the same is true for many of the other talents from Ai. I've worked with gobs of artists, accountant, MBAs, developers, appliance repair techs, and so on. Ai does a better job than most of them, but not as good as the best of them.

This is an excellent point, and it doesn't only apply to art/design.

In almost any intellectual domain, including coding, the models are already ahead of the average human. But instead, we compare them to the very best humans, which almost no one on the planet has access to.

$20 for a lot of access to better-than-average is a world-changingly good deal!

Not to mention that I can also tell when a poster has been generated using Photoshop and not real artist tools, like brushes and pens. I've seen a lot of these Photoshop-generated posters, and they are in no way comparable to something DaVinci or Picasso would create.

Absolutely. I've had the identical experience hiring artists for game art/UI. Every once in a while you find an artist who is stellar but most everyone else is not that good.

The TFA is pointing to a prompting skills/creativity issue, but I get equally frustrated with hired artists as with genAI image models. Even with skilled human artists (remote/offshore), I find they're best at copying a particular style so I end up having to google for images of the look that we're targeting, then spend hours painstakingly describing the changes needed. Then iterating many times, and with artists in remote time zones that means each iteration takes a whole day. The process is ironically very similar to using AI image models but can take much longer due to time zones.

AI thumbnails outperform human thumbnails on YouTube by a lot, I've seen click-through rate spreads of 4%+ (~5% -> ~9% in AB tests). Yet people will do drive by comments trying to excoriate creators for using AI thumbnails. It's really quite ridiculous.

Anecdotally, I was reading https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematicians-build-long-awa... from another HN post and I could have sworn the image was AI generated but https://www.pangram.com/ said was legit human created. Sad that my new default is assuming everything is AI created or vibed nowadays.

The alternatives are not horrible, but look like I’m being lured to a Spring Fair by an alien. It makes no sense to associate with Japanese imagery or 90s computer graphics for an event that has nothing to with these topics. Design is a language and these speak gibberish.

The blog also mentions, several times, that it wasn't the goal to be indistinguishable.

I think it's actually a feature when people can recognize it as AI.

Why would someone want it to be unrecognizable as AI? What is the reason people want to hide AI usage ? (other than when "cheating" in studies or examns or such, obv)

> they can tell they’re AI and point to things that the AI did “wrong” and a human artist would do better.

Pretty much all of the designers we contacted recently were using AI to draw. Especially on those kinds of cheap work. They are just a bit more professional in the prompting and can do final touch in Photoshop.

This is my experience as well. I run a bootstrapped business, so we don't have a ton of backing. We can't afford the top design firms, and Fable can do better than those within our budget. So it's not that we prefer AI over human designers; we just don't have the money!

Totally agree. Opinions are cheap. People can be drawn to “horrible” art, and small artists - especially social media managers - right now are creating intentionally bad mspaint.exe 1994 aesthetics because AI art looks like it was created by real artists, and it’s the only way to differentiate

> I’ve worked with dozens of budget friendly designers on Fiverr and consistently get way worse results than I’ve gotten from AI models.

That makes sense given they're on Fiverr. However, Fiverr freelancers are now just AI prompters :) doesn't matter whether it's code or art.

If taste is all that's left you can't fault people for discriminting on taste

Have you considered looking up designers you like and asking them instead of "budget friendly designers on Fiverr"?

>I think it would be interesting to see if people could reliably distinguish between AI generated flyers and human made flyers

i think people can point those out pretty consistently for in-the-wild cheap posters, since the 2 types are often bad in different way

To me, they look very much like Canva style designs. Some pre-existing design template that someone took and then smooshed their own dates and information into.

To me if you ask to a 10 years old kid and give him a PC with Microsoft Paint on it it will you will have a much better result than any AI-generated option in the post. If there are graphics designer that produce a worse result of what AI creates, it's because they probably use AI as well.

The problem of AI generated stuff (we see the problem of manifests, but I'm a software engineer and with computer programs it's exactly the same thing) is that they immediately look non-human, and our brain trained itself to detect, and thus get irritated by, AI generated content.

It looks fake, it hurts to see, it seems fine at first glance fine but it's not, everyone seems identical because the AI is not, despite of the name, creative, it just a hyper complex copy/paste machine, and obviously the result just looks copy/paste as well.

The problem’s not so much that the posters are AI generated, but that they’re too crowded and unfocused. Their individual elements seem fine and look good, but when taken as a whole they feel wrong.

This may be a failure mode similar to juniors using AI and making it much harder for seniors to find the bugs, because the code actually looks good at first sight.

I don’t think the blog author actually has any design skills based on the prompts and the AI obviously can’t nudge them in the right direction or help them clarify their brief, like a real designer (i.e. not random online freelancers) would.

At least for me, the enumerated svg-like icons give it away, but that's merely a prompt fix.

Maybe it's just me, but even on pure aesthetic reasons I would take a Comic Sans and clipart poster made in Word over the slop.

At this point I have some kind of a physical repulsion to the generated posters, and it's always easy to tell from the fontwork and the iconography, let alone illustrations if there are any.

It doesn't have to look "cartoony". Harness issue. Your 2026 models are trained on a sufficiently broad set of images that style is almost a solved problem.

I’ve been diving into Ink Master highlights on YouTube lately. These are typically all excellent artists but they don’t always produce excellent work. I’ve seen some hands that could have come out of an early gen ai model permanently inked into someone’s skin.

I sure hope it’s better than some random person you paid $20

i would never go to an event that cares so little about people buying tickets they can't even put a pen to paper or just use a photograph. it reeks of laziness.

>Maybe, but a small local event or business probably won’t have the budget to hire them or know where to find them.

This is funny to read given I am currently on a Japan trip with 3 friends and we actively avoid every small restaurant that have AI generated images of their food. Using AI generated bullshit just shows that you really dont want to put in the work to produce something actually charming. Hell, we've seen a food menu drawn by a toddler and it was infinitely more sympathetic than all the AI generated Wagyu images.

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Cool man, how good of a job would you do at your craft if I only gave you $5