I saw an AI poster at a bar advertising a band night. My initial reaction was “this looks like AI art” and on closer inspection it seems correct. It seems charmless and soulless in the way all AI art is. If the bar owner, or whoever is in charge of putting posters up, well if they wanted to it could have just been text on a blank paper and it would have conveyed the same information. If they wanted to they could find generic or ironic stock images, watermark intact (for additional irony) and it would have accomplished the same thing. All this poster is doing is advertising that there’s going to be a band night and several acts are playing.
Concerts and show posters are still in use in and around seattle, which is famous for concert posters papering the sides of telephone poles - increasing their diameter until they are taken down in huge husks. They are typically of a pretty high quality, although some might use rudimentary wordart with stock photos. There are two that spring to my mind - a rap poster with a bunch of dogs on it, and a poster for a 100 gecs show that used purposefully bad clipart of an onion.
I made a poster for a Lan party. Nobody asked me to make one, and nobody paid me to make one, the event had an entry fee but that went to charity. I enjoyed making the poster, it took me maybe 10 - 15 minutes to make, and I used mainly stock images I found off google. But I was able to collage something together with a few stylistic flairs. Like, it’s not the greatest poster in the world, but it conveyed information and got at least one or two people to show up. I got to make a bit of art and share it.
And, yeah a little bit of history, I used to go to Lan parties in college, and for those events I would offer to make the posters, which would get printed, and some of which might be floating on a hard drive somewhere. Those all have value
In an ideal world, someone the bar owner knows would be making posters for weekly events, maybe they get paid a little, or maybe they just stop by and get free drinks from the bar. Maybe this same person is using AI art and getting free drinks. Perhaps they are choosing to use AI art because they don’t feel like they can make anything “good” and AI art is “Good enough” while having the separation of “not being made by me, but my idea”
Eventually AI art is going to choke out human made art. I have noticed not just bar show posters, but also pop up shop posters using AI generated art. I hate looking at it because I feel deceived into thinking someone cared about something enough to draw it, when in reality they didn’t care at all and wanted the final product. It makes me wonder if I should care about the thing they’re advertising because this lack of care probably extends to the event itself.
We’re seeing a phenomenon on Facebook where communities around things like woodcarving and feltwork are being overrun with people posting AI images of fake woodcarvings and feltwork. The fakes succeed because they look perfect at first glance, they can be made in an instant because they don’t represent real work, and they look fantastical enough to get “likes” and engagement from passers by and the community. The result is that people participating in earnest, with real woodcarvings and feltworks, can’t anymore. They can’t outpace the output of the fakers, they can’t produce something in real life that’s as good as what the fakers are generating. So they leave, and eventually most communities on larger social media sites are going to evaporate because they’re going to be a torrent of AI sludge.
People will still recognize genuine art, and the desire to have a web site that is not governed by a “for you” algorithm will probably always exist. But the general consensus seems to be that most people won’t care, that quantity will win out over quality, and the world is just going to be sludge forever.
I don’t have a good forecast for this. Microsoft recently invested with (or bought?) inWorld, an AI company. Inworld had an implementation within a GTA 6 mod where you could interact with NPCs in the world, and presumably ChatGPT would generate dialog and an LLM voice synthesizer would turn text into speech. I watched a video of someone playing it. The dialog is nonsensical and references actions, locations, and things that are not in the game. The person playing the game thought that was novel and played along. The voice over is worse, and the text is worse, but the player doesn’t care about quality, just having unlimited “content” within the context of the game is enough. I felt like I had stumbled into a bar where everyone was drinking pond scum and saying that it tasted great, and I just wanted a glass of water again.
That is what is most frustrating about this AI is that the world is going to get remarkably worse, uglier, filled with more garbage, and most people will not care. They care that there is “more” and the fact that it’s garbage doesn’t even register with their brain.