This fucking shite

This fucking shite

Octoberfest this year had a lot of stands, all with the same AI slop posters. I bought a burger from a stand with just a handwritten sign. Felt good.
What gets me is they're all the same style. Do they not see that their posters are the same as everyone else's??
Anyone competent enough to understand that effort is a vital component of modern marketing is already steering clear of AI slop nonsense. It's the stupids that are left believing that doing something as cheaply and easily as possible won't reflect poorly on their business.
and good lord there's a lot of stupid people out there.
I have a lot to say about how and why, but i think these people though their posters looked good before they saw everyone have the same style.
Like how Walmart and Target are competitors, but their themes complement each other as to what we expect from their stores. It's something a successful business can't ignore. See power tools brands have all cornered their respective color theme, but up close they all perform similar to our expectations before anything else.
So AI steps in, advertised it can make posters now, and people believe it. Either they can't afford an artist, or don't care enough to consider. Swaths of salt-of-earth businesses jump to use it, naively, and kinda out themselves accidentally as the amateurs they are.
Everyone sees it, and realized too late. I think that style will die off pretty quickly if business owners know what's good for them.
It's just so absurd that AI as a solution is just again, seen as another poison to the thing it's supposed to solve. If I were to write a story about it, I couldn't make it up. The absurdity has it's own gravitational pull.
They each probably thought they had this great idea of getting a crazy unique AI sign before they showed up and saw that everyone had the same idea.
I see more or less the same at craft fairs: lots of the same stuff, lazy dad crafts, lazy mom crafts (done at scale). All following the same toktok or Instagram trend.
To the signs thing, I think I'd rather see a generic stencil and spray paint sign. At least that's real.
I personally didn't think Comic Sans was bad, just overused, especially in contexts where it didn't belong. (Funeral homes should have been banned from using it by industry regulation. They never did that. Anywhere in the world. This is why we need multinational legislation.)
This font, whatever the hell it is called, besmirches the good name of hand lettered sign painting and advertising that was common in advertising before computer typography. Have you seen old hand lettered ads? Unless they were in great hurry, they never left brush edges visible to this extent. It looked sloppy.
Best use of comic sans I can recall was the OG Higgs boson discovery presentation in 2012
Oh, I guess I never realized it was supposed to be brush painted letters. I figured it was just trying to be edgy
It's especially important to understand that in the early days of computing you only had a single system font or a tiny font pack of less than 10. Microsoft used a tiny pack that had Arial as their sans-serif, Times New Roman as their serif, Courier New as their monospace, and two symbol fonts. Of the three real fonts, two were incredibly computery, leaving Times New Roman as the friendliest font available.
Microsoft then set out to make a family-friendly cartoon-themed OS and set the entire OS in TNR. One of their designers took issue with it and designed Comic Sans to be a viable OS font that felt friendly and suited comic art. He was a bit late in starting, so it shipped with TNR and immediately failed, but Comic Sans ended up shipping with some versions of 95, then became a default font in Internet Explorer and Win98. As a result, it was the only friendly font on the average computer for ages.
This is an insult to Comic Sans
I've been absolutely shocked walking through city centers and seeing these fucking AI flyers everywhere. Boycot whoever uses this shit and pay your local artists and graphic designers.
I am in Japan right now and they were selling postcards with AI images. Not even art made by humans...
It's weird be cause you would think that whoever makes these should have the common sense to see if it's a bit too obvious or too typical. You can use just about any font in existence in AI by just telling it to use that font, but lazy ass people choose the crypto chud font.
You’re telling me they could be generating posters with Papyrus, Joker, or Wingdings font, and don’t?
Missed opportunities
It's an absolutely insane test of my faith in humanity. It just takes like 10 more words to get AI to make a sign that's at least a little different from the slop. But they won't even do that. It's like they're spitting in their own face with the disrespect they show to their own businesses or whatever they're advertising. It's nuts.
Effort? From slop consumers/peddlers?
You'll have better luck finding ice in the Sahara.
It isn't really a specific font, just something AI models made to generate images have picked up on. Things that were immediately attention grabbing and bold probably got more positive scoring and reinforcement during training, so they learned to use larger more dramatic styles (this is also why you often see sort of electric or fiery glows, sparks, dramatic lighting, etc) but that doesn't really work to help a business stand out when all of them now look like that.
I'm also not sure if everyone knows this yet, but most AI image generators nowadays are split into two parts. It used to be that you'd need a prompt like poster, graphic, promotional, large text, dramatic, brushstroke font, on sign, city background, club background, microphone, This Font is the New Comic Sans bold text, high quality, but since most people do this shit through something like ChatGPT, and might just say "make me a poster that says 'This Font is the New Comic Sans'", in the background, an LLM takes that prompt and makes a more extended prompt for the image generator.
This is where a lot of this type of thing probably takes place. For example, I prompted an AI model with Convert this prompt: "Make me a poster for my nightclub" into a Stable Diffusion prompt for a poster, and it gave me: nightclub event poster, bold neon typography, vibrant magenta and electric blue lighting, silhouetted dancers in motion, smoke and laser beams, glowing geometric shapes, dark moody background, high contrast, synthwave aesthetic, centered composition, space reserved for event title and date, ultra detailed, sharp focus, professional graphic design, 8k (emphasis added by me)
Nightclub posters do sometimes have these elements, but a lot of them actually use clean typography, little to no neon inside the typography, it just made up synthwave as a relevant aesthetic to the club it knows nothing about, and simultaneously wants a dark and moody background... with something that has high contrast, neon lights, lasers, and lighting everywhere.
Both image generators and LLMs optimize for things that are bold and for excessive additions like you saw in the prompt earlier, which leads to the super sloppy, over the top, crowded designs you see on most AI posters.
Yes! It feels like every second restaurant in my area has suddenly gone with this font and AI slop images for their menus. Lets call it Tragic Sans or something like that.
I see that, I go elsewhere.
Fascist tech-bro slop font? Just in case it doesn't have a name I'd like to throw this in the ring.
The essential qualities of a good typeface balance visual beauty with practical function. This is just plain ugly and makes Comic sans look elegant. Using this crud is as acceptable as attending a funeral dressed as a clown.

I was JUST thinking about how I see this on a bunch of ai slop and slop adjacent stuff recently!
Why is it that all AI fliers look like this though?
This ! This is the exception for the rule : never slop
I saw a funny poster that was in the style of a LLM generated event promo poster that was actually all disparaging text like "no one is going to read that shit" and "this is actively causing people to avoid your event". I felt that was borderline and decided not to post it here.
I’ll be honest, I didn’t make it, but looking at it I can’t tell if it’s actually slop or not. Looks like two standard photos side by side with text overlaid and a mic png
I don't see why you are getting downvoted. In any case, the hand and the form of the shadow people is pretty much the only blatant giveaway. Its getting near impossible though, especially if someone simply modifies the giveaways away.
I’ve been frustrated with Lemmy’s trend of downvoting people when they struggle to tell if something is slop. Usually it’s from some genuinely trying to learn how to spot the giveaways. What does downvoting someone trying to learn accomplish?
I'm with you. I post a shit ton, so all I see are fucking cats telling me slop is bad.
Fortunately, someone taught me about this: https://www.zerogpt.com/ about a week or two ago and it's been helping. It's still cumbersome to use given the speed at which I find and post memes, but at least it's another tool I can rely on somewhat.
Look closely at the mic. Why does the grille look so organic and asymmetrical?
Look at that skyscraper. What in the hell is that blue thing on top of it?
You just have to look for like 3 seconds to see that this is slop.
At least it makes it easy to instantly detect the slop. Its like the em dash or the "its not just A. Its B." in writing.
A YouTuber I used to adore has gone to this shitty ai thumbnail format in recent months, so I've stopped clicking on him 😞
A few of the half decent, small YouTube channels I follow started using it in their thumbnails as a way to polish up their channel. Little do they know is all it does is suck the soul out of their content.
What I come to call the "300" typeface because it's what all AI slop posters are like now. They're more or less based on "Edo SZ" which has seen very frequent use.
I first took a note about it in Like a Dragon\Yakuza games, where it's used for title script of chapters, tasks, encounters with enemies. They got trendy for a while after starting to rerelease on many platforms including PC.

EdoSZ or Friday13? https://fontmeme.com/friday-the-13th-font/
Half of what makes me hate this is that the people making these posters don't even understand why its wrong :(
This is an insult to comic sans. Comic sans is a good font and helpful to people with dyslexia
Comic sans (originally designed for a comic dog character) is an awful typeface. It is constantly misused in serious settings such business contracts, medical notices, and legal documents. In the UK many schools use it. It is as appropriate as wearing a clown costume to a funeral.
Using it makes any professional design look childish, sloppy, or amateurish
There is very little peer-reviewed scientific evidence that Comic Sans inherently improves reading performance for students with dyslexia.

It is? I’ve seen a couple fonts meant to combat dyslexia and they look very different from comic sans
It's either this shit or the fucking humanoid robot in every tech related post touching a holo screen showing completely pointless and unrelated data

At least comic sans is easy on the eyes. easy to read.
You might need new glasses.
That is literally one of comic sans upside. Its objectively speaking easy to read. Its one of the better fonts for people with dyslexia and reading difficulties.
People hate on it because memes and ignorance. Also the absolute over use making people sick of it. But those are subjective things.
Typeface, not font. Also, one of the better ones for dislexia is a stretch given there's actually no hard proven data, it's all anecdotal & preference based. It's not HORRIBLE but there are plenty of ones that lots of studies focus on that have marginal potential.
We have 2 approaches: 1 being good lettering + how much families enable good reading and 2 being the cognitive processing of information via text. Comic Sans falls very mid on both but that's not necessarily bad either.
If we want to talk dislexia alone, OpenDyslexic followed by the still growing Atkinson Hyperlegible even as a serif, COULD be marginally be the better ones.
Comic Sans has one big advantage, it's ubiquitous. That means that dyslexics have more chances to see the appeal of it in comparison with blocky monolithic Serif typefaces.
Dyslexie is the actual one that opened Pandora's box regarding dyslexia assisting typefaces but that's a rabbit hole for another time. It's fascinating & forever changing.
To be fair I was more thinking about it in the context of the era it was everywhere. So the late 90s to very early 00s if I recall?
Which I want to say was before much of the actual effort to make better options.
I probably should have prefaced that. That's my bad.
I dislike the font, but I REALLY fucking hate what they're doing with food. It's like they're all using the same horrible model that has never seen hashbrowns and BBQ sauce. You ask midjounrey for a steak, it makes you a convincing steak. It's like every restaurant in every country is set on tryptophobic food
but I really hope it goes the way of Comic Sans
I use comic sans monospace in my terminal. But I don't want this shit in my terminal!
You're absolutely right to push bwck on this, it is a dogshit slop-font.
What else can i help you with today?
Is it actually a font? No same letter looks the same - look at every 'S' for example, they all differ. Very similar but not the same. Maybe its just slop?
New Lobster
I don't think I have ever actually seen someone talk about Lobster. Because yes, after learning about that font, I started noticing it EVERYWHERE because it's a pretty nice font and is free for commercial use.

To play devils advocate, I reopened Canva for the first time in forever.
Anti Canva rant
(Any service that could be free/no account, but wants an account is immediate red flag in my book. No one NEEDS an account to make a slideshow or poster. Plus I'm on the haveibeenpwned list of the 2019 data leak. But we 1 week away from the school Christmas concert, and the people in charge insist, )
But when I opened the website, there isn't a clear warning to say "hey, this font or image pack is AI" you have to read the fine print to know for sure.
Canva itself advertises "hey, use our AI helper", but for the 3rd party features? Up to the uploaded to say if its AI or not. (Still hate Canva though. Can't wait for the concert so I can never open the website again)
But when I opened the website, there isn't a clear warning to say "hey, this font or image pack is AI" you have to read the fine print to know for sure.
This is what annoys me on a lot of 3D asset websites as well. On steam you are supposed to declare if your game includes any AI generated assets and since there is pretty good evidence that that affects purchase numbers, I don't want to include any. Trouble is, you don't always know where everything is coming from.
Most people probably wouldn't care if some background rock was made by AI rather than the human artist, but it still technically breaking the rules, and I suspect that if someone were maliciously inclined they could really make a big thing of it.
Is it really hard to write a prompt to make it not look like this? Or are people too lazy and just use the first generic slop result that they get?
The letters differ slightly, the 2 E in "THE" and "NEW" or the Cs in COMIC - so it might be hand lettering, possibly done by artificial virtual hands.....
"I hate AI slop so much I use AI slop to show off how much I hate it." Why are people like this?
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