my partner and i went to a new place that just popped up around the corner from where I work and every single menu, ad for upcoming events, and everything else you could imagine looked exactly like that wall of shit. I can’t stand it, can’t even avoid this shit by turning off your phone
and the sad thing is that so many creative people who had fun doing these dont get to do it anymore. being into art in the pre AI era you would get asked to review a draft, sketch a logo, help someone out with a drawing, and even make a simple flyer but that rarely happens anymore. it robs us of simple human interactions like these
I saw signs in a public parking area recently, like metal signs, telling people how to pay for parking in these spots, that looked like these flyers just in two-tone color. It was wild how unreadable it was for something that was mostly text and a QR code. It was so obvious that someone used AI to generate the layout of the sign.
I blame Canva for injecting AI into literally every part of their design system. I know that Shopify(?) has an included website builder, and it requires you to use AI for editing the site…
Like you aren’t even allowed to place things manually, you have to ask the robot to move your text elements and it constantly just fucks up your whole layout.
You HAVE to use the AI to edit the website? What a nightmare!
Yup, they let you choose elements, but changing the layout is done with prompting
Klaviyo does this too. Instead of building a segment you have to ask AI to do it, which it then just goes and partially does. I just want to filter for everyone where postcode starts with a specific number.
It makes me think even visual builder tools were a mistake because it’s how we got here. Everyone should just be forced to learn SQL
My favorite web service right now is Metabase. Open source, written in lisp (clojure), and it has a visual builder that literally shows you the SQL and you can convert any visual query to SQL with one click.
I self host it and have gotten several local businesses to use it instead of their crap paid systems. It’ll run on a laptop no problem.
I saw a completely AI generated flyer for an art class one time which I thought was sadly ironic
