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In focus<br>Soulless summer fairs and cute puppies: AI poster slop is taking over a pub near you<br>A vapid style of graphic is infiltrating social media groups and being used to advertise local events across the country – though no one seems to actually like it. Katie Rosseinsky takes a closer look at why those using prompt-painting will end up regretting it

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AI flyers, like these ChatGPT-generated examples, are visible everywhere you look – shop windows and Facebook groups alike (ChatGPT)

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There is a scourge taking over Britain’s towns. Glance at the notices pinned to the wall in the pub or scroll through a local Facebook group and you’ll be met with a barrage of event posters that look uncannily alike.<br>Whether they’re advertising a summer fair at the community centre, a car boot sale at the park or an open mic night in the beer garden, these flyers share similar fonts, interchangeable layouts, and an overwhelming air of soullessness. Another thing that they have in common? They were generated by AI.<br>Once you’ve started to notice the hallmarks of this aesthetic – if derivative slop coughed out in a few seconds by a large language model (LLM) can really be said to possess anything as lofty as an aesthetic – you’ll start to see them everywhere. It’s a look that has the nation’s bulletin boards in a chokehold of anonymous cutesiness.

How to describe it? The overall feel is busy and often fussy, the backdrops crammed with flowers, smiling kids playing, or cute animals (there’s always the possibility that ChatGPT will have bestowed a puppy with an extra paw, or elevated the ducks to gargantuan proportions, given AI’s continued but less obvious propensity for haunting visual errors).<br>A dash of bunting tends to crown the corners of the page, and the fonts are rudimentary, the sort of thing that would send a proper graphic designer into a decline. All the relevant information seems, for some inexplicable reason, to be overlaid on planks of wood, or ye olde scrolls, perhaps to summon up a semblance of rustic charm. There is, of course, nothing remotely rustic about an image that has been cobbled together by a bot powered by massive, water-gobbling data centres.

Plus, the images often have the yellowy-beige undertone that has become a telltale sign of ChatGPT (it’s thought that AI models like OpenAI’s will have learnt from a dataset filled with warm, “golden hour”-style images from social media, so inevitably sway towards yellowness).<br>open image in gallery

Summer (slop) fair: ChatGPT can create an identikit poster in a matter of moments (Created by ChatGPT)<br>This plague of drab ads is enough to leave you asking: whatever happened to the noble pursuit of throwing some clip art onto a blank Word document, jazzing up the fonts with a sunset gradient and hoping for the best? At least those efforts had a whiff of human endeavour about them – even if they did tend to rely heavily on Comic Sans.

In the interests of investigative journalism, I asked ChatGPT to create a poster for a generic summer fair at “the village hall”, with a few classic fete activities. It took a matter of seconds for it to come up with a boring but essentially functional image – one that looked just like the other posters I’d already seen.

This style, it seems, has very quickly become ChatGPT’s default – flattening out any quirks and creating a truly tedious universal visual language, from Cornwall to Carlisle.<br>In April, the artist Barry Whitehouse collated 12 flyers from across the UK to demonstrate just how out of hand this trend has become. “All these posters look the same, yet they are from different areas in the UK, so...