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Tübingens umstrittener Oberbürgermeister Boris Palmer soll die Landesregierung modernisieren. Cem Özdemir erhofft sich von seinem Freund unkonventionelle Impulse für den Bürokratieabbau: »Es ist niemand vor ihm sicher.«
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Thinking loudly about networked beings. Commonist. Projektionsfläche. License: CC-BY
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Die Grünen bauen in BW _mit Boris Palmer_ DOGE nach und ich wundert bei denen ja auch gar nichts mehr.
Berlin/Germany
"I’ve struggled to write something that would persuade my colleagues and friends to ditch AI and affirm their avowed beliefs about climate change, the trustworthiness of megacorporations, and our right to live and work with dignity."
Berlin/Germany
I am not sure, exactly, how many ChatGPT signs, flyers, or advertisements I had seen without noticing. But I do remember that once I began noticing them, I saw them everywhere. A few blocks from my house, on a display easel: “Break Free Surfing California: SURF LESSONS VENICE BEACH.” On Instagram, a going out of business closeout sale for a skateboard shop. On invites to parties from friends, Fourth of July barbecues being thrown by bars, concert posters. I saw ChatGPT-designed advertisements for drug deliveries in Berlin, World Cup parties in France, junk hauling services in South Carolina, and fundraisers in Texas. The scourge of low effort, stylistically indistinguishable AI-generated signs and flyers have flooded both social media and, increasingly, posters, billboards, and signs in real life: “So ain’t nobody gonna address this ChatGPT flyer pandemic we’re in?” one viral post on Threads read last month.
“YOUR FLYER LOOKS LIKE GARBAGE,” a viral ChatGPT-generated parody of the genre posted by Jill Oliver reads. “Hey if this is your flyer, I’m not going, I’m not donating, I’m not sharing. Don’t ask me.” The “ChatGPT flyer pandemic” has become a big topic of conversation among graphic designers, musicians, bars, and small business owners who care about design and showing that they’ve put effort into something.
Once you notice a ChatGPT flyer, you will see them everywhere if you keep your eyes open. The art of the format is basically big, flashy bright text on dark background and an AI-generated or AI-altered image. There is almost universally a little box of generic icons in a bulleted list vaguely tied to whatever event or business it’s advertising, lines coming off of the text to emphasize whatever it’s saying, and either bolded words or underlined text and tons of arrows and checkmarks haphazardly strewn throughout. It is easier to just show you what they look like than describe it, because they all look basically the same:
The argument against ChatGPT-generated flyers is basically the same as the argument against all other types of AI slop: It looks generic, lazy, and like businesses don’t care. The designer Kenzi Green made a video about the backlash to AI flyers that has 870,000 views called “Customers are begging you to stop the AI slop.” Another video of a graphic designer putting his head in his hands and shaking his head while ChatGPT flyers scrolls past called “we are living in an AI flyer pandemic” has nearly 7 million views.
“Your logo, food truck wrap, social media graphics, menus all look AI generated,” Green said. “People are going to be able to spot that from a mile away and choose the competitor next to you that looks like they actually hired a human being,” she said. “It might feel like you’re ‘saving time and money,’ but you’re actually slowly turning your brand into something generic like all the other brands out there using AI tools.”
The rejection of ChatGPT flyers infesting real life spaces is real, growing, and cuts across languages and borders. The New Jersey-based sticker company Death By Stickers has started selling a “CERTIFIED AI BULLSHIT” sticker for people to slap on ChatGPT flyers: “With your roll of 50 “CERTIFIED AI BULLSHIT” labels you can let everyone around town know when that flyer is AI SLOP,” the company says. The Thomas House Bar in Dublin has said it will stop letting people post AI flyers in its pub: “We’re not accepting AI posters or flyers for the pub,” the bar wrote on Instagram. “We’re right next to Ireland’s biggest art college, lads. It’s not a good look.” A venue in Oakland has banned AI flyers, too. I have seen anti-AI posters in Portuguese (“TUDO IGUAL: FLYER GERADO PELO CHATGT? CLARO QUE SIM!” Same old story: Flyer generated by ChatGPT? You bet!) and German (“BITTE KEINE FLYER MIT CHATGPT” Please don’t create flyers with ChatGPT). I have seen numerous viral posts from people saying that they will not go to businesses or events that use AI posters to promote, lest one get roped into a Fyre Fest or Willy Wonka AI hellscape experience. And I have begun seeing real graphic designers offering low-cost services for companies that promise not to use AI flyers.
Jonathon Yule, executive creative director for design at the creative studio Concrete in Toronto told 404 Media that these types of posters continue a long tradition of terrible graphic design that we see in the world, but with “none of the charm” that may accidentally come from a business owner making something low quality.
“Terrible posters are nothing new,” Yule said. “The only difference today is generative AI makes it easier than ever to get the veneer of "polish" with none of the charm that these types of posters might have had when the designer was faced with constraints (usually time, resources or experience). These types of posters would have typically been done by designers either working at a small agency or print shop and these mid-level design jobs are disappearing. Stepping back to think about where this style (and its acceptance in the world) might have come from I'm going to have to pin the blame on YouTube and AB-tested-whatever-gets-more-clicks approach to thumbnail design with the exaggerated facial expressions and shoddy yet eye catching typography.”
In the last few weeks, since I began noticing ChatGPT flyers, I’ve been taking photos of ones I’ve seen in real life, and have asked my friends to take photos of AI flyers they’ve seen out in the real world. I’ve seen them at Mexican restaurants and for surfing lessons in Los Angeles, on business cards for drug delivery services and on döner shops in Berlin, for pretzel shops in Philadelphia, and so on. I've tried at times to not notice these, but like with other AI, my brain feels like it is constantly trying to calculate whether any given sign or flyer was made using AI, and, if so, whether it actually matters.
These can be generated in ChatGPT easily by asking it to generate you a flyer or advertisement for any sort of event or business you can think of. ChatGPT routinely generated flyers that are essentially identical in format to what I see all the time when I threw random events at it: “Can you make a poster for my bar? It’s called Jason’s bar and we’re having a Fourth of July party. It goes from 4-10 pm and has food, fun, and fireworks,” and it instantly generated this, which is emblematic of the style.
None of the ChatGPT posters have the “Graphic Design Is My Passion” charm of quickly dashed off or handwritten posters, nor even the unhinged excess you might see in, for example, a Softbank Vision Fund slide presentation. For my money, one of the most iconic pieces of graphic design of the last 20 years is “Friendship Ended With Mudasir, Now Salman is my best friend.” With a ChatGPT poster, you get none of the sheer emotion that comes through the page with a mouse-drawn X. Here’s to bringing back an MS Paint aesthetic, handwritten scribbles, or literally anything else.
“Hey if this is your flyer, I’m not going, I’m not donating, I’m not sharing. Don’t ask me.”
Same goes for "AI"-generated title images etc.
Same goes for "AI"-generated title images etc.
Berlin/Germany
About a month ago, Flathub announced a ban on slopcoded applications. Evangelos “GeopJr” Paterakis, developer of a number of popular Linux applications and ton of other things, did some research into just how many applications tagged with “AI slop”, a tag Flathub reviewers used to keep track of slopcoded applications submitted to Flathub, actually survived the test of time. The results are exactly what you’d expect.
Of the 120 unique repos, 32 were maintained and 88 were abandoned. No seriously, a big portion of them was completely deleted, nowhere to be found, others stopped 6 months ago, right after submitting to Flathub.
↫ Evangelos “GeopJr” Paterakis
That’s absolutely soul-crushing. Why should Flathub’s reviewers spend their precious, limited time talking to lazy slopcoders’ “AI” agents to get their slopcoded applications into Flathub, when 70% of these applications are abandoned or outright deleted from existence within mere months of being submitted? Minimal effort for the slopcoders, maximum effort for the reviewers. Just dump a bunch of shitty code over the fence, let a chatbot handle the interactions with the reviewers, and pretend you made a valuable contribution.
This is the contradiction slopcode enthusiasts really don’t want to talk about. If these “AI” tools are so great, where is all the amazing new software? Where’s the massive gains in software quality? Isn’t the story that “AI” tools do the menial work, giving programmers more time to focus on improving their software? Reality does not seem to match the story we’re being sold. Despite these slopcode tools being out and available for years now, there’s no influx of great applications and other software, there’s no rise in software quality, nothing.
What we mostly seem to be getting are slopcoded projects nobody, not even their “creators” care about, so they just get abandoned and deleted as quickly as they were dredged up from the bottom of the programming barrel. These aren’t applications created because someone wanted them to exist; these are applications created because some mid programmer got high on their “AI” supply and fancied themselves better at programming than they really are – only to realise once the comedown hits they’ve got crappy, barely working, entirely unmaintainable gibberish vaguely looking like code nobody can make head nor tails of.
And then they abandon the project, ready for the next high – leaving everyone else to clean up their mess.
What a miserable workflow.
"What we mostly seem to be getting are slopcoded projects nobody, not even their “creators” care about, so they just get abandoned and deleted as quickly as they were dredged up from the bottom of the programming barrel."
Berlin/Germany
(Für ein Event wurde ich gefragt ein paar Worte zur politischen Dimension von Daten und Infrastrukturen der Digitalität” zu schreiben. Ich veröffentliche es auch hier kurz als kleine Notiz, weil es mein aktuelles Denken ganz gut zusammenfasst.)
Die Debatte über Daten und digitale Infrastrukturen bezieht sich oft stark auf das „wer“: Wer designed solche Systeme, wer wird ihnen ausgesetzt, wer wird diskriminiert oder bevorteilt? Alle diese Fragen sind selbstverständlich relevant, blenden aber doch eine zentrale strukturelle Betrachtung aus. Wir haben gesellschaftlich und politisch „digital“ mit „fortschrittlich“ gleichgesetzt. Alles muss „digitalisiert“ werden – wir haben dafür jetzt sogar ein eigenes Ministerium! – damit es voran geht. Digitalisierung als hegemoniales Verständnis der Welt läuft aber in die klassische Verwechslung von „Map“ und „Territory“, denn Digitales ist immer nur „Map“, wird aber behandelt wie „Territory“.
Die Auswirkungen dieses Denkmusters sind die Etablierung einer stark durch eine sehr simplifizierte, ingenieurs- und STEM-getriebene Modllierungssicht auf die Welt, die die realen Widersprüche und Komplexitäten der soziopolitischen und sogar physikalischen Welt negiert zugunsten eines Ansatzes, der möglichst einfach in Computercode gegossen werden kann. So werden dann Geschlechtsidentitäten als binäres „männlich/weiblich“ abgelegt und in einem Anflug an Inklusion noch ein „divers“ hinzugefügt, als ob diese dritte, am Ende nur als diffuses Sammelbecken fungierende, Datenoption strukturell eine Änderung vorgenommen hätte. Dieses Beispiel zeigt, wie stark die normierende Wirkung des Digitalprimates die Denkräume und Lösungsoptionen beschränkt.
Die Arbeit an konkreten Machtauswirkungen digitaler Infrastrukturen ist wichtig, aber die Analyse, Kritik und an vielen Stellen auch Bekämpfung von Digitalisierung als kultureller Logik darf nicht außer acht gelassen werden. Die Welt ist nicht das, was man in Computern und Algorithmen ausdrücken kann. Das ist eine für einige bequeme, aber gewaltvolle Illusion.
"Digitalisierung als hegemoniales Verständnis der Welt läuft aber in die klassische Verwechslung von „Map“ und „Territory“, denn Digitales ist immer nur „Map“, wird aber behandelt wie „Territory“."
Berlin/Germany
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