You’re waiting for your oat milk latte, and there’s a flyer taped to the counter. Live music, Friday, 8pm. The band members have a suspicious number of fingers between them. The guitar has one too many strings and a headstock that melts into the amp. The text under the date says “Featuring Loocal Artits.” Someone printed forty of these.
You’ve seen this poster. Maybe not that exact one, but its cousin — on a community board, in a restaurant window, in your neighborhood group chat. People have started calling them ChatGPT flyers, and they are everywhere. One tech outlet asked readers to send in the worst examples they’d encountered and got buried in submissions. Another writer described the moment we’re in as a “ChatGPT flyer pandemic,” and made a point that I think is the most useful thing anyone has said about this: the AI-versus-human argument is almost beside the point, because regardless of how these posters were made, they’re just ugly.
Bad output isn’t a law of nature
If you’re not a designer, the easy conclusion is that AI image tools are simply bad at this and always will be. I don’t think that’s what’s happening, and I say that as someone who spends most of her time explaining these tools to people who’d rather not think about them.
What’s actually happening is that a tool with no taste got handed to a lot of people in a hurry, with no step in between. A poster is not one job. It’s several:
- Deciding what the single most important piece of information is
- Making that information readable from across a room
- Choosing an image that supports the message instead of competing with it
- Proofreading, which sounds boring and is the step that most often gets skipped
An image generator will happily do a mediocre version of step three and ignore the rest. It doesn’t know that the date matters more than the vibe. It doesn’t know your town. It has no opinion about whether the flyer works, because it has no opinions.
Which is why the humans are having a moment
There’s a story going around about a designer who takes these mangled posters and fixes them — same event, same information, rebuilt by someone who knows what they’re doing. The framing was blunt: it’s AI versus humans, and the humans are winning. That’s a satisfying line, and I’d add a small footnote to it. What the designer is winning at isn’t image production. It’s judgment. They’re supplying exactly the thing the tool can’t.
That distinction matters if you’re trying to figure out where any of this is headed. The valuable skill was never “can you make a picture.” It’s “can you tell whether this picture is doing its job.” That skill has gotten scarcer relative to demand, which usually means it gets worth more, not less.
The contest problem
Then there’s the messier version of this story. At the Ohio State Fair, a poster made with AI won the poster contest, and a lot of Ohioans were not thrilled about it. The detail that stuck with people was that the winning entry contained the usual AI-generated image errors — the kind of small structural mistakes that look fine in a thumbnail and fall apart when you look closely. Judges picked it anyway.
I find this more interesting than the flyer stuff, because it’s not a story about a tool being bad. It’s a story about humans not noticing. Contests are supposed to be where judgment gets applied most carefully. If the errors slipped past there, the problem isn’t only the entry. It’s that we’re all still learning what to look at.
What to actually do about it
If you’re a non-technical person who occasionally needs to make a poster for a bake sale or a book club, I’m not going to tell you to avoid these tools. Use them. Just don’t let them be the last step.
- Write your text yourself, in a normal text editor, and paste it in. Generated text is where the embarrassing typos live.
- Look at your poster at the size people will see it. Squint. If the date isn’t the first thing you find, start over.
- Zoom in on hands, faces, instruments, logos, and signage. That’s where the seams show.
- Show one other person before you print forty copies.
The tools aren’t going to develop taste on their own, and the flyers on your coffee shop counter are the visible evidence. But a poster that looks rushed is a choice someone made, not a sentence the technology handed down. Someone can make a different choice tomorrow, and some people already are — which is a more hopeful read on this than the six-fingered guitarist deserves.
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