Frequent Flyers: so tAIring
AI & the sea of sameness
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A.I. is all around us. Like air, or sunlight, and hot takes, and hopes, and stupidity. Accepting its ubiquity, we are told, is just the simple, sane thing to do. In some respects, I would agree- and there is much to look ahead to with excitement. But of all the nooks of our lives that AI has crept or stormed its way into, some are better off without that insidious reach.
I found some actions and reactions of this kind today, strung together across design and music and communication and voice acting.
Fly Away: Flyers that shout the same thing.
A Bus-Stop Scrawl: A tiny pushback in Singapore stop.
Speak Up: No AI please, we’re singing & speaking.
Chat TJB:
Somethingsomeone to talk to.➕ · HBO Shorts · Disney x Pods · Myspace murmurs ·
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Cheers,
Shakey
1. Fly Away
Is anyone else seeing this?
Digital flyers, real flyers, Insta posts, sports camps, calls for submissions, posters, restaurant promos, community events.
They. Are. All. Looking. The. Same.
Clutter! Big flashy letters! Dark contrasty background, bright AI-generated or AI-enhanced images, clutter, lots of text, boxes, bullets, icons, always icons, and oh- clutter.
Look, I get it- things are made easier for people who need the ease. Not everyone has a designer. Not everything is ‘creative expression’. Not everything is art. Sometimes you just need to shout out your point, is all.
I get that.
But this sort of death by AI-flyer-aesthetic can be tiresome for your audience and tire out your brand.
If you have a stall at a fair, you wouldn’t fill it with off-the-shelf cans from the supermarket. If you’re headed for a performance, you wouldn’t press shuffle on an anonymous Spotify playlist and leave it. If you have a lunch promo, you wouldn’t stick a frozen pizza on the table.
But that’s kinda the vibe these flyers convey. As more and more people see more and more of these, what are they taking away when they see your version, just like all the other versions? One more in an assembly line of ‘convenient’ communication.
You/your brand look and feel interchangeable.
“Your graphic tells a story and is the first thing that people see. That gives them the idea of what they’re in store for. If your graphic is fake, what does that say about what you’re trying to broadcast out there?” DJ Ca$h Era from
And I say this also very much as a layperson, not someone working in ‘creative’ or ‘brand or ‘design’. I have seen too many of these in my own social world, my neighbourhood, my family’s life, not just in my ‘work’ explorations.
Of course, it’s not just my little corner of the internet/globe. I only had to prod a search and sure enough, there are many bemoaning, “the scourge of low effort, stylistically indistinguishable AI-generated signs” ^ spreading across both our digital and real lives.
“these look like garbage and make me feel like ur event will be garbage too” ^
“Please just get a marker pen out instead.”
In the European summer, many in UK felt overrun by summer fair flyers that looked all too alike, feeling like the look had “the nation’s bulletin boards in a chokehold of anonymous cutesiness.” In that time of summer sameness, artist and teacher Barry Whitehouse compiled a dozen of these (in the process confusing himself, because they were so similar) making the plea then to just get our markers instead.
It’s gone far enough for some to even look at Comic Sans with some…. affection? The horror! Katie Rosseinsky defeated tone is common, “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.”^
And that typeface! There are some (not entirely satisfying but logical) explorations about how and why these are the same and why is the same ‘font’ picked. It’s pretty much what you would think– AI aggregates, predicts, plays it safe. (More explanations here and here.)
(Feel free to gag on a large crowd sourced collection here)
Alternative music venue Thomas House Bar in Dublin is one of the many establishments to make a stand against AI flyers, banning them from any of the bands playing at the venue. Sample this too from the Stork Club in Oakland, which shouted out NO AI FLYERS on their socials.
A.I. has its place in the world. Like creating meme slop that makes you stupid and rendering your career irrelevant or robocalling your mom once a week and chatting with her in your voice. All important tools brought to us by the scrappy altruistic billionaire overlords that merely want us to live in a future of abundance.
Such pushback, both passive and active, is all over- a sticker company selling rolls of labels reading “CERTIFIED AI BULLSHIT,” as tags for AI-made flyers ; no-AI badges and made by human labels; venues saying No to those who use AI in their work; fans saying they aren’t going to go; student pushback; Singaporean indignance.
Having said that, I still do find most of these coming from far shores. There is less fundamental pushback I have seen in Southeast Asia and South Asia- at least in my circle/feed/algo and the research I did in writing this. Happy to be shown more.
There’s so many reasons to reconsider doing these- aesthetic assault, visual dreariness, brand slush… and this is not even getting into the debate about using AI in the first place. Digital and physical lives blur, our audiences are exposed to so much, lets try to make sure what they see from us is not just more digital dross .
Talking of people pushing back—
2. A Bus Stop Scrawl in SG
A small bus stop. A smaller sign. A tiny rant.
This made me smile- because a random scrawl in the real world doesn’t feel like an echo chamber.
What sentiment we see around AI is shaped by our social media feeds, the contours of our work/workplace, our algorithms, our curiosity and– let’s face it- our worldviews.
You would have– more likely than not– seen murmurs or raging rants pushing back on the indiscriminate use of Gen-AI and LLMs in our every little thing we do (see the flyer story above).
‘Why do we need this?’ ; ‘A solution for a problem that didn’t need solving’ ; ‘Being shoved down our throats’.
Much of it comes from the proliferation of AI slop and the increasing weariness many of us feel, in having to cope with it every day.
There is also a case to be made that this pushback has a meaningful existence in the real world, it’s not just some little intellectual corner of the internet that’s bouncing off each other’s grumpiness.
Seeing this scrawl at a small bus stop at one end of Singapore made me think of that again. Abundance depletes value, even if a thing’s value was questionable to begin with. When it comes to communication, we might find we’re all less accepting of thoughtless, indifferent expression than we can be accused of.
Lets keep the human in human interaction.
3. Speak Up
No AI please, we’re singing & speaking.
The voice end of things in AI doesn’t get the same attention and rah-rah (or bah-bah!) that video or writing does. This is not surprising– voice is generally often underestimated in the creative process.
We have all heard AI narrations and voice overs by now, in fact for quite some time- that ad on Spotify, the explainer video on your refresher course, the scam caller, the customer rep, that spot on Youtube, the interruption in your podcast. Some are sophisticated enough to be nearly indistinguishable from a human voice, others still sound pointedly robotic.
In that, these two nuggets from India I found interesting.
Rashmeet Kaur is a singer-songwriter with a pretty eclectic career thus far, and pretty wide-ranging success. She recently spoke about an incident that, shall we say, gave her pause. Or as she says, inimitably, “bro– how’d you do that?”
One day she rocks up to the studio, and hears a song playing. It’s a new song, sung by her– except she had never sung it. It’s AI-generated, of course, and she’s pretty taken by how close it sounds to her. But it turns out the song was generated by the agency/prod team– used as a ’pitch’ for the client to approve working with the artist.
Rashmeet is head-shakingly in disagreement with this, the very basic assumption that it’s cool to simply replicate a voice, just because they can. She also narrates a funny (not funny) bit with the recording engineer, which you can listen to here.
Elsewhere, voice actor Tanya Nambiar shared a story of how her clients now frequently ask for a video showing her recording the script, just so they could be sure it was a real human doing it, and not some AI service.
Weird? Yeah. Mildly dystopian? Sure. Also vaguely positive? I say yes, because it shows there are clients who still give s**t and don’t want a computer-generated voice to narrate their story.
I agree, Tanya- this is a strange time to be alive.
Come on people, keep at it- prove your humanity!
“It’s actually not cool to use somebody’s voice which they have worked on for years. They have spent all their lives to create that, to reach that particular vocal or that tone or texture.” Rashmeet Kaur
4. Chat TJB
And if all this AI interaction, content and debate really tires you, you might like to hear about Chat TJB. A billboard popped up in San Francisco promoting a chat interface “powered by AI*” where the * informed us it was an ‘Average Individual’. That’s right, just one bloke.
An artist who once worked at Google, Tucker Bryant just started this as an art project. Not so much anti-AI, as commentary on how people are believing AI chatbots freely and indiscriminately (what’s been called ‘cognitive surrender’). A slow start gave way to a flurry of requests, and Tucker found himself fielding over a thousand prompts a day!
Some interesting nuggets about this effort here and here.
➕Quick Hits
HBO’s testing Shorts, an in-app feed. Clips are from shows already in the catalog. An “in-house AI tool scans thousands of hours of content, flags moments it predicts will grab attention and passes that shortlist to human editors who decide what runs.” If you like something, click through and watch the episode right away, or save it for later.
Disney announced a deal with iHeart to bring podcasts to their streaming platform. This will include the Jonas brothers’ show.
A stray comment has led to a series of little headlines about the potential return of MySpace, the social media platform from the Y2K era, something a few fans might be keen on.
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Till next week, go make a flyer… or something.
