I don’t even know what it’s called, but I really hope it goes the way of Comic Sans
Edit: does anyone actually know what this awful font is called?
Is it really hard to write a prompt to make it not look like this? Or are people too lazy and just use the first generic slop result that they get?
It isn’t really a specific font, just something AI models made to generate images have picked up on. Things that were immediately attention grabbing and bold probably got more positive scoring and reinforcement during training, so they learned to use larger more dramatic styles (this is also why you often see sort of electric or fiery glows, sparks, dramatic lighting, etc) but that doesn’t really work to help a business stand out when all of them now look like that.
I’m also not sure if everyone knows this yet, but most AI image generators nowadays are split into two parts. It used to be that you’d need a prompt like
poster, graphic, promotional, large text, dramatic, brushstroke font, on sign, city background, club background, microphone, This Font is the New Comic Sans bold text, high quality, but since most people do this shit through something like ChatGPT, and might just say “make me a poster that says ‘This Font is the New Comic Sans’”, in the background, an LLM takes that prompt and makes a more extended prompt for the image generator.This is where a lot of this type of thing probably takes place. For example, I prompted an AI model with
Convert this prompt: "Make me a poster for my nightclub" into a Stable Diffusion prompt for a poster, and it gave me: nightclub event poster, bold neon typography, vibrant magenta and electric blue lighting, silhouetted dancers in motion, smoke and laser beams, glowing geometric shapes, dark moody background, high contrast, synthwave aesthetic, centered composition, space reserved for event title and date, ultra detailed, sharp focus, professional graphic design, 8k (emphasis added by me)Nightclub posters do sometimes have these elements, but a lot of them actually use clean typography, little to no neon inside the typography, it just made up synthwave as a relevant aesthetic to the club it knows nothing about, and simultaneously wants a dark and moody background… with something that has high contrast, neon lights, lasers, and lighting everywhere.
Both image generators and LLMs optimize for things that are bold and for excessive additions like you saw in the prompt earlier, which leads to the super sloppy, over the top, crowded designs you see on most AI posters.
Sloppy drip 2
but I really hope it goes the way of Comic Sans
I use comic sans monospace in my terminal. But I don’t want this shit in my terminal!
I personally didn’t think Comic Sans was bad, just overused, especially in contexts where it didn’t belong. (Funeral homes should have been banned from using it by industry regulation. They never did that. Anywhere in the world. This is why we need multinational legislation.)
This font, whatever the hell it is called, besmirches the good name of hand lettered sign painting and advertising that was common in advertising before computer typography. Have you seen old hand lettered ads? Unless they were in great hurry, they never left brush edges visible to this extent. It looked sloppy.
Best use of comic sans I can recall was the OG Higgs boson discovery presentation in 2012
Yeah, that’s always the exception to the rule.
If you’re going to give a presentation that will change the world as we know it for the better, well, nobody gives a shit what font you will use. Go wild.
Oh, I guess I never realized it was supposed to be brush painted letters. I figured it was just trying to be edgy
This fucking shite
What on the fucking love of God is eBay live? Do we not even pretend anymore that’s content and go straight to TV selling channels?
Tiktokification. Every app has a reels clone, because that shit is addicting and works at keeping people engaged.
eBay is jealous of Whatnot and is trying to copy them
Those faces in the bottom left corner are horrifying.
Mouths of a feather slop together
So many fingers
Octoberfest this year had a lot of stands, all with the same AI slop posters. I bought a burger from a stand with just a handwritten sign. Felt good.
What gets me is they’re all the same style. Do they not see that their posters are the same as everyone else’s??
They each probably thought they had this great idea of getting a crazy unique AI sign before they showed up and saw that everyone had the same idea.
Anyone competent enough to understand that effort is a vital component of modern marketing is already steering clear of AI slop nonsense. It’s the stupids that are left believing that doing something as cheaply and easily as possible won’t reflect poorly on their business.
and good lord there’s a lot of stupid people out there.
I have a lot to say about how and why, but i think these people though their posters looked good before they saw everyone have the same style.
Like how Walmart and Target are competitors, but their themes complement each other as to what we expect from their stores. It’s something a successful business can’t ignore. See power tools brands have all cornered their respective color theme, but up close they all perform similar to our expectations before anything else.
So AI steps in, advertised it can make posters now, and people believe it. Either they can’t afford an artist, or don’t care enough to consider. Swaths of salt-of-earth businesses jump to use it, naively, and kinda out themselves accidentally as the amateurs they are.
Everyone sees it, and realized too late. I think that style will die off pretty quickly if business owners know what’s good for them.
It’s just so absurd that AI as a solution is just again, seen as another poison to the thing it’s supposed to solve. If I were to write a story about it, I couldn’t make it up. The absurdity has it’s own gravitational pull.
Slop font is way worse than Comic Sans.
This ! This is the exception for the rule : never slop
I saw a funny poster that was in the style of a LLM generated event promo poster that was actually all disparaging text like “no one is going to read that shit” and “this is actively causing people to avoid your event”. I felt that was borderline and decided not to post it here.
I’ll be honest, I didn’t make it, but looking at it I can’t tell if it’s actually slop or not. Looks like two standard photos side by side with text overlaid and a mic png
Look closely at the mic. Why does the grille look so organic and asymmetrical?
Look at that skyscraper. What in the hell is that blue thing on top of it?
You just have to look for like 3 seconds to see that this is slop.
I don’t see why you are getting downvoted. In any case, the hand and the form of the shadow people is pretty much the only blatant giveaway. Its getting near impossible though, especially if someone simply modifies the giveaways away.
I’ve been frustrated with Lemmy’s trend of downvoting people when they struggle to tell if something is slop. Usually it’s from some genuinely trying to learn how to spot the giveaways. What does downvoting someone trying to learn accomplish?
I’m with you. I post a shit ton, so all I see are fucking cats telling me slop is bad.
Fortunately, someone taught me about this: https://www.zerogpt.com/ about a week or two ago and it’s been helping. It’s still cumbersome to use given the speed at which I find and post memes, but at least it’s another tool I can rely on somewhat.
For a potentially better tool in many cases, you can use one of the official SynthID detectors. It only works for OpenAI and Google at the moment, but Anthropic is supposed to release their watermarking detector soon as well.
New Lobster
I don’t think I have ever actually seen someone talk about Lobster. Because yes, after learning about that font, I started noticing it EVERYWHERE because it’s a pretty nice font and is free for commercial use.
Wrong. This is MUCH worse than comic sans.
Half of what makes me hate this is that the people making these posters don’t even understand why its wrong :(
At least it makes it easy to instantly detect the slop. Its like the em dash or the “its not just A. Its B.” in writing.
Don’t forget, extreme usage of -ly adverbs.
extremely, consistently, verbosely, strongly, forcefully… ad nauseum
I was about to instinctively downvote this post until I read the title
