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?
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??
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.
You have far too much faith in taste.
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.
I see more or less the same at craft fairs: lots of the same stuff, lazy dad crafts, lazy mom crafts (done at scale). All following the same toktok or Instagram trend.
To the signs thing, I think I’d rather see a generic stencil and spray paint sign. At least that’s real.
Is that some AI clone of Oktoberfest?
This fucking shite
Those faces in the bottom left corner are horrifying.
Mouths of a feather slop together
So many fingers
No bottom rows of teeth in sight
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
What?
not
Goodbye
This ! This is the exception for the rule : never slop
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
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.
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 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.
this is an insult to comic sans; that ai font is way worse than it
This is an insult to Comic Sans
Yeah, Comic Sans is actually useful.
Slop font is way worse than Comic Sans.
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
Speaking of edgy, long time ago, this sort of font was vaguely about “anarchism”… Actual anarchists were like “well I guess it passes for graffiti, but for real typography, you need real typography. Look at this perfectly rendered Ⓐ, holy shit that’s so geometric, fucking epic, right?”
Once GamerGate hit, I took one look at the “Alt Right” subreddit, saw they used punk aesthetic nonsense vaguely like lazy hand lettering stuff, and was immediately convinced they would not know punk if it bit them where it hurt (their monthly allowance from their parents).
It’s especially important to understand that in the early days of computing you only had a single system font or a tiny font pack of less than 10. Microsoft used a tiny pack that had Arial as their sans-serif, Times New Roman as their serif, Courier New as their monospace, and two symbol fonts. Of the three real fonts, two were incredibly computery, leaving Times New Roman as the friendliest font available.
Microsoft then set out to make a family-friendly cartoon-themed OS and set the entire OS in TNR. One of their designers took issue with it and designed Comic Sans to be a viable OS font that felt friendly and suited comic art. He was a bit late in starting, so it shipped with TNR and immediately failed, but Comic Sans ended up shipping with some versions of 95, then became a default font in Internet Explorer and Win98. As a result, it was the only friendly font on the average computer for ages.
When OP said they wish it goes the way of Comic Sans, the first thought in my mind was that it would be used in a bunch of doctors’ offices. Not sure if I would want to be treated by Dr. McSkateboard
I’ve been absolutely shocked walking through city centers and seeing these fucking AI flyers everywhere. Boycot whoever uses this shit and pay your local artists and graphic designers.
I am in Japan right now and they were selling postcards with AI images. Not even art made by humans…
I’ve seen that in a city I visited, three seperate shops with those and people were still there browsing
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.
The LLM / image gen AI centipede.
Yes! It feels like every second restaurant in my area has suddenly gone with this font and AI slop images for their menus. Lets call it Tragic Sans or something like that.
I see that, I go elsewhere.
Tragic Sans is pretty great. Also saw Toxic Sans somewhere and really like it.
Clanker sans
It’s weird be cause you would think that whoever makes these should have the common sense to see if it’s a bit too obvious or too typical. You can use just about any font in existence in AI by just telling it to use that font, but lazy ass people choose the crypto chud font.
You’re telling me they could be generating posters with Papyrus, Joker, or Wingdings font, and don’t?
Missed opportunities
It’s an absolutely insane test of my faith in humanity. It just takes like 10 more words to get AI to make a sign that’s at least a little different from the slop. But they won’t even do that. It’s like they’re spitting in their own face with the disrespect they show to their own businesses or whatever they’re advertising. It’s nuts.
Effort? From slop consumers/peddlers?
You’ll have better luck finding ice in the Sahara.
The essential qualities of a good typeface balance visual beauty with practical function. This is just plain ugly and makes Comic sans look elegant. Using this crud is as acceptable as attending a funeral dressed as a clown.
I know multiple people that would want clowns at their funerals
Juggalos?
My grandfather was a clown for the Shriners, and he literally had clowns at his funeral! He was also the first balloon twister I ever saw. He started back in the 60s, twisting balloons into dogs for sick kids in hospitals, dressed as a clown. He was a special guy.
That’s more like using Comic Sans for the obituary
Comic Sans was - is - a frigging superb font. It was destroyed by being abused.
This is an insult to comic sans. Comic sans is a good font and helpful to people with dyslexia
It is? I’ve seen a couple fonts meant to combat dyslexia and they look very different from comic sans
To my knowledge Comic Sans predates all of the dyslexia specific fonts. It’s liked in the dyslexia space because all of the letter forms are quite distinct and therefore easily differentiable.
It existed before dyslexia specific fonts existed and there was a dedicated effort to create them.
It became popular early on for dyslexia because it just happened to be really useful for dealing with the issue.
Compared to a specific font designed for dyslexic people it doesn’t hold a candle to it. But that doesn’t make it bad for the job either there’s a reason it got popular for that usage in the first place.
For like a good 10 years it was basically the only good option. Nowadays there are just much better ones and anyone still using comic sans I would hope it’s just using it for silly things.
Comic sans (originally designed for a comic dog character) is an awful typeface. It is constantly misused in serious settings such business contracts, medical notices, and legal documents. In the UK many schools use it. It is as appropriate as wearing a clown costume to a funeral. Using it makes any professional design look childish, sloppy, or amateurish There is very little peer-reviewed scientific evidence that Comic Sans inherently improves reading performance for students with dyslexia.
Yes Comic Sans is an awful typeface, but even the worst, most garbage looking human made typeface is still preferable to the ai slop-font.
Normally I would be all for peer reviewed, but this is a fantastic example where that’s a stupid fucking metric.
Comic sans existed before efforts to formally make a dyslexic assistance font.
Comic sans has been casually recommended by many dyslexic communities and assistance programs because sans serif fonts are helpful and fonts with unique letter shapes are helpful.
Comic sans for many years was one of the only fonts that fit both categories. But by the time formal efforts went into place, comic sans quickly became unneeded in the space. There’s no reason at all TO do a formal study on it when it was never intended for the use case.
What studies there are in fonts from the time lean towards it being helpful for reading speed and understandability in children. But none of the studies of the error really focused on dyslexia so at best you can only infer based on adjacent findings it even then it’s loose at best.
Point is just because something doesn’t have formal research on it doesn’t make it not true and that years of casual helpfulness just vanish.
So get off the little petty wagon where you hate something just because it’s overused. Comic sans is a useful and fun little font that just gets over used.
It’s a good font, but only for silly things
And it’s all silly
Six exclamation marks, a sure sign of insanity.
It’s either this shit or the fucking humanoid robot in every tech related post touching a holo screen showing completely pointless and unrelated data
The explosion of shitty illustrations attached to every tech article has been so hideous to behold. Somehow even worse than the fact that so many of them are totally pointless slop.
Wrong. This is MUCH worse than comic sans.
