We hate laziness more than we love polish

What does it mean when every flyer you see now suddenly looks like this?

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For most non-boomers, it induces a clear eye roll. The following tweet (which, admittedly, features the ugliest possible variants of AI-generated posters) racked up 280k likes:

Contrast the above with the flyers those same people might have used a few years ago:

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Most people will agree that AI-generated imagery—whatever its signature look—is more "polished" than poorly designed, human-made imagery. That is to say, if you saw images from the first selection five years ago, you would say they are more impressive (or at least, engaging) than the latter selection. So why the eye rolls?

Because we hate laziness more than we love polish.

The eye rolls are not a critique of the look in and of itself, but a critique of the effort that went (or rather, did not go) into its creation.

Effort is a proxy for unseen care

When we transact with a business, we expect them to put care into their work. Unfortunately, “care” is invisible. You can't see the hours a restaurant spends sourcing its ingredients.

So we find its best approximation, which is often how a business represents itself. A polished flyer used to tell us someone hired a designer, or even tried to make something themselves. And a business that spends money and hours on its flyer is the kind of business that spends money and hours on other things; a signal we can trust.

The lazy poster is not ugly. Its problem is that it removes the one piece of evidence you used to have that the business wasn't lazy—and without that evidence, you assume the worst.

Now consider some other artifact—a flyer, billboard, game, or website—that was created with AI, but not solely. Maybe a flyer that features an AI-generated image, but was typeset and composed in Adobe Illustrator. Or a website built with AI coding, but with clear evidence of human polish.

Would it evoke the same frustration? Some people object to AI in any context, and they'll object here too. But most people are far less bothered by things made with some combination of human and AI effort.

Take another example: a woman makes an agenda for her friend group's vacation, and delivers it via some AI-generated digital poster. No one would care—because the agenda is just a tool, and the care is visible elsewhere (in the planning of the weekend itself).

If that same friend sent you an AI-written birthday card, it would sting far more than any flyer. While the agenda was just a tool, the card signals care, and so effort should be infused. A business's flyer sits closer to the card: it's one of the few places you can see how much they care, so a lazy one reads as an admission.

AI-generated flyers are the focus of this piece but this principle applies across all creative disciplines. Anyone can now produce polished work, in the form of good design, good writing, good music, etc. but if the lack of effort is visible, the eye rolls still come. It is why those who can discern AI from human work are often frustrated with Claudespeak or obviously-Claude-designed websites.

A Canva redux

One might find a historical parallel to this moment in Canva. Haven't templated, low-effort designs always existed? (After all, the non-AI flyers included above were most likely made with a Canva template.) I think there are two distinctions.

First, Canva was palatable to the population writ large but still had its critics among a more specific audience: designers. To everyone else, the poster came across as just fine, because they had never even heard of Canva. So one difference is awareness of the tools: now everyone knows they can use ChatGPT to make a poster, and so when someone does, it comes off as lazy.

Second, even Canva required some (low) degree of effort—make an account, pick a template, add your own text. Usually there was some resizing of elements, and if you were ambitious, maybe you even reorganized the layout! The software itself has a ceiling that talented designers can reach. Contrast that with ChatGPT, where there is no real interface for handcraftedness, and even incremental edits after the initial generation are usually just more low-effort text prompts.

So where does the signal go?

Effort remains a signal. The eye rolls stop (for most people) when obvious effort has been applied, even if artificial intelligence was used in their process.

The tricky part here is that AI is currently the worst it will ever be. With every new model release, AI outputs get closer and closer to what we normally associate with human effort. Should the major labs succeed, an end user would never be able to distinguish what was made by machine and what was made by a human.

This is already occurring in domains unimaginable a year ago—many videos now produced by AI are virtually indistinguishable from human-recorded videos, and images got there long before.

When polish becomes free, it stops meaning anything, and the signal moves to whatever is still expensive to fake. This is why many brands are now going to great lengths to prove handcraftedness — legible effort becomes a moat when polish becomes cheap.

Until then, perhaps we should be thankful for the obvious "AI smells" that give generated work away. For now, at least, they still show us who put in the effort and who didn't.