Creativity does not have to be expensive to be good. Yall just dont want to bother dealing with it.

I was the person who "had to bother dealing with it" many years ago before we had AI, Canva, or even Adobe cloud.

I volunteered and designed a good amount of posters for student organizations.

Don't enjoy it but did it to help my peers and friends out.

I find it ironic that back then we had a lot of trouble finding people who were willing to design posters and promo media on print.

Now the comment section on this post has people mourning AI taking over poster making in 2026. Where was the help back then?

From the perspective of someone who had to burn the midnight oil to do it for years, trust me, I would rather not do it and spend that time with my family and friends. And judging from how hard it was to find others who were willing to do it, I think its a reasonable argument that most people were not actually willing to do the work either.

So mourn away but I wouldn't cry if I "missed out" on making posters. If we had AI back then, I would not take on any of those poster making requests.

Back when? The 1970s? I don't believe that you couldn't find poster making services in the last 10-20 years.

You missed the “I volunteered” part. They were working for free.

"I find it ironic that back then we had a lot of trouble finding people who were willing to design posters and promo media on print."

I don't see the word free here. Of course you'd have trouble finding people to do anything for free.

They said: "I volunteered and designed a good amount of posters for student organizations." What do you think how many student organization have the excess money to hire a professional designer for a one-off poster? Of course they needed someone to do it for free, or else it wouldn't have been done at all!

That doesn't even make sense. If you volunteered, then you did find someone. Yourself.

Are you being intentionally obtuse? Try reading their comment in its entirety, and not just as individual fragments taken out of context: They most likely didn't have the budget to hire a professional designer and no one else would do it for free, so they had to do it themselves. They didn't enjoy it, and they would've gladly passed that work to an AI, had one existed back then.

It's not that hard to understand. Here, I've linked it for your convenience: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49765890

One of my best memories from an art class in high school was that a student organization came into our class and asked if any of us would be willing to design a poster. I ended up designing and silk-screening their poster for them and it was a fantastic experience.

I can totally see how doing more than a couple would start to feel like work, but having one or two experiences like that was awesome.

oh my. from my perspective, this is the most useful comment on this post.

we should have asked the arts students! (and find a way to return the favor) i did not think about that.

that being said there were some intense rivalry between various studies, my presence may not be have been well received.

and judging how i am here, you can guess what i studied :-)

thank you for this. really feel like i got a missing piece of a puzzle reading this.

This is like anything. If you want good and inexpensive it's going to be a pain in your arse one way or another.

Exactly. Sad to see another industry getting decimated by AI just to save a bit of cash.

A bit ? A lot.

Because people assume u need to actually hire someone to make art. Just let your kid draw something for your small restaurant. It's more pleasant to look at for people who didn't yet sell their soul to AI.

Then you get Chick o' Fish.

It is not, in fact, more pleasant to look at.

> Just let your kid draw something for your small restaurant.

Wait, we've gone from "pay the local artists" because AI shows you're "lazy and cheap" and "don't care about your brand".

And now whatever my 7-year-old draws is good enough.

My only conclusion reading these threads is that folks come in with their mind made up, and will argue absolutely anything so long as it amounts to "AI bad".

the point of advertising is to communicate something. If your kid draws your menu, you signal family values. If you pay a local artist, you signal investment in the community.

If ChatGPT churns out your ad you've signaled nothing. And that's obviously why you can criticize AI for every imaginable reason. That's indeed the difference and why people, regardless of how 'good' your AI art will be, will attempt to hide it, because it defeats the purpose of advertising as such.

And every person I talk to has a different take. In one case, it's that you don't respect the brand and you're lazy and you're cheap. In another, it's that you're signaling your values.

Maybe the reality is a lot of people have different feelings about this. Most people don't care and I'm mostly engaging with the loudest detractors, each with their own reason for hating AI.

>And every person I talk to has a different take.

Maybe every person you talk to is autistic with no sense for creativity at all. Thats what most of this dogshit website consists of. Programmers with no values, no creativity, no friends, no life and no self awareness. People who actually should be replaced by AI because they lack human values.

>Maybe the reality is a lot of people have different feelings about this.

yes that is the reality, but what I was saying was is that the abstract reason for that is what's called costly signalling in economics, biology or even religious studies.

When you want to display, advertise or communicate to earn yourself trust, it must cost something. Whether that's proof of work, or money, or reputation or skill, what all AI criticisms have in common is that AI costs nothing. Signalling values isn't 'another thing', it's what underlies every motivation for an ad or display and the better your AI tools get the less of a costly signal it is.

These people just doesn't have a good taste, imo.

For every human good art that is cheap I can show you ten that are not. The problem is you don't know which version you'd get. Someone charges less because they are unknown. Fixing AI art is much less hassle than human one.

This technology is super new and I've only seen AI posters really proliferate in the past few months and suddenly... people don't know how to live without it?

Well, no. Before genAI, I used fiverr, and I was also shamed for hiring those humans.

They're not saying they can't live without it, they're saying it's helpful. If you've been walking to the well for years to get buckets of water, and suddenly have running water in your kitchen, going back to trudging buckets doesn't sound very appealing.

> we just don't have the money!

You don't have ANY money? Plenty of students would do a great job for a little money and a professional reference. Now you just helped the workforce, helped the local economy and cost you little.

Have you ever tried doing that? In my experience, art students don't like to work for "little money" and "professional reference" and stablished artists don't like when you try to pay "little money" to students.

In year 2026 you are likely going to pay for a meat proxy who would still use the same model just without you controlling the prompt.

These days a cheap designer is just going to be a meat proxy for AI anyway.

AI, at least for now while it's still free/very cheap, enables producing a lot of very low-value content that in the past you never could have justified spending money and human labor on. The cost or time needed to make a poster or a flyer acted as a value-based gatekeeper. Today, it costs nothing to make an AI slop image and blast it out on social media, so we're drowning in it.

What is your experience with design done by students? Because mine isn't great. It's not bad either, but it's just... mediocre.

Depends on which economy the buyer and the seller respectively come from.

the problem is that AI does better than those students, especially if you don't know what good design looks like... which is most people

but of course this means the entire market will dry up because no one pays students anymore

Just a note about language: when folks say they "don't have the money" or "don't have the time", it's almost never the case that they don't have any of the resource in question...it's about priorities. What they are saying is that there are far more effective ways to spend their money than incidentals like this, especially when cheap alternatives exist.

You have the money, you just don't have the contacts or skills to find a good designer which charges you a fair price. Big design firms will rip you off. Their job is to get corruption contracts from the public sector or big enterprises, and then reward their insider later with a nice fake job.

Saying you don't have the money for a designer is a bit like saying you can't go on business trip because the company can't afford to purchase a jet airplane right now.

Damn, how did businesses survive decades without being able to pay some intern or someone in the office to quickly put up a poster? Like come on, claiming 'budget' is the issue here when I can see indie bands operating with twigs and some chewing gum figure out how to put together a poster for their band is embarassing.