Summer has begun, temperatures are rising, and suddenly every summer bar in my village has the same poster hanging on the wall.
A tropical sun, a cocktail, a wooden deck, a few people looking just a little too happy into the camera. A gradient of orange, pink, or yellow. A giant headline. And at the bottom: every Friday, DJ, cocktails, food, free admission.
You’re advertising your own summer bar, but the image could just as easily be of the summer bar eight kilometers down the road.
It's not only here
At first, I thought I was just paying too much attention to posters. A professional quirk. Until I read an article in The Independent about exactly the same phenomenon in Great Britain, where it now has a name: “poster slump.” Village festivals, flea markets, open mics: the same fonts, busy AI backgrounds, smiling people, and that typical yellow-beige haze meant to create extra atmosphere.
Artist Barry Whitehouse placed twelve of these posters from different British regions side by side. They looked so much alike that he feared he might have accidentally used the same poster twice. That’s what I found most sobering: what I see hanging on a wall in Antwerp is hanging in almost the same form in an English village.
The problem isn't that AI creates bad posters
To be clear, AI doesn’t necessarily create bad posters. The images are often technically correct, well-lit, beautifully composed, and have accurate colors. But the problem is that everyone is starting to make the same kind of poster.
In the past, the barrier was a lack of resources: no budget, no designer, no good photography. Now it’s the opposite. Anyone can create an image in thirty seconds that looks like a lot of effort went into it. And because it’s cheap and fast, we just keep making more of them. AI lowers production costs so drastically that efficiency starts to outweigh attention to detail, craftsmanship, and distinctiveness.
A poster doesn't have to be pretty
A poster has one purpose: to be seen. Not to be beautiful. Not to neatly contain all the information. Not to show five cocktails, a sunset, and a group of smiling friends all at once. A poster must make someone standing twenty meters away think: Hey, what’s that?
That’s the trap. AI makes it very easy to create an image that’s pretty enough. And pretty enough feels like it’s finished. Pretty enough gets approval from your friends. Pretty enough can be printed. But here’s the thing: pretty enough doesn’t stand out. It just ends up, like a boring resume, on the pile.
A good poster makes choices. There’s one thing you see first, one thing you read next, and one thing you remember. If you throw everything into an AI tool (date, location, lineup, drinks, food, sponsors, logo, QR code, DJ), you won’t end up with a poster anymore. You’ll end up with a design that’s overloaded with information.
And yes, there's a cost involved
I don’t want to make a moral point here, because I use these tools myself. But two things are worth mentioning.
First, energy. In 2023, researchers from Hugging Face and Carnegie Mellon University calculated that a single AI image can consume about as much energy as charging a smartphone. One image makes little difference. But if you generate dozens of versions to ultimately choose just one, the energy consumption quickly adds up.
Then there’s trust. Ever since the Willy Wonka fiasco in Glasgow—where visitors were lured to a nearly empty warehouse by a beautiful AI-generated poster—some people have started to view that kind of image differently. A poster that looks too perfect or obviously AI-generated can arouse suspicion.
I understand why people do it
In the British article, an organizer explained that she simply didn’t have time to design a poster herself. That’s not laziness—it’s the reality for volunteers, freelancers, and small business owners who have to do too much on their own. So I’m not going to judge anyone who’s quickly throwing something together at 11 p.m. AI can actually be very useful for that.
At Studio Boiler, we also use AI every day, but always at the same stage in the process: after the conceptual work. A tool creates an image, not a thoughtful choice. And design is all about those choices: what do you leave out, what do you emphasize, what do you deliberately not show so that the rest stands out more? Those decisions stem from a brand—from knowing what you stand for, how you sound, and why someone comes to have a drink with you rather than eight kilometers away.
Without that foundation, every image becomes replaceable, no matter how beautiful it is. Design without strategy is nothing more than wrapping paper around an empty box. Rarely has that statement felt so literal as it did this summer.
