There’s something especially depressing about bad AI design.

Not because AI is inherently bad. Not because designers should be afraid of it. And not because every image generated by a machine is somehow devoid of value. The problem is what happens when AI becomes a substitute for taste, effort and judgement.

You see it everywhere now.

A poster for a party. A menu at a food market. A flyer for an event. A vaguely cinematic image of something that never existed, populated by people who were never photographed, eating food that was never cooked, attending an event that has somehow already managed to look disappointing.

And no, I’m not coming to your fucking event with your AI poster.

I’m not ordering the food either.

Walk around any fashionable food market and you’ll see the same thing: enormous, hyper-saturated images of burgers, noodles, tacos and cocktails, all rendered into some impossible version of themselves. Cheese stretches too far. Meat glistens too perfectly. Every ingredient appears to have been art-directed by someone who has never actually eaten.

I recently saw an AI-generated image for a barbecue showing a hamburger topped with fries. The actual hamburger, thankfully, was not.

But lately I don’t even have to go looking for this stuff.

In my own neighbourhood, two newly opened businesses have proudly plastered AI-generated imagery across their storefronts. It’s on the windows. The roadside signs. The door hangers shoved through the neighbourhood.

Every encounter feels like a tiny slap in the face.

No, I’m not taking my kid for a haircut at your trashcan of a barbershop.

No, I’m not signing my kid up for taekwondo because the six-fingered child on your sign appears to be having the time of his synthetic life.

And yes, I tried the fancy coffee.

It was good.

I’m still not buying the generated cake.

Which sounds petty. Maybe it is.

But it gets at something larger.

Design is communication.

A storefront is communicating. A poster is communicating. A menu is communicating. A cheap little door hanger left on my porch is communicating.

None of these things are merely images filling rectangles.

They tell me something about the people behind the business. They tell me whether someone cared. Whether someone paid attention. Whether someone has taste. Whether what I’m looking at bears any meaningful relationship to the thing being sold.

And increasingly, AI-generated design communicates one thing very clearly:

We couldn’t be bothered.

That is the part I find difficult to ignore.

The cheap poster for a mediocre band playing at your shitty bar does not need artificial intelligence. It's not worth half a litre of water! And it doesn’t need a fantastical 3D render, a glowing cyberpunk city or six mysteriously deformed hands holding cocktails.

It needs a designer.

Someone who notices things.

Someone who understands typography. Someone who knows when an image is unnecessary. Someone who can take a bad photograph and make something good out of it. Someone who can decide that perhaps all the poster needs is a name, a date and one unexpected idea.

That work might take thirty minutes. It might take three days.

But it contains intention.

And intention is what seems to be disappearing.

The irony is that AI is capable of being an extraordinary creative tool. I use it. Most creative people I know are experimenting with it. It can help explore an idea, build impossible worlds, test visual directions and accelerate parts of a process that used to be painfully slow.

That isn’t what bothers me.

What bothers me is the surrender.

The moment someone types “cool poster for music event” into a prompt box, downloads the first plausible-looking image and considers the creative work finished.

Technology has always changed design. Photoshop changed photography. Desktop publishing changed typography. Digital cameras changed image-making. None of those things eliminated the need for taste.

AI won’t either.

If anything, as generating images becomes effortless, taste becomes more valuable.

Choosing becomes more important than making.

Knowing what not to generate becomes more important than knowing what to generate.

And eventually the novelty will wear off. The glowing faces, impossible architecture, cinematic lighting and plastic food will stop feeling futuristic. They already are.

What will remain is the same thing that has always mattered:

A good idea.

A considered image.

A sentence worth reading.

And the time and attention of someone who actually gives a shit.