DIY vs. AI: The Battle For The Soul of The Show Flyer

“No More AI Flyers,” declared Oakland dive bar and kitsch palace Thee Stork Club in a Sept. 9 Instagram post. “It’s giving us the ick.” As of this writing, the post has received more than 600 replies from patrons, artists, and others, mostly in enthusiastic support. (There are also a handful poking fun at the post’s intentionally weird typos and formatting.)

According to club co-owner Billy Agan, the ban was a response to a growing problem: the AI flyer situation has grown from weird one-offs to about two per week since the beginning of the year. “I have an eye for illustrated design,” Agan says. “I know that something is not consistent, you know what I mean? Like, if a poster is a cartoon dog and you can see the teeth. You can just tell when that stuff is AI.”

Recently, I took BART to 19th Street Station and saw ads on the walls for Skechers that were obviously AI: so much so that someone wrote “AI SHIT” on one of them. The illustrations of buxom women in sneakers popping their pussies out at the viewer were creepily shiny. The consistency of the characters’ clothes was off, with seams that went nowhere, and the background featured red lanterns with garbly designs meant to evoke Chinese… something. It was uncanny and so ugly. Some decision-maker thought it was “good enough,” and that’s sad.

Agan didn’t know how to address the AI stuff at first, and even went ahead and posted the ones that “weren’t too obvious.” But it’s gotten more blatant, he says, so the club decided to put a stop to it entirely. 

While it’s easy enough to find tour dates online for the Insane Clown Posses of the world, the smaller, DIY music acts rely on the classic show flyer to get the word out about their performances. On Instagram, venue websites, and even group chats devoted to show listings, the show flyer is their shot in the dark. It’s an art form with a lot of history, especially locally, and a lot of range. There are ironic “graphic design is my passion”-esque treatments; hand-drawn illustrations; and, Agan recalls, a recent really memorable one where the artist wrote the show details on toilet paper and photocopied it. At their best, show flyers represent the passionate, avant-garde, and even crude side of the counterculture; at their worst, they at least still tell you where and when the show is. 

To be clear, a human-first policy isn’t just good for the vibe: It’s good for up-and-coming artists, too. "Everyone gets their start somewhere in the creative world,” says Agan. “A lot of illustrators and artists have gotten their start by doing friends' bands or DJs’ posters." In his post, Agan noted that Thee Stork Club would be partnering with a roster of local graphic artists who could offer flyer-making services at affordable rates. One of them is Janelle Blarg, whose comic about People’s Park was recently published by COYOTE!

So posting a bunch of AI-generated slop just doesn’t fit the image Thee Stork Club is going for. Of course, spotting the AI flyers when they’re sent in does add a little bit more labor to running a venue, Agan admits. A busy booker might not have the time nor interest to bug a promoter to send a better flyer. And catching the AI will likely only get more challenging: perhaps, one day, generative AI will be able to mimic the rough, handmade feeling of an artist-made design. 

But Agan thinks not taking a minute to check if you’re reposting AI crap means you lose something so, so important.

"There's just something intangible missing [in AI-generated flyers],” says Agan. “The point of art is to evoke some kind of emotion or feeling or something from a human to another human or to a group… but AI doesn’t know it’s alive. It's just fucking super Google. Like, that's all it is. Super Google that destroys the environment."

A big part of generative AI promotion is the assumption that it’s coming anyway, so you’d better adapt or die. It’s inevitable, they say, that we will watch people’s brains turn to soup as they consult ChatGPT to craft breakup texts or LinkedIn posts. We just have to get used to websites prompting us to use it as persistently as a vape company pushing nacho-flavored carts onto teens. Or, even worse, become accustomed to the possibility that someone we love might take a wrong turn with a chatbot that could lead to psychosis. There’s no sense of human agency here — no element of affirmative choice, even as it’s clear that human MBA-havers are the ones making the choices to lay off their fellow humans in order to maximize their own financial gain, whether through cut labor costs or venture capitalist hype.

It’s all incredibly depressing. But the positive reception to Thee Stork Club’s AI ban gave me hope for a different future: one that we choose, rather than sleepwalk into. 

To Agan, the response is something other venues should note, too: "A lot of people have been saying, ‘I'm less likely to attend an event if the flyer's AI’.”