Santa Cruz Fair ai flier?
These booklets (left) and fliers (right) were dropped off at my work. To me it appears that the flier has been run through an ai. When I looked into it online I found information saying that they run a yearly contest for the art and do not use ai.
There are a lot of bad ai fliers this season (my hometown county faire in Santa Clara is a real offender and I’m not going to go to the internet to complain about that)
I have two big issues with what seems to have happened here. They make a point to talk about the contest and how the art is original and personal, so presenting it altered in this way without acknowledging it feels very disingenuous. Also the message this sends to artists, especially young artists, that this kind of fake thing is better and more appealing than their artistry.
I commented on the cover photo of the event page for the fair on Facebook inquiring if this was what had happened and a few hours later they removed commenting from the picture.
Running them through an ai detector got me a 3% likeliness the original picture is generative ai and 58% that the other could be.
I’m not looking to drag them for this but to appeal to them to maybe consider these things going forward.
Do you agree that this is very unnecessary, would you have been fine if they had just used the original submission?