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Sloppy Joe's - The era of AI Signage

As I walk around my neighborhood in New York, each day I’m greeted with more and more signage that is clearly AI generated. The default style of ChatGPT signage is very standard - you can see how my Sloppy Joe version looks very similar to the ones spotted in the wild:

Sloppy Joe sign
Sloppy Joe sign 8
Sloppy Joe sign 10
Sloppy Joe sign 2
Sloppy Joe sign 3
Sloppy Joe sign 1
Sloppy Joe sign 4
Sloppy Joe sign 5
Sloppy Joe sign 6
Sloppy Joe sign 7
Sloppy Joe sign 9
Sloppy Joe sign 11
Sloppy Joe sign 12
Sloppy Joe sign 13

Some look better than others - but they share many tropes:

  • Paint-stroke fonts, banners, and circles.
  • Greebling, lots of little splats around key words
  • Checkmarks, stars, and arrows galore
  • A sort of bombastic eye-catching style that uses lots of colors
  • Punchy three-phrase slogans or lists with little useless icons
  • A made-up logo that is not found anywhere on the real store

The result is a sort of maximalist, garish sign that my brain has quickly learned to ignore. I recently wrote a bit about my feelings on AI generated art infesting our human world, so I won’t make a huge point of all this. These signs don’t matter much even when they’re human generated. But even when it comes to signage - I would rather read the prompt:

The prompt used to generate a street sign