Earlier this year, a group of film-makers, commercial directors and AI industry influencers gathered in New York City for the Runway AI Summit – a daylong hype-fest, trumping up the potential of this new technology. During one talk, Rob Wrubel, co-founder and managing partner at San Francisco ad firm Silverside, talked up his work on the Coca-Cola company’s AI-generated 2025 Holiday Caravan ad. “What’s incredible about AI,” Wrubel said, “is that you can go from script to production is just two weeks!”
What Wrubel failed to mention was that the ad – with its computerized polar bears and fake-looking trundling delivery trucks – was widely despised by pretty much anyone who saw it. Indeed, the public distaste for the campaign became its own news story, spawning headlines like “People really don’t like Coke’s AI holiday commercial” and “Coca-Cola’s New AI Holiday Ad is a Sloppy Eyesore”. It may indeed have been quickly conceived – and it looked like it. Reached for comment about the backlash, Wrubel admits: “The conversation around the ad became almost as important as the ad itself because it surfaced questions the entire creative industry is wrestling with right now.”
Plenty of artists and creative-types have been sounding the anti-AI alarm lately. Thousands have signed open letters opposing infringement on their creative work, and copyrights. Major pop singers are announcing concerts with hand-scrawled notes posted on social media. Some have filed lawsuits against AI companies training off their work.
Now that spirit of rejection seems to be coalescing into its own design aesthetic – a move towards the conspicuously handmade, the janky, even the primitive. Call it “anti-slop”.
Where AI slop is slick and uncanny, anti-slop celebrates a more homespun feeling.
It’s present in the work of photographer and designer Michael Schmelling. Schmelling has designed photo books for the Rolling Stones, album art for singer Sharon Van Etten and recently a suite of covers for the novels of acclaimed Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño, reissued by publisher Picador. These covers have a crude, scribbly, doodle-in-the-margins-of-a-high-school-notebook quality. They look like basement punk show posters or tattoo flash sheets (indeed, they were designed in collaboration with tattooist Mike Adams). They are even a little sloppy – but again, thoughtfully so. (This didn’t stop haters in the harshly critical annals of “lit twitter” from decrying them as “terrible”, “a shade too twee”, and, somehow, even “woke”.) But perhaps that’s the point – AI would never.
While Schmelling maintains that these designs weren’t deliberately devised as an affront to the increasingly dominant aesthetic language of AI, he does see a reaction taking place. “This AI stuff has just been rammed down our throats,” he…
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