Everything is ugly now

On AI, the Ohio State Fair, and art

Last year, my brothers were home over Christmas break and we all took our parents’ dog for a walk in town¹. We walked past a garage door that was draped in a garage door cover made with AI, which was a new phenomenon this year. The AI angle, of course, but also the concept of seasonal garage door covers in general. Maybe they existed in other parts of world, but here in Ohio I hadn’t previously seen someone be like, “Christmas trees and lights have been done. What really needs decoration is my garage.”

The garage door cover was really ugly, with the smooth edges and false sparkle that clearly marked it as AI. A nearby house had several vintage blow molds perched on its stone front steps, and compared to that, the AI garage door cover looked garish. As we walked past it, complaining about how bad it looked, Chase said, “It really sucks that some people just don’t care if things are ugly.”

And ain’t that the truth! Once he said that, I saw it everywhere. So many people simply do not care about making the world beautiful, and I couldn’t stop seeing it in the terrible “luxury” condos that replace every building in Columbus, in the way cars look today, and in the God-awful AI generated posters that show up everywhere now.

You know them. They’re advertising a neighborhood festival, they’re taped in the window of a bar to let you know about their weekly trivia night, they’re sometimes even at your kid’s school. They’re way too busy, featuring people with unsettlingly wide smiles and big eyes, too many banners, and almost always a strange sepia tone, as if the entire project has been dipped in a cup of black tea to make it look old-timey for a school project².

Or maybe you don’t know what I’m talking about, if you’re the judges for the poster contest at the Ohio State Fair. The winner gets a $1,000 prize and their work is displayed at the fair. I think they run this contest every year, but I’ll be honest and say that I’ve never paid attention.

But this year, they got a lot of attention because the winning poster was quickly and widely disparaged for being AI. And not in a subtle way, either. All the hallmarks of AI are there: the chaos of an extremely busy image, the inaccuracies (the racing pigs are numbered 1, 2, 1), and that abhorrent yellow tone. Why? Are we in the intro for Gilmore Girls or something?

I would rather see this in the poster contest

This was not against the rules because, up until now, the contest rules didn’t prohibit this sort of AI usage—it only required entrants to disclose their use of AI. Apparently they’re changing the rules for next year, but I just don’t understand how this won. I don’t understand how a team of judges looked at this and said, “Yes, this will represent our beloved state fair.” I don’t understand how none of them looked at it and said, “Is that the Liberty Bell, notably not present in Ohio?” I don’t understand how none of them realized that this poster is, while not against the stated rules, an affront to humanity.

This is what it looks like on display at the fair.

Per my research (Reddit), the contest wasn’t judged by the Arts department, which….well, that’s clear. It was judged by the PR department. I want to be as generous toward everyone involved in this situation as I can, and I do have some compassion for the judges who seemingly didn’t understand why this poster shouldn’t have won. It’s the same way I have compassion for the elderly woman in the neighborhood facebook group who posts what she thinks are cautionary tales about dog safety but are, in fact, AI-generated ads for dog-cooling beds. Or the same way I have compassion for my mom when she tells me there’s a new movie coming out called Three Grandpas and a Christmas Miracle, starring Tom Selleck, Steve Martin, and Morgan Freeman (I’m sorry to throw my mom under the bus, lol, but she was convinced by one of the many AI-generated posters³ floating around…and in her defense, why would someone make that up?).

I also don’t think people should go out of their way to shame the woman who “designed” the poster, even if it is bad. She didn’t break any rules. I don’t think she’s an artist by trade, and maybe she genuinely doesn’t understand why putting a prompt into a generator isn’t the same thing as making art.

But that’s the part that depresses me so much…that a lot of people didn’t seem to know, or care, that this poster wasn’t made by a human.

Here’s the most insulting part: the winning poster and the four runners up were on display in the building that houses what I guess you would call the crafts. They’re art, of course, but the Fine Arts building is in a different spot. This is the building that holds the quilts, the decorated cakes, the slices of pie and cans of jam. The knitted sweaters, the Lego displays, the miniatures. The tablescapes (yes, there’s a tablescape category and it is hopping). All of the stuff that’s made by human hands over painstaking hours, days, or months.

In the quilts section (my favorite!) there’s a piece of paper included that has a sort of artist statement—the fair’s version of a museum placard. The quilter can include information about what materials they used, why they chose them, what their process was like, the meaning behind the quilt, etc. This is one of the best parts of the fair—I love knowing why a person made something, how they bought the fabric on a trip with their mom or made the quilt as a gift for their kid, that it was the third quilt they ever made or that they loved trying a new technique. The form also includes a section where the artist can say how many hours they spent on the quilt. I saw 100. I saw 200.

Because a quilt isn’t a prompt you can feed into a generator.

One of my favorites was this quilt. I wish I’d taken a picture of the explanatory paper, but I’ll just recount it from memory. The artist said that their dad had made these quilt blocks many years ago, then stuck them in a box and forgot about them. He died in the 90s, and in the 2000s she found them and wanted to honor him by doing something with them. So she pieced them together, but needed help with the quilting and contacted a local quilt guild who helped her with it. This quilt was made by so many people over decades, and it’s beautiful. A true work of art!

Another favorite section of mine is the cross-stitch. Just look at this Frog and Toad! As I started to take this picture, a young couple was like, “IT’S FROG AND TOAD!” and took their own picture. I planned to look up the artist and follow her online to see what else she’s made, but it turns out she doesn’t have a public art Instagram. :( But we do love to see a true offline queen.

The food section is another one I love. At the true fair (the Bellville Street Fair), we put the baked goods in an open, not climate controlled former fire station. The cakes and pies just sit there in plastic bags, getting hotter and more bug-covered as the week goes on. And I would defend that presentation because it certainly has its charms, but at the Ohio State Fair the building is air-conditioned and all the pie slices/cookies/cupcakes are behind glass. Not a fly in sight!

I was just as fascinated by the canned goods. The second place jam winner was kiwi lime. I wish I could try it! It’s been haunting my dreams.

You know what I’m going to say here. You cannot, to the best of my knowledge, make AI-generated jam. Although you can certainly make an AI-generated cross-stitch/embroidery pattern (I mean…don’t), a person still has to do the actual stitches.

The entire building is full of gloriously human-made things, in all their beauty and messiness. It’s my favorite part of any fair and I wrote about it a little bit in Just Another Love Song, my street fair summer book. A fun fact is that when I went to the Bellville library to visit my mom’s book club, their book club leader/librarian read this passage out loud (my heart!).

“Part of it is that I genuinely enjoy seeing what people submit—the beautiful, the not so beautiful, the sublimely weird (like the aforementioned Garth Brooks portrait). But it’s also a reminder for me that creativity exists everywhere. The vast majority of the entrants don’t create art for a living, but that doesn’t mean they can’t paint or draw or photograph something. It doesn’t mean they’re immune to seeing beauty and capturing it on paper or canvas or film.

It’s also a reminder to me of what community means—the kind of community we have here in Baileyville. There isn’t an art show if people don’t take a chance and share the thing they created. There isn’t a baked goods competition if people don’t take the time to make cakes, cookies, and pies. There isn’t a needlework show if people don’t accept the vulnerability that’s necessary to enter something they spend hours upon hours making and offer it up to the judges.”

The fair is, at its heart, about people (and cows made of butter). It felt like a real slap in the face to see an AI poster in the same building as a quilt that took 200 hours to make, just feet away from the kids’ paintings/drawings/sculptures. I’d so much rather look at a second grader’s drawing of their dog than look at this poster. Let a second grader draw the butter cow, for Pete’s sake, and make that the poster!

It made me think of this post from Hallie Bateman, whose newsletter is wonderfully anti AI.

That’s exactly how I feel. I unfollow influencers who use AI in their captions (if you cannot write one paragraph by yourself, you should find a new career). I try my best to avoid businesses that use AI in their advertisements because if you don’t understand why that’s ugly, I don’t have high hopes for whatever your product is. And I sure don’t want to read any newsletters that have been written by AI or use AI art. If you aren’t even going to take the time to write your work, why the hell would I take the time to read it?

Perhaps it goes without saying that I am not interested in Substack partnering with AI detection software. It feels embarrassing. Like…you guys can’t just tell when something is written with AI? Does the frequent use of the word “quiet,” the “it’s not x it’s y” construction, the short paragraphs and choppy sentences, not give it away for you?

Also, what sorts of newsletter are you reading where this is a problem? Stop reading about life/workout hacks and start reading weirder stuff. Please do not run my work through the AI detection software and just accept that AI would never write something with this many parenthetical asides/typos/cultural references that no one else cares about.

AI wishes it could make anything as cool as a hand-knitted sweater or a miniature setup inside a detergent bottle (I wish I took a picture of that one). It wishes it could make a quilt or a cross-stitched piece of Captain Picard with the phrase “Set phasers to stunning.” AI wishes it could can a jar of barbecue sauce or decorate a cookie. It wishes it could make a butter cow, but it can’t! Only dairy and human hands can⁴.

I’m sure there are good uses for AI in science and medicine—I wouldn’t know, because that’s not my business. Frankly, I hope that AI is actually useful in some way for humanity, the way the tech oligarchs keep promising it is. I would love it if it could cure cancer or make dogs live forever.

But I’m talking about using AI for art and creativity, which I don’t think is ever okay. And hanging it up at the fair, giving it a $1,000 prize while it’s displayed next to beautiful, bizarre, lovingly handcrafted human artwork is offensive and depressing.

I never, ever want to read a book written with AI. I don’t want to watch a film made with AI. We have no shortage of human-made artwork on this planet, and I plan to use my time here watching it, reading it, writing about it, and raising a kid who loves it, too. There are so many people who view generative AI as some inevitable thing—you know, the ones who say we need to get on board or get left behind.

That’s only true if you believe it, and I don’t. My title for this post may have been “Everything is ugly now,” but I only feel that way on my worst days. The truth is, we are surrounded by beauty—it’s everywhere, if you just let yourself see it.

Sometimes I wonder what the point of writing this newsletter is. I mean, my primary job is writing books, and this newsletter is not usually delivering any actual news. Instead, I’m spending a significant amount of time writing about movies, books, television, and all the other things I can’t stop thinking about. In some ways, I guess that’s kind of selfish. I would never write about anything that I don’t personally care a lot about, and I would write an essay about a movie that I know has limited appeal to other people (some might say I have done that many a time).

But ultimately, the goal of No One Asked is to encourage you to invest in your obsessions—the ones that don’t involve scrolling through other people’s lives or trying to lifehack yourself out of humanity. It’s a reminder that art does actually matter, that it does have the power to influence your life and improve your days. AI can make a picture—or a book, or a poster—but it can’t ever be obsessed the way humans can.

Let yourself watch a movie, or read a book, or visit a museum, or listen to a song made by a person. Go to the fair (it’s happening through the weekend) and look at the quilts. Let yourself experience anything that’s made by flawed hands. Let’s remember that we’re not put here on this planet to listen to machines. We’re here to be human.

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1. My parents live in rural Ohio in the country, where you can’t safely walk a dog on the road, so “in town” just means we drove ten minutes into Bellville proper to walk on the small town streets and, usually, the cemetery. Sorry if you don’t understand the beauty of a cemetery walk!

2. Please tell me you guys also did this in school.

3. Another reason not to trust AI: if you Google this title, their AI overview tells you it’s a real movie, with cast and plot information. This is why using AI for research is so dangerous. It’s quite often completely wrong!

4. If AI was used in the design of the butter cow, don’t tell me.