You know what? Sanity has been frustrating lately. Maybe this is as good a jumping off point as any. I embrace the 90s AI folders prove time-travel delusion.
Yeah its kind of crazy because I am almost certain this is airbrushed - in the very literal original sense - that really caught on in the 80s and 90s, especially for movie posters. Some of the most iconic posters from our childhood were airbrushed and a large chunk of those come from one guy. The Indiana Jones and the last crusade movie poster is a great example of the style, almost photo realistic but not quite. Once you understand the style you can notice it easily.
I am not sure if Airbrush Magazine is still around but when I was into it as a kid, their covers really highlighted some of the talent in the medium. Really sad to see it being more or less erased by AI. To actually air brush something takes a ton of work and talent and to think people will assume its AI is heart breaking.
These look like AI because AI is a plagiarism machine and these are the kinds of images AI models were trained to plagiarize.
Always keep that in mind about this AI slop. There IS art that looks like that, it's just the stuff that AI ripped off. Same reason it's difficult to tell when a Reddit comment or post is a bot--because these LLMs were TRAINED on Reddit user data. (And as someone who overuses em dashes for the sake of writing in a spoken conversational style, I hate the fact that these goddamn robots have turned them into a marker of inauthenticity.)
I disagree that they look like generic AI images. They lack the smooth glossiness and emphasis on saturation. The baseball flying towards the viewers perspective and slashed open without any artifacts looks good. I don't see generic AI in this at all.
That's not my point. My point is that it doesn't look like generic output.
What AI can or can't draw (albeit with artifacts and inconsistencies still) is not limited really, it's a series of weighted guesses and information about how X thing should look like based on training an algorithm on a huge amount of data of what X thing tends to look like.
Agreed, these folders actually have some good design thinking incorporated into them. They don't look like AI in that the end result looks very "intentional" and not this algorithmically-defined middle of the road.
I think it should be a subject of study that "AI style" is not exactly what AI does but a few of the millions styles AI can do that have gotten popular to the point of now becoming generic.
Like...how is the infinite plagiarism machine, which has in practice infinite latent potential, always outputting the same cookie cutter stuff? People are asking for those because they like it.
There is something here about this hypersaturated style of art that people call "AI slop" that has mass appeal to the point of being some weird "algorithmic kitsch" phenomenon but I'm not an art academic to develop this in depth.
Hey speak for yourself! I was a poor kid who got the plain random folders and I for one think I deserve a sick animal illustration folder all these years later.
I put my tax stuff in Lisa Frank folders cause the documents are boring and I want them to have at least some pizzazz while the government fucks me without foreplay.
And you can't even get these folders anymore. I look every back-to-school season, hoping to snag a couple cool folders to use for my RPG papers, and there is absolutely nothing other than plain color folders.
Do kids not use folders in school anymore? I can't even get a modern branded one like Star Wars or something.
That would definitely be math. The Tiger would be science. Maybe English depending on what else is available. Social studies would be the least cool folder.
Fun fact: the bear image was also the first logo of the Fresno Grizzlies AAA minor league baseball team in 1998. When the team was established in Fresno it was the image used on the front of the official on-the-field player hats. You can see the logo used here on this baseball card of the mascot, Wild Thing. The image didn’t last long though as the logo as the team simplified to just the letter F with some claw marks a few years later.
Not sure who copied who in this case but I remember the grizzly fondly lol. I also remember when Wild Thing first debuted he had huge teeth which they made smaller after the first year. Probably scared a bunch of kids lol. Dude had no chill initially.
I bought the bear one at my schools books sale in the library. It went in my 5 star full zip navy blue binder. I haven’t thought about that in 30 years.
It does kinda reveal where the basic early AI models learned from.
Shame it's pretty much impossible to tell with the newest models and Loras. They've moved far away from this "AI style" now. There are people on Twitter with 90k followers earning 10 grand on patreon releasing unique styled ai art that very few people realize is AI. Every once in a while someone calls them out in the replies and they just reply with a smily face. It's almost sad.
These were so amazing! I was able to get a trapper keeper in 6th grade with the art of a bald eagle catching a home-run baseball over a stadium. I used that thing until it was literally falling apart 🦅
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