Every Monday I put together a weekly show and events calendar called Record Recommended. These roundups are relatively basic and lo-fi—words, links, occasional YouTube embeds—but they still take a fair amount of effort to assemble. I have a spreadsheet with links to more than 30 Milwaukee venues. I click on a venue link, add the shows I think are noteworthy, and move on to the next one. This usually takes an hour or two. Next, I check to see if there are any Milwaukee Record events happening in the next seven days (there are usually, like, 8,000 of ’em). Then I adorn a handful of listings with blurbs. These are mostly quotes taken from official bios, but some are freshly written by me or Tyler, and others are things we have on file. This takes another hour.

Which brings me to the final step of the process. Before wrapping things up, I wade through the wild and wooly world Facebook Events and look for any shows I may have missed. I usually find three or four. But what I ALWAYS find are some of the most wretched, awful, ugly, lazy, soulless, busy, impenetrable, unreadable, dog-shit-colored AI flyers on the planet. Good lord.

You know the kind of AI flyers I’m talking about. The kind that look like this:

…or this:

…or this:

These butt-ugly things are so ubiquitous these days that they’re practically invisible. Restaurants “make” them. Bars “make” them. Police departments “make” them. Church picnics “make” them. And it’s not just on Facebook—these things are out in the real world, too, lurking on street corners and in shop windows like malevolent aliens disguised as little old ladies. (What is it with the “three little action lines” on these things?)

So yeah, this shit blows, full stop. (For the purposes of this article, I’m not going to broach any environmental issues related to AI. I’ll leave that to much smarter folks than myself.)

One of the funniest things about AI flyers is when people get called out for using them. These AI-shamed folks always have the same response: Well, we’re just a small mom-and-pop business trying to make ends meet! We can’t afford to pay a graphic designer thousands of dollars to make a flyer!

This is funny for several reasons. First, it’s funny when people get defensive about something they know sucks. Second, and most notably, it’s funny when folks imply that the only other POSSIBLE way to create a flyer for their restaurant or charity pickleball tournament is to pay a professional graphic designer a duffle-bag full of cash to do it.

[stands on soapbox, turns on megaphone]

As if everyone wasn’t easily and happily slapping together homemade, bootleg-Photoshop, graphic-design-is-my-passion-ass flyers for decades upon decades before AI became a thing two years ago.

Ahem.

But seriously: it’s still possible to create simple and effective flyers without using some dumb AI thing that makes everything look like hospital garbage soaked in urine. Don’t believe me? Behold two local examples I recently spotted on Facebook. Did they jump out like glittering oases in a desert of brown-colored and bug-textured food? They did!

Ahhh. Don’t those look great? Aren’t they positively charming? The first is from Gilles Frozen Custard. Unlike other local custard joints, Gilles’ flyers adhere to the glorious pre-AI rules of do-it-yourself design: a basic background, three-too-many fonts, and a cut-and-paste photo of a bottle of Jameson. Is it weird that I get a little misty-eyed every time I look at that poorly cropped photo of a pulled pork sandwich?

Ditto the flyer for the recently wrapped Mineral, Fossil, Crystal, Gem & Jewelry Show. Let’s cut the bullshit, folks: here’s the name, here are the ticket prices, here’s the location, here are the dates, here’s the website, and here’s a T-rex. All on a bright red background! DONE.

Remember these sorts of flyers? Remember how to make these sorts of flyers? Of course you do! How about we all do it again?

Maybe you noticed I didn’t use any Milwaukee examples for the “crappy AI flyers” section up top. (Well, except for the SaveMPM thing, which squeezes out AI flyers and AI articles every hour on the hour.) That’s because I do sympathize. I sympathize with every bar, restaurant, small business, and drive-in movie theater that’s just trying to make ends meet. Everything is awful. Everything is getting worse. You gotta do what you gotta do. I’m certainly not going to shame a barely-holding-on business for taking an AI shortcut. Even if the resulting ad looks like cartoon dog shit.

As for me, I don’t use AI, and I tend to not think about it much. (Well, beyond this 1,000-word article. And in preparation for a thing I’m speaking at later this month. More on the latter soon.) I know I’m supposed to think about it. And worry about it. And worry about it some more. I’m a writer, a journalist, and a general “creative,” I suppose. AI is coming for my jobs! I’m doomed!

But I can’t help thinking back to my weekly Record Recommended posts. Like I said before, I do them all by hand. Even during light weeks they can take up to three hours or more to complete. That’s not a ton of time, but it is a chunk of my day. Could I somehow use AI to compile these roundups in 30 seconds? Maybe. Though I’d have to check and verify everything by hand afterwards, so what’s the point?

Using AI would also eliminate the human element to Record Recommended, which is something I think folks appreciate. For better or worse, these are shows and events I think are noteworthy, that I am recommending. A lot of people have told me in person how much they depend on these roundups. Just last week, a local artist referred to them as their “bible.” I don’t think I’d hear things like that if I used AI.

Do my Record Recommended articles take a lot of time to put together? Yes. Are they a little basic and lo-fi? Yes. Do they get the job done regardless? I’d like to think so. And I’d like to think that knowing a human is behind the whole thing—a human checking one website at a time, a human adding one clip-art dinosaur at a time—still matters. Because it absolutely does.

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