You might have noticed flyers for small businesses starting to look the same in recent months, not because everyone's jumping on one of the big graphic design trends of 2026, but because of a technology. AI-generated flyers are everywhere, and they're replacing the great tradition of folk design built in Photoshop or Microsoft Paint.
Suddenly everything from your local church's car boot sale to the food truck on the pavement outside it is presenting itself with AI-generated visuals. And despite the theoretically infinite creative possibilities that AI image generators afford, most of them look mediocre, if not outright traumatic when it comes to AI menus and food imagery.
On social media, graphic designers are trying to make the world see sense.
The vast array of AI flyers cropping up all over social media and even printed in physical form suggests that many small businesses see such assets in purely informational terms: an inconvenience needed to communicate a product or service rather than a vital piece of branding that can say a lot about a business and the people behind it.
The fightback is in full swing on Instagram and YouTube, with a recent flurry of posts and videos that seek to highlight that ethical issues and simply the cheap generic look of AI-generated visuals could put customers off.
Designers and illustrators are also taking AI-generated flyers from the internet and trying to show how they would have approached the brief, leading to much more unique, eye-catching and coherent results.
Some designers are using the process like a real brief to practice their skills and others to promote their services.
Others are so tired of seeing bad AI designs that they're imploring businesses to design their own assets in any other way.
Some people appear to have got the message. At least, there's a simultaneous trend running of small businesses declaring on Instagram that they'll be communicating using pen and paper instead of AI flyers. Others have been sharing simple tips for other businesses on how to make a flyer without using AI.
The AI proponents will say bad users are the cause of generic-looking flyers, not AI itself. All you need to do is prompt better. But even with the most detailed 1,000-word prompt followed by multiple rounds of generations, there's an inherent tendency for AI image generation to gravitate to a statistical average of its data set and the verdicts of data annotators.
Before AI, we had bad Photoshop fails and the classic 'graphic design is my passion meme'. But at least amateur design had some personality. With AI, everything just looks a bit mid. For some businesses, that might be enough, but I think the trend towards rawer hand-crafted work may be building.
