IN DEFENCE OF AGEING PUNKS USING AI POSTERS
Old people are using AI as incessantly as - well - young people are complaining about it, and tensions around the subject aren’t much higher than in the self-proclaimed punk scene.
The oldies: original outsiders of Thatcher’s Britain, still putting on weekly shows and selling homemade zines. The difference now is that the shows are empty, and the zine’s circulation barely pushes single figures. But the oldies don’t seem to notice, or care.
The youngsters are sort of middle-class post-bohemians. They’ve swapped traditional intoxicants for social media, and reckless free-thinking for a collective endorsement of whatever the current left-wing trend is. On the face of it the word “punk” is all these two movements have in common - even the music doesn’t sound the same.
If it is a competition between the two (and it absolutely is in my mind), the youngsters get an obvious upper hand when it comes to their genuinely DIY approach to poster design. Their almost religious aversion to AI keeps the flyers fresh and dirty and passionately involved with the scene. I’m proud to see the Midlands still scattered with these physical materials, and they do make the efforts of our beloved oldies look a lil pathetic.
I didn’t see punk the first time round, and so can only assume that there were plenty of shite posters around back then, now gratefully lost to the mists of time. Regardless, these days we find those who did live through that original wave mindlessly putting the scene’s flyer aesthetic to shame, and although it’s what you’d expect from any generation previous to ours (fuckin idiots), what irks me is that just a few years ago you could at least laugh at the damn things.
They were made on Photoshop or MS Paint or whatever was available and comprehendible to them, and largely consisted of spelling mistakes rendered in barely legible “punk” fonts over a pixelated photo of an event from 40 years ago that was evidently way more successful than the one now advertised. You got booked and could barely tell you were playing. It was all hilarious and we loved it.
An absolutely cavalier use of exclamation marks had their slogans come off like the desperate plea of a village church noticeboard tryna get kids into Sunday school, and they were always poorly cropped on instagram so that essential information was missing - ya know, stuff like time, date, venue etc. They’d copy and paste the entire ticket link into the body of the poster itself, wrongly assuming they’d be clickable in the image format, or perhaps that people would be standing on street corners manually copying the vast 150-character URLs into their phone. Love it love it love it.
Alas, AI has ruined all that, and the youngsters are totally fair to criticise the cartoonish punk caricatures and sickeningly colourful lettering that our machine overlords spew up for the oldies every time another one of their inevitably empty events gets booked in through a begrudging pub landlord who’s probably just waiting for them to die rather than have to initiate an awkward conversation. But of course aesthetics aren’t the only criticisms leveled by the new kids on the block - the real problemo is that AI is considered inherently establishment, and I can see three big reasons why...
Firstly, AI is bad for the environment. Paper glue and sellotape plastering the town isn’t great either I guess, nor is the petrol used to get to and from shite gigs and all the electricity needed to run them and get the beer to them too, but perhaps, unlike those big thirsty data centres, that stuff’s impact is easily outweighed by the music’s progressive message that ripples out like a flower of life in the murky pond of society. Probs.
flower of life in my lidl yoghurt
Secondly, AI jeopardises the careers of graphic designers. Not that the oldies were using graphic designers in the first place (as evident by their pathetic output prior to AI) - in fact, what DIY promoter does? You literally do it yourself. I spose with their years of graft behind them (and only a couple more ahead of them) it’s a no-brainer for the oldies to finally sit back and let the machines do the work. Hmm.
Thirdly and probably most importantly, excessive AI use does symbolise a sort of alliance with the great big control system that dystopian novels warned us about and which may bring an end to our freedom as we know it. And that’s not really very punk is it. Or is it? I mean, who cares. Is punk about caring? Sid Vicious didn’t seem to care. Was he punk? I don’t know any more.
I will say this: sometimes the young zealous critics could stay in their lane. A band group chat I was in before it all turned sour was, in its heyday, littered with jokes about another (ageing) band’s “AI girlfriend” - the massive-titted reels they’d post with old boys commenting “gorgeous” underneath; the possibility of their lead singer having a blow-up doll of her made, and plenty other world-beating lampoons. All good fun. But when a local promoter of youngsters publicly badmouthed them online for their (admittedly insane) AI use, I felt a pang of anger, a possessive flame inside me. Those are OUR stupid old people to lampoon in the privacy of our own group chat! Leave them alone you crusading lil twerps!!
But then I guess the whole point is for the new kids to criticise the old ones. Is there anywhere better to direct your mindless rock’n’roll hatred than at your own predecessors, the very foundations of all that you do? It all makes the two movements seem quite similar actually. Even their music kinda sounds the same.
Punks need something to have a right go at, and AI is a neat boundary for these youngsters to refuse to cross (except when they’re using search engines or algorithms or telling ChatGPT all their problems). Most convictions are fluffy and messy and borderline meaningless anyway, but still fun to hold. And fun to rip apart too, as the next generation will find when they take us lot to task for our blind spots and idiocy and crimes against humanity. Sounds like everyone's a winner!
P.S. I meant it when I said "ageing" - those using AI posters who are below the UK pension age are exempt entirely from my sympathy. Get real guys. And yes that continues to go up as the pension age rises