The flyer isn't the product, it's the promise · Detroit Meets
Story
The flyer isn't the product, it's the promise
@alex.30mm, @kaden.ski, EM Meet & 14 more
I thought about writing a catchy hook but this topic needs no introduction, AI flyers are becoming a problem.
They take less than a minute to make. And everyone who sees one knows that.
That minute is the whole problem. Attending a meet can be one of the most memorable experiences ever. Sitting in a random parking lot with a few hundred people who get it, walking up and down the rows of cool cars just talking. Pull up in a bone stock daily and you still get the nod, because cars were only ever the conversation starter. People show up alone yet leave as a group. The cars are the excuse, the community is the point.
Every one of those days fills a camera roll with memories that are unforgettable. So when the invitation to all of that is something a prompt spat out in 45 seconds, people feel it. The flyer isn't the product, it's the promise: the only evidence a stranger gets before spending their Saturday and half a tank of gas on your event. Lately a lot of those promises are being written by software who only really cares because we tell it to.
I run Detroit Meets, so flyers are my raw material; organizers send them in, listings come out. But my opinion is the least interesting one here. I asked some of the people who actually carry this community: organizers, photographers, designers, and real enthusiasts. Some sent essays. One sent a video. Their words appear exactly as sent, typos and all, because the whole point of this story is that human fingerprints are the value.
What a flyer used to mean
Flyers used to be community work by definition. Somebody knew Photoshop, or knew somebody who did. Somebody shot last year's event specifically so this year's flyer would recall what everyone loved, cars that would actually show, driven by people you'd actually see again. The flyer was the handshake between organizers and enthusiasts, and it carried the fingerprints of the people it came from.
The flyer was never really about the graphic; it's a signal about effort, and effort is the currency this whole culture runs on. EM Meet said it about as directly as it can be said:
I think Ai generated flyers simply have no creativity in them it takes less then a minute to generate and make. If the organizers don't put effort into the flyer then you can guarantee that there will be no effort put into the event itself.
Read the flyer as a forecast, in other words. Shift Society runs everything through someone who cares, and their answer deserves to run whole:
Our take on AI-generated flyers is that it shows laziness, no creativity, no personality, and no flavor. The feedback we have got from our own flyers is that people love the creativity and passion behind it. Our graphic designer and media person Rylan Basheer handles all of this.
Personally if someone invites me to an event with a AI flyer I would 99% of the time not go to said event. If they show no care or laziness in there flyer, that means the event itself has no thought into it.
Greatest analogy I can think of is, it's like building a car, each car that someone truly builds has some sort of character, personality, and style to it. If we are building nice cars let's build some nice flyers to go with it. Canva is what we use to design our flyers. I get it sometimes people don't have funds to hire a graphic designer, but people can find time to learn new skills with a free canva trial.
Nobody in this community respects a car that was bought instead of built; the build is the personality. Flyers work the same way. Then sit with the middle paragraph: one of your favorite organizers just told you they skip 99% of AI-advertised events, sight unseen. The flyer got read, the event got judged, and nobody ever showed up.
And they're very cookie cutter. They all look the same and they usually advertise cars that won't even be there
That last line came up unprompted in almost half the answers, and it moves this past a design gripe. The community is, at bottom, a network of trust. You trust that the meet is real, that the organizer has permission for the venue, that the event on the flyer resembles the event. Show up to two or three meets that looked like Goodwood on the flyer and turned out to be three Civics in a gas station parking lot, and you stop trusting flyers altogether. **
Anyone who is serious about having events will never succeed using ai generated flyers- especially when there are cars in the flyer that aren't at the meet. AI Flyers don't stand out nor do they give any credibility or personality
I personally find the A.I. posters lackluster and lazy. Instead of having someone with talent make the posters they put in a prompt and go with it. Also the cars and background showcased in the posters are completely different than what the event is in reality. A.I. flyers make me not want to go, as they are often associated with takeover culture.
Takeovers are what ruin opportunities, cops get called, and the whole community gets painted with one brush. Organizers spend years earning the worlds trust precisely to stay out of that shadow, and a flyer that pattern-matches to takeovers borrows the exact reputation this community has been fighting to shed.
I personally don't really care to have an opinion on the matter, I think AI flyers have no individuality, are too cluttered with useless graphics and information, and shows absolutely no effort given. Plus I think most flyers just have exaggerated or untrue information and pictures. I don't mind people using them but it just shows how little effort they give and how little they care, so I don't mind if people use it, I'll just avoid that meet
"I'll just avoid that meet." Quietly, that's how communities thin out. Nobody argues. Nobody posts a callout. They just stop showing up, and attendance was the only vote this economy ever had.
What it takes out of the community
There's a part of this that doesn't get talked about enough, because everyone's busy arguing about aesthetics: every AI flyer is a moment of community participation that got passed on.
Think about what a real flyer requires. A photographer gets asked to shoot. A designer gets trusted with the event's identity. Somebody's actual build ends up as the face of the meet, and its owner shows up proud. Friends get tagged, photos get shared, and by the time the flyer drops, half a dozen people already have skin in the game. The flyer advertises the community, and the making of it pulls the community closer.
We are blessed with a ton of talented and creative individuals that should always take precedence over ai.
Dedicating a photoshoot for an upcoming event will genuinely capture the identity of that meet. Even using a photo from a previous meet is adequate.
There is no excuse. Too many cool cars, locations, and creatives for the fliers to be so low effort and lacking that badly.
A flyer built from real photos of real regulars broadcasts exactly which family you're being invited into. A generated flyer broadcasts nothing, because it came from nowhere.
And when the photoshoot doesn't happen, the photographer doesn't get put on, and the loss has nothing to do with money: they don't get included. Being the person whose shot made the flyer is how a kid with a camera becomes a deeper part of this community. Those on-ramps matter. Remove enough of them and the next generation of creatives never gets pulled in at all.
It would be dishonest to write this as soulless robots versus noble artists, because the scene is messier than that, and some of the sharpest people in it sit in the middle.
@down.to.nothing made the argument the anti-AI crowd actually has to answer, and it deserves to be read whole:
Overall my perspective with Ai as a whole is that it is a tool. It shoudnt replace human creativity but it can help solve problems for basic tasks. It constantly makes errors. Onto your topic, making generic car event fliers is a very basic generic task in my opinion. We aren't making art that lives on for years. It's a basic photo that shows you a time / date / location. I'm not hanging your car event flier up in my shop. I have an event flier for Tokyo Auto Salon 2019 that is autographed by several shop owners during my visit to Japan. I couldn't tell you if that poster was drawn by Ai or a person and to be honest I couldn't care less who did. Historically guys would often hire someone on Fiver to make them art for their liveries and posters. It was usually done quickly and without any sort of automotive involvement or passion. What's the difference? Now, if you hire someone on Fiver they're just going to us Ai anyway.
additionally I love and respect using artists and their work. However, hiring someone to tell 500 people what parking lot to go to this weekend often isn't worth an investment….especially if the event is all volunteers. I have a business and I have used Ai to make me generic sale promos etc. it's quick, easy, and get the message across. If I'm hanging something up as art, it's going to be a local photographers work that showed me his vision in the automotive industry.
Of every flyer on those walls, the one that survived is the one signed on a trip that actually happened. Even its owner can't tell you whether a person drew it, and it doesn't matter, because the artwork was never why it gets kept. Paper becomes worth keeping when people touch it. That poster is tressured for the community embedded in it and the story it tells, which proves the whole case from the other direction: the flyer's worth was never the pixels. It's the people attached to them.
There's an honest bootstrap case too. @salspec7 (Cars and Cannoli @ Nino Salvaggio's) came into hosting brand new, with nothing real to show yet:
We've been using them mainly because we've never had car events at any of our locations until now and didn't have good photos with the stores incorporated with cars.
That being said we made ai flyers to have each individual store in the back with some cool cars.
and when we finally had photos of each location with cars we're going to use those
Now that we've had an event at almost every location, moving forward will all be real photos from past events
I agree that ai flyers are silly and shouldn't necessarily be relied on, It's a great tool to get something out there fast and accurate like we were looking for
A specific gap, a fast tool, an expiration date. They've hosted at almost every location now; the real photos exist; the renders retire. Used that way, as scaffolding you tear down the moment the real community exists to photograph, it's hard to stay mad. And notice the endpoint is the same as everyone else's: real photos of real events with real people in them.
I don't think AI flyers are inherently bad, I think they're a tool. I've made plenty of AI-assisted flyers, but I prefer using AI to enhance a design rather than letting it create everything. For example, I use official Porsche corporate assets and AI to expand images or add context, which helps create a cleaner, more polished look while still keeping the brand's identity. If a flyer is fully AI-generated, I believe it still needs strong human direction through editing, revisions, and quality control. AI should assist the creative process, not replace it.
@cruisnmedia, whose team is genuinely split, which might be the most accurate snapshot of the whole debate:
Our team is actually fairly split on the topic of AI-generated event flyers, which we think reflects the broader conversation happening throughout the automotive community.
On one hand, some members of our team feel that many AI-generated flyers have become easy to recognize because they often share the same visual style. They believe this can take away from the originality of an event and that artwork is something that should continue to be created by real artists and designers whenever possible.
On the other hand, some of us view AI as a valuable tool—especially for small teams like ours that wear many hats each day. A flyer that might take an hour or more to create in an editing software can sometimes be produced in just a few minutes with AI, allowing us to spend more time on other responsibilities. We don't necessarily see AI as a replacement for creativity, but rather as another tool in the creative process.
We also believe there's a difference between simply generating a basic prompt and accepting the first result versus intentionally refining, editing, and guiding AI to create something unique. We've created AI-assisted flyers that don't have the stereotypical "AI look" because we've taken the time to manipulate the prompts, and make thoughtful edits afterward. Like any tool, the quality of the final product depends on how it's used.
Overall, we believe AI has a place in the creative process, but it works best when paired with human creativity, good design judgment, and respect for the artists and designers who continue to push the industry forward.
The common thread across all four: a human who cares stays in the loop, and the AI fills gaps around the community instead of replacing it.
Here's the twist: the people with the most to lose were the calmest ones
I feel as though for most artists the answers are gonna all be quite similar haha! For me personally there's such a lack of creativity when it comes to things like AI generated event flyers. It's not to say that it can't be helpful and useful in many different ways, even creatively! But I think part of what makes art and advertisement so personal and connecting towards the audience, is that it's still human. Perhaps there's errors, mistakes, or maybe it's simply so imaginative that only a true creative spirit could've come up with such a design. AI generated ANYTHING just simply isn't as memorable… something I think a lot of people don't know about me is that I play a lot of instruments, and I'm also huge into documentary videography! When I first got into film, I wanted everything from the video work, the editing the music, the idea, EVERYTHING to be mine. Even though there's so many little imperfections throughout, those imperfections are beautiful
AI is mainly mathematical, right? It takes data of all the most popular and common used imaging and advertisement on the Internet and smashes it all together to make ONE. But what happens when everybody starts making AI generated flyers? lack of color and creativity certainly. I think there's a lot of people out there who recognize this "AI epidemic" and to be honest I don't think it will last forever.
my personal thoughts… well, it doesn't really affect me at the end of the day, in fact, I think it helps people like me out even more stand out! so I feel quite little threat of any kind when it comes to the topic!
"It's still human." That's the community argument in one sentence. The imperfections aren't flaws to polish out; they're evidence that a person on your side of the culture made this thing for you. AI averages that away by design: it takes the internet's most common imagery and smashes it into one, and the result belongs to everyone and therefore to no one. A scene that prides itself on one-of-one builds, advertising itself with the statistical average of everybody else's picture.
And the prediction in the middle of that answer is already coming true. As generated flyers converge on one look, the human-made ones are what people stop scrolling for.
So where does that leave us
Some verdicts were short and to the point, Exotic Car Connections: "We aren't a fan. We don't use ai in our flyers." @mk7_cracked of stuckintmw: "I hate ai flyers. They poopy butt." @tenlor.ski: "Shits ass they need to stop it." Which is itself a data point about how the community feels.
If you organize, the takeaway was never about design. Use photos from your last meet. No last meet yet? Shoot the empty venue with your phone at the hour you'll run it. Better, ask your favorite photographer, because being asked is half of what builds a scene in the first place. Learn a new skill, Canva and Figma are free! And if you genuinely need AI to get a first event out the door, remember: human direction, and honesty about what the event actually is.
A meet is an invitation into a community, and the regulars read a flyer the way they read a car: built with care, or thrown together. The minute you saved generating that flyer might cost you the exact people who would have made the community at all.
Out of everyone who reached out, I got one video that sums it all up. @kaden.ski:
“Bring real people together with a cover made by real people”
