The Dog Show, the Slop, and the Slow Death of Good Enough

Someone on r/Melbourne went to the Dog + Cat Lovers Show this week, the first time in a few years, and came back reporting the place was about 80% AI slop. Not just stallholders cutting corners either. The show itself was using AI artwork to promote the event. A show about actual, real, photographable animals, advertised with images of animals that don’t exist. There’s something almost poetic about that, in a bleak kind of way.

I’ve been turning this over for a few days because I don’t think it’s really about dog shows. It’s about a threshold we seem to have crossed without much ceremony, where “good enough and free” beat “good and costs something” in about eighteen months flat. Someone in the comments who works as a graphic designer put it plainly: people don’t lack taste so much as they lack the ability to notice when something looks like everything else. The AI logo and the AI poster and the AI dog-with-a-weirdly-woven-texture photo all have the same fingerprints, the same slightly waxy sheen, but if you’ve never had to look closely at design for a living, you just don’t clock it. It reads as “custom” because a computer made it specifically for you, thirty seconds ago, for nothing.

I get the appeal, genuinely. I spend my working life automating things that used to take a person a full day, and there’s real satisfaction in that. A small business owner running a dog grooming salon in Dandenong doesn’t have a design budget, doesn’t have a design degree, and has about four minutes between clients to make a poster for Saturday’s half-price nail trim. Of course they’re opening whatever tool spits out an image fast. I don’t think that’s a moral failing. It’s a rational response to being time-poor and cash-poor, which describes most small businesses I know.

But there’s a cost that doesn’t show up on the invoice. One of the commenters, an ex-graphic designer, said something that stuck with me: the hope is that we’re in the overcorrection phase, where everything looks the same and eventually people will pay for a human again because distinctiveness becomes valuable precisely when everyone else has stopped bothering. He said he hoped that, but wasn’t confident. I’m not either. We said the same thing about stock photography fifteen years ago and somehow we still ended up with a thousand websites using the same photo of a woman laughing alone with a salad.

What actually gets me is the bit about who notices and who doesn’t. Someone pointed out, reasonably, that opposition to this stuff skews younger, and that people who grew up watching design happen slowly, by hand, by someone’s actual judgement, are more likely to feel the uncanny wrongness of it immediately. I’m squarely in that bracket. I remember when clip art was the cheap option and everyone agreed it looked cheap. AI slop is clip art’s grandchild, except it’s confident enough to pretend it isn’t cheap, and a lot of people believe it.

I don’t have a tidy answer here, and I’m wary of anyone who does. I use AI tools most days for work and find them genuinely useful for the boring, structural parts of the job. I also think the wholesale replacement of visual craft with statistically-averaged sludge is a loss, even if most people shrug at it, even if the business owner saves four hundred dollars. Both of those things are true at once and I’m not going to pretend one cancels the other out.

What I’d actually like to see, before the next dog show, is some kind of modest cultural correction where “made by a person” becomes a thing small businesses advertise as a point of difference, the way “locally roasted” or “family owned” already does. Not because AI is evil, but because somewhere in all this cheap abundance, the thing that used to signal someone cared enough to pay for craft has quietly disappeared, and nobody voted on that. I’d happily pay the extra for the poster someone actually sweated over. I suspect I’m not alone, even if right now it doesn’t feel that way.