WEST ALLIS, Wisc. — Emma Kimball noticed it everywhere at Wisconsin’s State Fair: on food menus, on merchandise and plastered across signs and advertisements.
Art generated by artificial intelligence was “just so in your face,” Kimball said, as she walked through the annual event in West Allis, a Milwaukee suburb.
“When I see it, I’m just disgusted,” she said. “It’s tacky. It’s uncanny.”
AI-generated advertising, artwork and merchandise are increasingly showing up at fairs and festivals across the country. The technology offers an inexpensive way for small businesses to create marketing materials. But its growing presence strikes some as particularly out of place at events built around craftsmanship, local talent and homegrown creativity.
This summer, the prevalence of artificial intelligence at festivals and fairs has even sparked a micro TikTok trend, with users attending local fairs and festivals and compiling sightings of what they call “AI slop.”
For some potential customers, the cartoonish look of AI-generated imagery — unnaturally glistening details, aggressively bold typography, caricatured objects — can be an immediate turnoff.
But for cash-strapped small businesses and vendors that rely on state fairs as a major economic opportunity, AI offers a free way to legitimize their operation without hiring a designer or marketing firm.
Whether AI-generated material actually helps or hurts the businesses that use it is more complicated.
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“The reactions do range,” said Wendy Moe, a professor of marketing at the University of Maryland who researches consumer behavior and how they engage with AI. “Some people are just anti-AI, and they’re not going to like it. A lot of AI-generated content has tells in it, and people do detect it. And some people think it’s funny. Some people get upset about it.”
Leveling the playing field
The Wisconsin State Fair — as most fairs go — is already notoriously visually overstimulating, with neon signs, thousands of people and elaborate displays competing for visitors’ attention. The untrained eye might miss the telltale signs of artificial intelligence at every turn.
Fairs are lush with mom-and-pop vendors — from handmade jewelry booths to cheese-curd-taco food trucks. For independent artists, mobile food businesses and online-only stores, fairs are a chance to sell to thousands, or even millions, of customers.
For businesses like these with small budgets, Moe said the technology is leveling the playing field.
Traditionally, businesses looking to put a professional face forward through branding, logos and other marketing materials would need to shell out thousands to hire social media experts, designers or branding firms. Generative AI platforms such as ChatGPT can spit out images, posters, logos and other materials on demand, often at little to no cost.
“From the perspective of small and medium business owners, I think it’s a great resource,” Moe said. “Some of these organizations and small businesses now have the opportunity to get in front of their consumers in a way they haven’t in the past.”
As for whether people concoct the right prompts to generate text and images that actually hit the right notes, it’s “hit-or-miss,” said Pat Huddleston, a retailing professor at Michigan State University’s department of advertising and public relations.
Without precise prompting and editing, AI’s typical style is easily recognizable: bold and often warped text, busy backgrounds, crowded layouts and shiny, over-rendered images of food. Mistakes in spelling or human anatomy are also common tells.
While plastering generative AI images around their booths might help businesses save on up-front costs, not everyone appreciates the result.
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Fairgoer and Marquette University journalism student Anna Heffernan said AI-generated marketing can make a business appear as though it took an “effortless” shortcut.
“It feels like, ‘Let’s just get this done,’” Heffernan told Straight Arrow. “You have people who specialize in this. I feel like this is damaging to people’s careers.”
Different states, same debates
Several attendees also questioned whether some of the merchandise for sale inside the Wisconsin State Fair’s “Official FairWear” tent featured AI-generated designs.
In response to questions from Straight Arrow News, Wisconsin State Fair Park’s communications manager Tim McCormick said the artists behind the T-shirt designs each said their designs were generated by hand.
“As AI creep seems to infiltrate many aspects of our lives, we are proud of the fact that the Wisconsin State Fair is a venue that still showcases the artistry and imagination of the Badger State’s best,” McCormick said. “We love to feature handmade, authentic artistry throughout the Wisconsin State Fair. And thousands of agricultural exhibitors showed off their handiwork and hard work in our many shows.”
For an event that has drawn over 1 million annual visitors in recent years, boasting an economic impact of $200 million, the designs felt lazy to Kimball.
“I noticed it right away and honestly, I just feel disgusted by it,” said Kimball, who says she feels skilled at recognizing AI art.
Similar debates and suspicions have cropped up at other fairs across the country this summer.
In May, the Iowa State Fair’s Blue Ribbon Foundation chose an AI-generated design for its annual T-shirt contest, sparking online outrage. The Foundation said it will review its rules before next year’s contest, but didn’t commit to prohibiting AI use.
“AI systems depend on massive data centers, consuming enormous amounts of electricity and water. These are the same resources many agricultural communities already struggle to protect,” said Blair Schulman, founder of art news platform Midwest Agenda, in a TikTok video about the controversy.
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In early August, the Ohio State Fair faced a similar controversy after an AI-generated poster won a design contest with a $1,000 prize. The poster was riddled with common tells, such as an American flag with an incorrect number of stars and stripes. Locals slammed the decision and its failure to reward real local artists.
AI will be prohibited in next year’s contest.
“I think it undermines the work that goes into making art,” Ohioan and art educator Victoria Douglas told local news station WKRN. “It is literally one of the most human things we can do.”
A turnoff for customers?
Huddleston has worked on several research papers trying to determine: “Do consumers really care” about AI advertising? Does it make them more or less likely to open their wallets?
The answer isn’t black-and-white.
Some studies have found that when consumers are aware that an advertisement is generated by AI rather than humans, it makes them more distrustful of the company, she said. Consumers may question whether the information in the image or advertisement is even accurate.
“One of the things that we found is, somebody that is familiar with AI and at least has some understanding is less likely to feel negatively about AI-generated ads than somebody who is less knowledgeable,” Huddleston said. “Therefore, sometimes people that are also less knowledgeable are a little bit more fearful and less likely to trust in the ad.”
Even if AI-generated material is free of errors, people can often feel unsettled by imagery that seems “too perfect” to be created by humans. Gen Z in particular values authenticity, Huddleston said, and “sometimes these idealized images don’t sit very well.”
Fairgoer Ella Lynch said she “won’t even go up to a vendor or a business if I see they’re using AI to advertise.”
“It’s scary that it’s all over the place. I feel like people are too comfortable making the easy choice. It feels soulless,” she said.
Others feel more sympathetic toward small businesses trying to pinch pennies.
“Is it unattractive? Yes,” said Evie Letter, a Wisconsin fairgoer. “But I don’t think you can get mad at the general population for using it. It’s easy. The problem isn’t the general population, it’s the big companies.”
Moe said a key challenge for businesses using AI is that it can produce content quickly, but it can’t always produce something that feels unique to a particular business. AI-generated text and images can sometimes feel bland or generic, she said, especially when businesses don’t add their own ideas and identity to it.
“So that’s where I really think human input is really important, right?” Moe said. “If you have a strong sense of what your business represents, then you have to be able to work with the AI to create content, images or text that fit your brand, and it’s not just another average piece of content.”
As people are becoming skilled at determining what is and isn’t AI, the generational gulf is widening, Huddleston said. Members of Gen Z — who grew up with the internet as a part of daily life — are often better at identifying it than baby boomers.
“I do think that it’s good that consumers question what is AI versus what is not … because again that’s part of critical thinking, critical evaluation,” Huddleston told Straight Arrow. “We really don’t want to hand that over to these large language models. We want to be able to retain those skills on our own. So, being critical, I think, is a good thing.”
But AI is also getting better at avoiding mistakes. Common slip-ups like hands with too many fingers or shadows falling incorrectly might soon no longer be so easily detectable.
“What I’m hoping to see is not relying on the consumer to be able to figure out whether it’s AI or not, but having some sort of policy or regulation that says AI-generated content needs to be labeled as such,” Moe said. “Then people don’t have to kind of evaluate, ‘Am I being lied to in some way?’”
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