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.
Joe is a regular freelance journalist and editor at Creative Bloq. He writes news, features and buying guides and keeps track of the best equipment and software for creatives, from video editing programs to monitors and accessories. A veteran news writer and photographer, he now works as a project manager at the London and Buenos Aires-based design, production and branding agency Hermana Creatives. There he manages a team of designers, photographers and video editors who specialise in producing visual content and design assets for the hospitality sector. He also dances Argentine tango.
