I go to a lot of craft fairs and I've been seeing people using AI to make their banners or book covers or detail designs on mugs and such. Here are people playing a "support local creators" line and they won't support their own local graphic designers.
There was one booth two shows ago that I particularly remember as it was selling "paintings" of pastoral scenes and wild life, "painted" on to log slices. This is a fairly common craft you might see at such events, but this particular booth was gluing an AI generated image printed on some kind of paper and then slapping it with a coat of texturing medium to give it a paint brush effect.
Disgusting. Selfish. Dishonest. Churlish. This is what craft is becoming. A pink sludge chicken mcnugget of cynical capitalist exploitation.
Why do you care? If it's bad people won't buy it. If people buy it, it's only bad to you
In the craft fair case the issue is the tragedy of the commons.
If people come to think that all craft fairs are choked up with AI slop and Temu (literally) 3D printed flexi-dragons then it does enormous damage to the notion of art fairs as a place to see the work of artistic individuals; the whole category will die.
This could happen much sooner than the slop-producing participants see a financial disincentive to attend, because their costs (time, materials, personal energies) are radically lower.
Like it or not, art communities need to have some chosen standards.
To be fair this is a much bigger concern for people who show at art fairs than people who simply attend, but the people who show at art fairs do need the support of their visitors in this.
Art fairs aren’t just unrestricted competitive capitalism; they are also cultural entities with norms.
Yes, I go to so many because my wife sells her novels at them.
There's also the issue that there is limited space at craft fairs with wait lists for vendors. A dishonest vendor is holding a space a different vendor could have instead.
It's difficult territory because at some level asking people to meet a certain standard to have a stall at a craft fair is, essentially, "gatekeeping".
But art sales are really the only gatekeeping there is in art, and it has to do with there being a literal gate to a limited space. (It's also usually not artists themselves doing the gatekeeping)
People who are engaged in art really ask so little of other people who want to engage with art — the barriers to entry are essentially non-existent except intent and willingness to learn and spend effort. Essentially every kind of expressive art is cheaper than a good computer; every kind of art has someone enthusiastically chipping away on the internet about it.
But when it comes to access to the physical space to sell physical work that is the result of effort and learning, someone does have to say: "this is not the right space for these kinds of things". The question is how do you judge and how do you say it without destroying enthusiasm.
I always laugh at the people talking about AI "democratizing" the arts and "eliminating gatekeeping" when punk and stream of consciousness aesthetic and several other completely open, completely non-virtuoso paths to the arts exist. If only AI could be helping to improve art and media literacy.
Yeah, I mean my slice of the internet is full of video shorts of people using dead ballpoint pens/tetra paks/kitchen ingredients/Temu pasta makers, or silicone baking mats/budget acrylic paint/leaves/laser printer copies to make really cool, unique prints.
The idea that anything about contemporary art needs further democratisation is kind of insane; there is no art form out there that you cannot find someone more or less begging you to learn for next to nothing.
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Speaking of AI and art literacy: one of the experiments I have been doing is asking local LLMs (Gemma 4 12B specifically) to look at a set of my own photos, describe them, draw parallels, and recommend other photographers. At one point it recommended to me (without any hints except my photos, which are not in any sense reproductions) that I look at the work of a fairly niche, early photographer who actually is my long term favourite; it also recommended someone contemporary whose name had only come up for me once before who is really fascinating.
So I don't discount that AI might have some value in that art history context. I think, analytically, these tools potentially have something to offer on this point, because after all, my influences (conscious and subconscious) are in the training set, and so are those artists' influences. AI ought to be good at revealing influences.
I am a 3D printing maker type nerd (I make my own tools for other creative tasks, rather than as their own outcomes) and I saw an incredible youtube video about 3D printed (flexi-dragon etc.) slop at US craft fairs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbDPzHLDjYY
She is so exasperated by it that she's unable to draw a conclusion, and I think that is actually the biggest problem with creative dishonesty on this scale. It is numbing.
Everyone knows that it is happening, everyone is clear that it is bad. But there is a paradox: serious-minded artists do use tools, of course. They also have an instinct about ways tool use would be dishonest. But they are introspective and they are often aware that their pragmatic use of a tool might be another's dishonesty. And they want to be inclusive, to build their "scene".
So actually there is less speaking out about it directly than there might be. And what that enables is this ever worsening bad-faith use of low-effort tools. The fact that the people selling the flexi dragons at craft fairs just bought them in bulk on Temu is the hilarious exasperating end point of it.
I think AI has made it more urgent for artists to speak out, sooner.
It has made me even more acutely aware that even though I make my own tools for my own creative projects (lo-fi and niche photographic tools, mostly), the fact that bits are 3D printed is probably interesting only to me or to others who want to make their own tools for their own work; the fact that CAD and 3D printing liberated my idea from its prison in my brain is something I must not let myself think is an end goal. The end goal is elsewhere.