Death of Illustration by a Thousand Prompts
How Skechers and other brands are napalming the creative playing field—one terrible AI ad at a time.
Wednesday, August 20th, 2025
Hell's Kitchen, NY
I was wedged between a man eating a bacon-egg-and-cheese made entirely of cheese and a woman FaceTiming her cat when I first noticed them: The Skechers ads. Plastered across the subway car like some fever dream conceived by a horny teenager with access to DALL-E and absolutely no adult supervision. I got off the train and descended the stairway…
There she was: a woman in a pose that suggested she was either about to sell me shoes or ask me to subscribe to her OnlyFans. Her legs spread in a way that made me wonder if Skechers had pivoted from athletic footwear to gynaecological equipment. The shoes—ostensibly the point of the advertisement—were an afterthought. (They also happen to look like shit. They are so poorly rendered they looked like someone had described trainers to an alien over a static-filled phone connection. Or the first thing a 15-year-old used their 3D printer for.)
But this wasn't just bad advertising. This was the death of commercial illustration happening in real time, one algorithmically-generated subway poster at a time. It isn’t new. I’ve written about it before— but this time it’s getting even more ubiquitous. More companies are doing it, and it’s getting gross.
Even high-end brands like Ermenegildo Zegna, with their stratospheric marketing budgets, are rendering cheap AI-dogshit like this to shill their suits:
Related reading:
The Tell-Tale Signs of Digital Desperation
Here's the thing about AI-generated imagery that non-artists don't seem to grasp: it's not that the technology is bad—it's getting terrifyingly good, actually. It's that whoever's prompting these campaigns fundamentally misunderstands what illustration is supposed to accomplish.
Real illustrators—the flesh-and-blood humans who used to get paid for this sort of work, the ones who dedicated decades of painful failure and attention to their craft—care about every single element in a composition. Where your eye enters the image. How the elements interact. Whether the bloody shoes are actually visible and accurately represent the product they're supposed to be selling.
AI, meanwhile, treats everything outside the main prompt like visual noise. It phones in the background detail with the enthusiasm of a DMV employee at 4:58 PM on a Friday. You can spot it immediately: the weirdly symmetrical faces (human faces are beautifully asymmetrical), the hands that look like they were designed by someone who'd only heard rumours about human anatomy, the backgrounds that seem to exist in a parallel universe where physics works differently.
And don't get me started on the colour palettes—AI loves a good oversaturated fever dream that would make a 1980s aerobics video look like it was directed by Zach Snyder.
New York Cartoons is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.
The Amygdala Knows
There's something deeper happening here, something that hits you before your conscious brain even processes what you're looking at. That primal part of your brain—the amygdala—that's responsible for detecting the uncanny valley starts screaming. It knows this wasn't made by human hands, even if it can't articulate why.
For artists, this feeling is particularly acute. We've spent decades training our eyes to see how line weight affects emotional tone, how colour temperature guides attention, how composition creates narrative flow. When you've dedicated your life to studying the craft of visual communication, AI art stands out like a chatbot trying to order coffee in Italian—technically correct, but utterly devoid of genuine understanding. (or hand gestures 🤌)
I can spot these Skechers ads from three stops away. Not because I'm particularly gifted, but because they scream "DALL-E 3 with a horny prompt" so loudly it's practically audible. Almost as loud as my landlord when he asks me where the hell the rent check is this month.
The Playing Field Has Been Napalmed
But here's what really gets me: the people commissioning this garbage think they're levelling the playing field. They genuinely believe that because they can type "sexy woman with shoes, high quality, professional lighting" into a text box, they're now creative equals to someone who spent four years in art school learning colour theory and another twenty years perfecting their craft.
What they've actually done is napalm the entire creative ecosystem.
Those illustration gigs that used to pay rent? Gone. The commercial work that allowed artists to afford groceries while pursuing more personal projects? Extinct. The entry-level positions that gave young illustrators a foothold in the industry? Eliminated.
In their place: an endless stream of prompt-generated imagery that looks like it was conceived by someone who learned about human biology from a funhouse mirror.
I know what you may be thinking: My p(Doom) is off the charts. That’s not totally true; I’m not a doomer. I think there’s a place for these technologies in our world. I use Firefly all the time when I’m in Photoshop. It’s useful. But watching the wholesale destruction of commercial illustration in real time is like watching someone take a sledgehammer to a Stradivarius because they heard you can make music with a kazoo.
More Related Reading (Boy, I’m giving you homework, huh?)
If, like me, you find yourself questioning your intuitions about AI, this essay is well worth a read. It’s written by the people who design these technologies (or, used to, before they jumped ship.)
The Great Gutting
I've never been a Luddite. Christ, I've probably tested more AI tools than most tech journalists. I've poked and prodded every new model from Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, Google DeepMind—not because I enjoy the existential dread, but because ignoring technological change has never been a viable career strategy. I’ve been an early adopter of all kinds of tech in my career from the very beginning, and I think burying your head in the sand and ignoring the advancement of technology is a truly dumb move.
Yes, these tools are impressive. Yes, they're getting exponentially better. And yes, there's probably some universe where they're used thoughtfully, as tools, as aids rather than replacements for human creativity.
But that's not the universe we're living in. We're living in the universe where Skechers' marketing department looks at an AI-generated image of a woman in a sexually suggestive pose—completely unrelated to athletic footwear—and thinks, "Perfect! Ship it!"
The Snapback That Won't Come
People keep telling me there will be a cultural snapback. That humans will crave authenticity. That live music, live theatre, live comedy will become more valuable as digital content becomes indistinguishable from human-created work.
I used to believe this. I wanted to believe this.
But I'm starting to think we're not heading for a Renaissance of human creativity. We're heading for something more like the cultural equivalent of factory farming—efficient, cheap, and utterly divorced from anything resembling craftsmanship or soul.
The speakeasies of the 1930s were romantic because they were rebellious. When human-created art becomes the equivalent of artisanal moonshine—quaint, expensive, and consumed by an increasingly small group of nostalgic purists in fedoras—what exactly are we rebelling against?
What We're Really Losing
Every time I see one of those Skechers ads—and trust me, the MTA has ensured I see them roughly forty-seven times per commute—I'm reminded that we're not just losing jobs. We're losing the entire infrastructure that creates visual culture. In full transparency, an agency job like this would have paid anywhere from $16k–$24k for these kinds of illustrations. If they’re used on web, TV, socials etc., the cost for these 8-12 illustrations would bump up to $36,000 to $120,000+ in total.
Yes, that’s a lot of money saved. It’s also a lot of rent not paid. (And a lot of artists becoming bartenders.)
The illustrator who would have created that shoe ad might have been the same person who, in five years, would have created something genuinely beautiful and meaningful. The young artist who might have cut their teeth on commercial work before moving on to gallery shows or graphic novels or the next great animated film—they're now making lattes or learning graphic design. (until Canva AI takes that job too.)
We're not just automating away individual careers. We're dismantling the entire pipeline that creates the next generation of visual storytellers.
Riding the subway through this AI-generated hellscape, I can't help but think we've made a fundamental error in how we value human creativity. We've treated it as a commodity to be optimised rather than a vital part of what makes life worth living.
But hey, at least Skechers saved a few thousand pounds on their advertising budget. I'm sure their shareholders will be thrilled to know they've contributed to the death of commercial art, one algorithmically-generated spread eagle at a time.
Sound off in the comments. I genuinely want to know: Am I overreacting, or are we watching something irreplaceable disappear before our eyes?
Thanks for writing that. Almost any creative job is feeling similar pressure. Many people may not think software development is creative (I worked in that for 40+ years), but it's the same kind of skills and "taste" that you gain from experience, judgment, and years of practice that the product manager who thinks he'll just "vibe code" something is going to miss. Unfortunately, those jobs are vanishing fast - people with new 4-year CS degrees used to be almost guaranteed a job, but this year more than 7% of them can't find work. Unfortunately, in many fields (especially that), AI is getting better at an exponential rate, which is not something humans are generally able to wrap their brains around. Things that were laughably bad a year ago are now OK if used by skilled people, and in two years they'll be better than any human. I'm worried about what happens when there is 30% unemployment - not due to AI, but due to executives and investors who gleefully shed jobs to boost the bottom line. It'll make the Great Depression look like a dip in the road. I imagine we'll eventually figure out what to do, but calling attention to that shit (like you're doing) seems like a good thing to do now.
As a young artist 50 years ago, I had a female friend who made a decent living as an illustrator drawing items for newspaper ads and catalogues. She could draw anything! From hammers to eggbeaters (the kind with a handle you turn that spins the wire beaters), clothing, cosmetics and groceries. All line drawings in black ink. No Internet to look up reference photos, let alone AI.
I am hoping that work that is, as @Beth Spencer says, “created with Human Intelligence” will soon be more highly valued. When anyone can have AI art, real art will be considered more prestigious.