Ohio State Fair bans AI from poster contest after AI wins
AI poster wins Ohio State Fair contest
The Ohio State Fair has announced that AI will be prohibited in future poster contests, following a 2024 rule that allowed AI if disclosed. The decision comes after an AI-generated poster won the 2026 contest, prompting feedback from fairgoers. The fair will continue to celebrate Ohio artists through other competitions that don't permit AI, such as fine arts and mural contests. The 2026 winners were announced, with Christin Billips taking first place.
We are committed to celebrating Ohio artists, with a number of other competitions that don’t permit AI, including the fine arts exhibition, creative arts competitions, mural contest, and plein air painting.
- embedding-shape
I think this is the actual image: https://cdn.saffire.com/images.ashx?t=ig&rid=OhioStateFair&i...
Notably, the zipline is all wacky, and two piggies are #1, probably more things I didn't notice at a skim?
I guess they didn't explicitly forbid AI, and it wasn't noticed until after the winner was selected, and now you can't "roll back"? It seems this was later added to the page:
> [...] we recognize that the use of AI has changed greatly over the last few years in ways we didn’t anticipate, and will be reevaluating the rules and processes for 2027, which will include prohibiting the use of AI [...]
July 7 2026 mirror of the page without that updated notice: https://web.archive.org/web/20260707145158/https://www.ohios...
- annzabelle
My workplace did a sweepstakes for the world cup and there were bonus prizes for decorating your desk. All three winners had simply uploaded photos of their desks to an AI image generator and had it add flags etc to decorate and submitted that. One person used AI to make it look like he was wearing the jersey of his assigned team.
The person running the contest wrote up something about how impressed she was with the creative use of AI.
The whole thing makes me sad - wouldn't the idea of this sort of thing be to scrounge up flags of obscure countries or make them out of paper and do a bit of arts and crafts to decorate your desk for the month? Instead people were just throwing 50 words into an AI system a few times and getting out a photo to submit.
- wxw
I quite like the 4th and 5th place posters.
4th: https://cdn.saffire.com/images.ashx?t=ig&rid=OhioStateFair&i...
5th: https://cdn.saffire.com/images.ashx?t=ig&rid=OhioStateFair&i...
- internet2000
People don't care and will continue not to care. I don't say that lamenting or with resignation. It's just a fact that we will need to accept.
Think of all the poor typography around you. If you have a critical eye and care you can spot all sorts of bad choices: That's a preview of the future. AI-generated disposable art (posters, billboards, menus etc) that is orthogonal to the actual thing being sold will continue being the norm.
- varenc
The poster: https://cdn.saffire.com/images.ashx?t=ig&rid=OhioStateFair&i...
Note the pigs are numbered 1, 2, 1. And the gondola with a floating cable and another that terminates at a tent top.
- magnetowasright
The fact that it's obviously AI sucks, but the fact that it also sucks on its own merits is extra frustrating to me. Choosing the jam-packed absolute nonsense with no attention to detail to the point of distraction, AI or not, over the other entries is ...bad. If someone had drawn this with pigs numbered 1, 2, and 1, or the crappy banners and typography, or the nonsense gondola lines, it'd still be a bad poster. I hate the AI cow in the runner up poster but it's at least a little more coherent a poster overall. Who the hell was judging this and by what criteria?
I wonder what their 2027 entries are going to look like; I wouldn't be surprised if this disincentivised prospective entrants. Why bother submitting if something as lazy and poorly done (and, of course, obviously AI) as that wins?
- RugnirViking
extremely noticeably so, too. A shame that the judges arent equipped to notice this sort of thing: the winning entry is pretty clearly the sort of result you get with a first naive attempt of "make a poster" with no style guidelines at all.
- ElProlactin
What's crazy is that the winning poster looks like one-shot AI output and probably was given the mistakes in it.