The "ChatGPT flyer pandemic" comes to nude recreation

Naturism has spent a century convincing the public we're real. Why are we suddenly advertising ourselves with fake people?

Envato Elements

AI-generated promotional art is everywhere these days. You’ve seen it. If you’re like me, you’re seeing it everywhere, even in naturism. Club newsletters. Association communications. Social media. The graphics are immediately recognizable because they all share the same visual vocabulary.

I come from a media background. Before launching Planet Nude, I spent years working professionally in advertising, filmmaking, design and visual communications, and I’ve also served in public relations roles for several naturist organizations. Watching this trend spread through naturism has convinced me that we’re making a serious marketing mistake.

The art is bad.

Yeah, I said it. It’s bad. I don’t mean technically. AI can produce technically competent images all day long (now that it has finally figured out how many fingers go on a hand). I mean it’s artistically bad. In fact, it shouldn’t ever even be called “art” at all. Art comes from observation and lived experience. It reflects personality and perspective. AI doesn’t observe anything. It predicts what an image should look like based on patterns in millions of images made by other people. The result may be polished, but it has no lived experience behind it. It can imitate human expression, but it literally cannot express anything of its own.

That’s important to understand because advertising is creative work too. It’s art and copy working together to communicate something about the people behind a brand. If AI can’t observe or understand the human experience—and naturism is inherently a human experience—it can’t communicate it very well either. That’s why I think AI-generated promotional art is bad marketing, bad public relations, and something naturist organizations are embracing at exactly the moment they should be leaning into the one thing AI cannot possibly reproduce: themselves.

Earlier this month, Jason Koebler at 404 Media coined the phrase “ChatGPT flyer pandemic” to describe the explosion of AI-generated posters, advertisements, menus, and event flyers that have flooded social media and physical bulletin boards alike. His point was simply that AI-generated graphics are becoming so common that they’re becoming instantly recognizable as a genre. Once people learn the visual cues, they begin spotting them everywhere, pervading coffee shops and food trucks and college campuses and workplaces and beyond. They’re everywhere.

I’ve had the same experience in naturism. Over the last several months I’ve been seeing so many examples from clubs, regional associations, festivals and events, people and organizations. Viewed individually, most of them are competent posters, I suppose. Viewed together, they become strangely interchangeable. Remove the logos and I suspect many readers would struggle to identify which organization produced which graphic. That’s a branding problem.

These examples aren't presented to criticize the organizations that created them. They're shown together because, as AI-generated promotional art becomes more common, many organizations are converging on the same visual style.

Branding is supposed to distinguish one organization from another. It gives people a reason to remember you instead of your competitors. Good branding develops a visual identity that people begin to recognize before they even notice the logo. AI is remarkably good at producing polished graphics, but it tends to produce them from the same small collection of visual conventions. In naturism, this results in many of the same tired cliches. The mountain lake at sunset. The small group of smiling people who look far too similar (and usually far too athletic). The handwritten script fonts and sunshine graphics. The row of circular icons. The generic inspirational headline. None of those choices are necessarily inherently bad marketing cliches, but together they’ve become so common that they no longer communicate anything distinctive. People are attracted to novelty, and put off by the mundane.

That is an important point, because naturist organizations aren’t selling a product. They’re inviting people into a community. Every club already has a personality. Every club has different traditions, different members, different landscapes, different history, and different strengths. Those differences are the story; they’re what might make a community uniquely attractive. Marketing should amplify them, not smooth them away.

Ironically, volunteer organizations often have a tremendous creative advantage if they’re willing to use it. Every nudist club I’ve ever belonged to has been full of talented people. Photographers and designers. Builders and artists. Woodworkers. Musicians. Retired newspaper editors and writers. Teachers. People who make things because they enjoy making them. That’s part of what makes communities interesting and vibrant and diverse. When a member illustrates your event poster, even if it’s not highly polished, you’re showing prospective members and visitors something about the people they’ll meet if they join. When your newsletter features photography taken by someone in the club, it’s evidence that this is a real place with real people who care enough to contribute their talents. On the other hand, when your event poster is clearly generated by an AI, it tends to advertise the opposite.

A ChatGPT-generated graphic illustrating the problem with ChatGPT-created naturist graphics.

I understand why organizations are turning to AI instead. Most clubs run on volunteer labor, and the same handful of people are often responsible for organizing events, maintaining websites, answering email, and posting to social media. AI is fast, free, and available at two o’clock in the morning when nobody else is around to help.

But audiences are changing too. People are becoming increasingly media literate. They recognize AI-generated imagery almost immediately, particularly younger audiences who have grown up online. Recent consumer research suggests that skepticism toward AI-generated marketing is growing, especially among Gen Z and Millennials, who are more likely to say they prefer brands that communicate with authentic human voices and imagery. Gartner recently found 49 percent of consumers believe generative AI has made online content worse, and 57 percent of Gen Z and Millennials expressed even greater concern. That should give naturist organizations pause, because attracting younger members has become one of the movement’s biggest long-term challenges.

Planet Nude readers appear to feel much the same way. Last year, we asked whether AI-generated imagery has a place in naturist media. Opposition outweighed support by a significant margin, while a large number of readers remained uncertain, suggesting that people are still trying to work out where these tools belong. The comments were even more revealing. Readers repeatedly returned to the same themes: authenticity, consent, diversity, and the importance of showing real people living real lives. One reader wrote that “our (real, imperfect) bodies are the means of our resistance.” Another argued that AI images cannot tell the story of naturism because the story is the people themselves.

Being thoughtful.

I’m not an AI hardliner. I use AI myself. It’s great at transcribing interviews, cleaning up audio, removing backgrounds, and all sorts of repetitive production work. I even think it has a place in design. But somewhere between “helpful tool” and “public face of the organization,” a line gets crossed. Is your communication being shaped by a human, or generated by a machine from end-to-end? Is it strengthening your brand, or replacing it? And what does that choice tell the people you’re trying to attract?

Naturism is uniquely vulnerable to this failure because its entire philosophy is grounded in the lived human experience. The strongest marketing asset a naturist organization possesses is the community it already has. The photographs, artwork, writing, and stories created by its own members are impossible to copy because they belong to that community alone. They’re the culture. They give people something no AI image can: a glimpse of the place they’re actually being invited to join. I think that’s where people increasingly want to spend their money.

In advertising, as Marshall McLuhan famously observed, the medium is the message. The tools we choose communicate something before a reader has absorbed a single word. A festival poster illustrated by a local artist says something about the community behind it. An AI-generated graphic says something too. Whether that’s the message you want to send is worth thinking about. 🪐