In a national chain of UK home stores, I did a double take while walking past this particular piece of “wall art”.

How do I suspect this is generative AI I hear you say? For reference, here is a photograph of an actual highland cow:

Bearing in mind I’m not an artist by any stretch, here are the key differences that, to me, stand out when looking at the wall art cow compared to the real thing:

• Why is there some kind of toilet roll basket on the cow’s head? It makes so sense within the context of the picture
• The horns go dark very suddenly at the tips. Yes, highland cow horns do have colour variance, but in all the examples I saw, the real cows had colour gradience
• The cow’s right-hand eye looks like a blur as opposed to an eye (although this could be due to the design having a hair across the eye)
• It looks like it has a scar on the right-hand side of its nose
• It appears to have furry fingers holding the newspaper, as opposed to hooves

But the worst, and most obvious piece of AI in this artwork? If you haven’t spotted it already, take another look, because the newspaper that says it all. Or more, doesn’t say anything. It’s written in gibberish.

The thing is, we can all laugh and poke fun at these things, chuckle that someone in an office signed this off as a perfectly respectable thing to include in hundreds of stores. We can say what we want about it clearly being AI, but people will buy this completely unaware.

When there are so many amazing artists in the world, this is not the type of product any company should be endorsing, let alone profiting from. Is there not another painting from ten years ago that couldn’t have had a second season? Just a thought.

FYI, this is all my opinion, I’m more than happy to be corrected if this was created by a human (typing a prompt into an image generator doesn’t count).

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