Trickle-down Slopnomics

Welcome to Product Cocktail, where the takes are as polarizing as a shot of Fernet—but the insights come together like a perfectly crafted daiquiri.

May 18, 2026:
While mindlessly tapping through Instagram stories, I landed on one posted by a friend who's trying to break into the LA comedy scene. I stopped in my tracks, my eyes subject to a garish, visual assault on my senses.

In large block letters against an explosion of party paraphernalia "ALL CHATGPT FLYERS LOOK THE SAME! Especially with this font!" (You know the font, now at least.)

I chuckled at the obvious AI slop, blissfully unaware of this phenomenon, as a new dad across the country, not tapped into the LA comedy scene (or... any comedy scene, for that matter).

Two weeks later, she reposted another version of the same flyer parody.

Then, the infamous "ChatGPT flyer" was everywhere.

LinkedIn. Local charity golf tournaments. Even at a local pizza shop on the Connecticut shore just trying to make it past the first year hump.

On July 10th—days after I saw the pizza shop flyer—an article hit my inbox from 404 Media claiming that "we are living in a 'ChatGPT Flyer Pandemic'" inspired by a viral Threads post from early June.

404 Media's Jason Koebler describes the visual grammar:

Koebler documents an extensive infection radius: a Venice Beach sidewalk sign advertising surfing, invites to parties from friends, Fourth of July parties hosted by bars, drug deliveries in Berlin, junk hauling in South Carolina, fundraisers in Texas.

The ChatGPT flyer looked at COVID-19 and said "hold my beer."

In May, I attempted to reckon with the shocking level and speed at which negative sentiment had taken hold toward consumer AI.

The same week I published that newsletter, Gen Z lifestyle content creator Gabe Escobar (idfk either, but he has 3.4M TikTok and 560K Instagram followers) posted a visceral takedown of AI on the 'gram.

That video did 2M views, 203.7K likes, and 23.6K reposts.

The negative AI sentiment had been building, and in June, local businesses and events started catching strays.

Shares outrunning reactions 3 to 1. A random Facebook post being blasted out, likely as cautionary tale to others.

Oliver's words posted above the meme serving as a definitive takedown of ChatGPT's house style: "YOUR FLYER LOOKS LIKE GARBAGE."

In mid-July, Lyndsey Lozano put a sign in the window of Grind and Unwind, her two-month old San Francisco coffee and pastry shop: AI-generated images of drinks and food, a temporary promo to pull in tourists.

First came the online backlash (predictable). "If that's what your food looks like, I don't want to eat there." Then, a week later, someone spray-painted a single word across the front of her building.

Seriously.

Lozano took the sign down.

The latest backlash has manifested as anti-AI graffiti on at least 10 billboards in… San Francisco? The same place that is host to "MCP Nights" and has historically gotten away with "STOP HIRING HUMANS" bus station ads (makes you nostalgic for the days of nerds being shoved into lockers).

Mintlify's agentic bullshit billboard cleverly marked with "At least the old billionaires were philantropic".

The AI elite buying the billboards are unfazed.

In response to one of Pylon's billboards in a $350k campaign being tagged with "fuck your AI billboard," 29-year old CEO and founder, Marty Kausas, laughed it off. "Honestly, fair."

Weeks earlier, across town, someone with another can of spray paint wrote one word on Lyndsey Lozano's pastry shop. Seriously. She repainted the building.

Kausas thought his was funny.

Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (what a name), CEO of Artisan (the Stop Hiring Humans people) thought that the "backlash is earned."

It's below the line for them.

AI backlash is projected to be a key risk factor in Anthropic's IPO prospectus. DGAF.

A Gallup survey from March noted that 71% of polled oppose a data center in their area. DGAF.

A local business buys into the promises of these executives, posting an AI-generated flyer. Unfollowed. Unsubscribed. Customer lost.

To be clear: I'm not trying to absolve every mom and pop restaurant, comedian, or bar owner who's caught shrapnel by (unintentionally) wading into the AI culture wars. I don't expect every SMB operator to be read in on consumer AI sentiment (like and subscribe, people!).

There's a difference between not knowing and willfully disregarding.

Take Wildwood Spirits, a small Seattle distillery that describes itself as "small-batch handcrafted" (we'll come back to that shortly). They've been posting AI slop to Instagram and Facebook for a while, interspersed with honest camera phone clips and genuinely well-produced real videos, which is the sad part.

In December 2025, they posted an AI-generated video of local celebrity squirrel "Sprinkles" rampaging through Seattle, like, well, Rampage. A customer questioned the use of AI. The brand's response:

The customer unfollowed. Asked and answered.

This doesn't seem to be a shop with no other options. Wildwood makes six spirits, distributes to Safeway, Whole Foods, and Total Wine, and ships to 35 states. They already employ people who can shoot, based on the well-produced content on their socials.

For what it's worth, the AI hasn't exactly produced breakout viral moments. Their best-performing video of the last two months is an unglamorous 7-second clip of one of their production assistants sucking whiskey out of a barrel with a glass tube: 58,100 views.

Their AI take on Jimothy the raccoon—the biggest local story of the year, in their backyard—did 1,706. The curious, slightly weird moment shot on an iPhone did 34x the views in the same month. (AI can obviously go viral, a partner cross-post with a heavy AI 'murica intro did 49k. I'm not deriving a social media strategy from two posts.)

The reach is only one piece. Remember "handcrafted"? Craft is the entire product claim. In May 2026, part of a video they posted contained an AI-rendered shot of their gin with scrambled letters where the volume and ABV should be, and a product name reading "Kur Gim." Kur is their gin. The tool could not spell the name of the thing they make. The product page on their website isn't much better: "750rol / 49% alc. by volums."

An average-image-generator misspelled the bottle. That's not a marketing miss, it's a tool contradicting the craft they put into creating the product.

And in the other corner... "In the Age of AI, the Analog Restaurant Feels Radical" a mid-July romanticizing of handmade touches by Bettina Makalintal at Eater.

It's a love letter written to places like new Manhattan restaurant, Somssi, which announced itself with a postcard-sized piece of lace with the restaurant's name, opening date, and address beautifully sewn into it in script.

Or Fearless Coffee in Johnson City, Tennessee (goddammit, now I'm humming "Wagon Wheel") that announced its new menu with a series of 90s-coded images that... admittedly hit me right in the feels. (It became their most-liked post ever.)

Evidence of "frictionmaxxing" a term coined by Kathryn Jezer-Morton, for rejecting technologies of convenience in favor of slower, analog processes.

Cut to: Product Cocktail, issue 5, "The AI Vibes Are Off"

I described this sentiment at the time suggesting that friction is the product. Two months later, the term for that phenomenon "escaped containment" and restaurants run it as strategy.

I cited brands like Apple releasing BTS videos of their ads to provide they didn't use AI. For restaurants, that's become a sharpie.

Somssi commissioned lace. Fearless Coffee hired a photographer. Those are choices made by businesses and called positioning.

Lyndsey Lozano put real pastries in her window because someone spray-painted her building.

They arrived in the same place, but she didn't pick it. At the time, I called the humanity premium a consumer preference—and it still is one, if you can afford to make it. Lozano got a bill.

What does the AI industry's favorite cheerleader God-King naysayer have to say about all of this AI backlash?

His fix: "actually curing cancer." Or at least, delivering on the promises to benefit the world.

For whatever it's worth, per CNBC Generation Lab, over 75% of 18-34 year olds don't trust Dario Amodei to act responsibly, and ~70% say the same of Zuck and Altman. Among the Big AI Dogs*, the one diagnosing the crisis of trust polls the worst.

He's partially right.

Regular people don't trust companies. The reasons go back decades. AI is the latest iteration of it?

That's a very convenient excuse.

Social media took over a decade to turn—Facebook launched to the general public in 2006 and the chickens didn't come home until Cambridge Analytica in 2018. AI got booed at a commencement inside of four years. Whatever this is, it isn't the slow accumulation of general corporate distrust that AI happened to inherit. It's faster and louder than its supposed predecessor.

This makes the small business problem harder to explain away. Diffuse anti-corporate grumbling would explain indiscriminate targets. This is different. People know precisely which industry they're angry at. They just can't reach it.

Nobody who unfollowed Wildwood was settling up with Anthropic. Jill Oliver didn't skip that fundraiser to send a message to OpenAI. A stranger spray-painted Lyndsey Lozano's building over a grievance with an industry she doesn't work in.

The backlash has no working path to the companies that caused it, and a perfectly functioning one to the sandwich shop.

Cure cancer, and maybe we're square. The pizza shop's invoice comes Thursday.

And Zuck, who is only a big dog in the AI spend category so far.

Some of these small businesses have earned one, the question is how to tell from the outside.

Luke Arens—the music producer from issue 5, and interviewee most likely to be an anti-AI hardliner—drew his line somewhere specific and fair. Another artist using Suno to produce a song for sync licensing (typically ads or tv/film) was theft. A 14-year old using the same tool to make his friend a birthday song was "almost like an introduction to creativity." The line wasn't about AI, it was about whether it took someone's job.

Wildwood is the sync license equivalent. They have the capability (and quiche) to produce something real, and instead fired the slop cannons.

By that test, the pizza shop flyer is the birthday song. They probably didn't have a designer in the budget. It displaced a flyer made in Canva or Word by a stretched-thin owner.

Jill Oliver's post was shared with 3500 people. I'm not going, I'm not donating, I'm not sharing. Fair enough. That's a meaningful cost to a business thinking about how to make payroll for their staff next week. It's not going to mean shit to OpenAI, but it might cost a pizza shop a Friday.

Send me questions, feedback, and cocktail recipes:
[email protected].

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