Every small business flyer on my feed looks like it was made by the same designer.

It was. Just not a person.

Rather than dunk on them, I tried something more useful: I picked a few and asked what specifically makes them fail. Not "it looks AI." What decision went wrong.

Three things came up repeatedly.

Hierarchy collapse. Everything is emphasized, so nothing is. The headline, the date, the price and the phone number all shout at the same volume. A human designer picks one thing you should remember. The model has no basis for picking, so it renders all of them at maximum.

Unearned detail. Textures, glows, gradients, drop shadows, all of it applied where nothing in the message asked for it. Detail should follow meaning. Here it follows the average of the training set.

Category drift. A taco truck flyer and a nightclub flyer land in the same visual neighborhood, because the model is solving for "flyer" rather than for this business in this city talking to these people.

None of these are craft failures. They're judgment failures, and they happen before any pixel exists. Taste gets described as a finishing move, the thing an expert applies at the end to make output better. In practice it runs earlier. It shapes the brief, picks the constraint, and rules out the obvious version before anything is generated at all.

Execution has gotten close to free. Judgment was never the polish at the end. It was always the decision at the start.

Image credit: Yahoo