The AI slop has arrived, our streets conquered by vibrant, same-same cartoon faces with goofy grins slapped atop gradient-drenched backgrounds, every inch of space smeared with colorful activity that distracts from wonky details: clocks with nonsensical numerals, bánh mì with reptile skin, and passion fruit oozing juice from sinkhole centers.
When you step onto Saigon sidewalks, a blitz of activity bombards your senses and splinters your attention, so you might not pay much notice to individual signage. But if you look closely, you’ll detect AI everywhere. From street carts to chain-store window posters, advertisements reliant on the technology have transformed the look and feel of Vietnam’s urban environments over the past months. The change is subtle because it takes place within an already cluttered visual landscape that, since the early 2000s, has expanded on a maximalist attitude which professes that more and bigger is best in a competitive ecosystem.
The adoption of AI in Vietnamese advertising shouldn’t surprise anyone. The country is more accommodating of the technology than regional peers, with 78% of businesses using it alongside high rates of personal use led by Gen Z, who ping chatbots to work, study, relax, and receive advice. While strict laws surround disinformation and scams, which are intertwined with AI, the government is also supportive of its potential to empower industry and economies, even using it for its own campaigns and media. The leap from Gemini inquiries to cyber-meat monstrosities on the side of a bún bò cart is infinitesimal.
Bottom-line costs, as opposed to aesthetic preferences, are surely why proprietors employ AI instead of a graphic designer or sign-painter. Friends and co-workers assure me we can not assume they make the same corner-cutting decisions when sourcing ingredients and materials or hiring workers. It feels cruel to levy our scorn at humble vendors who are unaware of the ethical concerns and political machinations that fill think pieces. But who, then, is to blame for all creativity-deficient crud on our city streets? And what can we do about it?
The unsatisfying answers may lead to the tech oligarchs described by author Arundhati Roy as “a single head and a single pale, unblinking eye set into its forehead, way to the right of centre, which casts its jaundiced gaze on ordinary humans and sees only what miners see in a mineral-rich forest, or what dam builders see in mighty, flowing rivers. A resource to be extracted, accumulated and put on the market. Fuck the forest. Fuck the river. Fuck the human.”
Some witnesses to the slop sludging up Saigon’s streets will claim it’s no different than Vietnam’s decades of pirating images and that the issue isn’t the reliance on AI, but the lazy use of it. Citing the limitless potential of AI to create images and even host lame web series, they will note that if visuals look bad or strange, it's because the creators aren’t skilled or diligent in how they craft prompts. And it might all be moot, anyways, as the most egregious errors in textures, patterns and interpretations are attributed to older models. In a few months, one probably won’t be able to tell what’s AI and what isn’t. At best, it all makes one even more nostalgic for the errors, idiosyncrasies and imperfections of handmade signs.
Ultimately, AI signage in Vietnam merely serves as a loud example of a wide-reaching issue of the modern age. Like the visual trends preceding it, AI is washing out creativity and flattening the diversity of human experiences. Spit out by the same source-trawling algorithms that churn out trends, the signs all look the same, whether in Saigon, Boston, Caracas, or Belgrade. The phenomenon applies to cafes that all feel like Apple Stores and music videos with indistinguishable choreography styles. If you take a thousand of the most magnificently plummaged jungle birds and throw them in a blender, you’ll get a monochrome slop of brown sludge — never mind you’ve lost the birds’ songs too, beautiful mistakes and all.
