AI slop isn’t coming for live events. It’s already here

Is ‘generic AI slop’ coming for live events? It's not coming. It's already in the building.

With respect, asking that questions is like asking whether rain is coming to Bradford. It's here, it's had its tea, and it's got its feet up on your best sofa.

Poorly used, badly executed AI is already gnawing at the soul of live events. It started at the edges: a press release here, a social post there, an image of a delegate with eleven fingers grinning at his lanyard. Nobody minded much. But now it's taking bigger bites: the poster, the promo video, the brand 'personality', the speaker bios and the highlights reel cut by an algorithm that wasn't even there.

I'll declare an interest before anyone else does: I've used it. I once published a blog written by a large language model and owned up in the PS at the end. It's a tool, fine; I'm not a Luddite; I'm a Yorkshireman, which is cheaper! The problem isn't the tool itself; it's what happens when it becomes the only one in the box.

Generic AI slop

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels

If all you've got is a hammer...

Give a man a hammer, and everything looks like a nail. AI is now the events industry's hammer, and by heck, we're swinging it.

Think about how it works. Ask a machine for an event poster, and it hands you the statistical average of every event poster it has ever swallowed. The next show asks for one and gets the average of the averages. Repeat until every event from Birmingham to Barcelona wears the same glossy gradient, the same paintbrush font, the same suspiciously symmetrical crowd with its hands in the air, and the same block of icons across the poster. Differentiation by photocopier.

AI lets you flood a market with video, animation, graphics, and copy at a rate no human team could match, or would want to. All of it fed through the same mincing machine. In short, we're serving our audiences the event-marketing equivalent of Soylent Green. Perfectly nourishing, we're told. Best not ask what's in it. (Spoiler: it's people. Other people's work, mostly.)

A weathered hammer surrounded by bent nails on a wooden plank, capturing the essence of carpentry work., image

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels

Lime green Y-fronts

So where are the off-the-wall ideas going to come from?

We once mailed out pairs of lime green men's Y-fronts to grab attention. Hand on heart, no algorithm would ever have suggested it. There is no dataset of successful lime-green underwear mailers. It came from a human brain, quite possibly after a long lunch, and it worked precisely because nobody had done it before.

That's the point. AI is brilliant at what has already been done. It is, by design, rubbish at what hasn't.

Events live and die on creativity, inventiveness and the calculated risk - and, let's be honest, a few not-so-calculated ones. The idea that makes the client wince in the meeting and grin when the bookings land.

Take that away, and you're left with something safe, competent and utterly forgettable. Which, last time I checked, isn't what anyone writes on a sponsorship pitch.

Be more Manics. Less 'Bad Times'.

Which brings me to Halloween, which I spent at Co-op Live in Manchester with Suede and the Manic Street Preachers on their co-headline arena tour. Hardly a sniff of AI anywhere. No synthetic hype reel, no algorithmic warm-up act, no hologram. Just songs crafted by inspired musicians, delivered by consummate performers who've been praised from every corner of the music industry for three decades. And these lads are all on the wrong side of 50. Nobody in that arena was thinking about the creative brief. They were too busy singing.

Contrast that with Imael Angel, an AI act that rode a TikTok dance trend into the charts earlier this year with the song ‘Bad Times’. The trend mostly involves dogs and toddlers pointing at the camera. Commercially, fair play: it hit number two on the UK downloads chart. Culturally, it's a song for pets. Give it 30 years and let's see which of them is still filling arenas on a wet night in Manchester.

That's the choice facing our industry. AI isn't going anywhere and, kept on a short lead by a human who knows what they're doing, it earns its keep. But if it's left to run the show unchecked, the live event loses the one thing a screen can never give you: the sense that real people, taking real risks, made something for the people in the room.

So be more Manics and Suede. Be less 'Bad Times'. And if in doubt, send the Y-fronts.

A large crowd of people standing on top of a stage, illuminated by bright lights and surrounded by musical instruments, screens, and other objects. At the top of the image, there is a ceiling with rods, and the background is dark.

By Mtaylor848 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=69479730

Paul Richardson and his pants