What's Worse Than AI Art? Corporate Memphis

Corporate Memphis is the mind-numbing design of bland corporate Big Tech

I had to upload some files to Google Drive, and this awful graphic showed up - a cartoon of a slouching blond woman with no mouth, oversized arms, and a teeny tiny head. The deformed figure is disconcerting and creepy - which is perhaps the intent.

This style of graphic has been dominating Big Tech for the past decade. You’ll see various of it on Google and Facebook. It all stems from a design “aesthetic” called Corporate Memphis, a semi-standard format of bland blob people that was first created for Facebook under the style name “Alegria” - Spanish for “joy.” But there’s nothing joyful about weird looking, faceless people:

The flying ponytail is a standard go-to for Corporate Memphis for some reason.

I keep wondering when the style landscape is going to shift, but it doesn’t seem to be moving much lately…much like women are still wearing ridiculously long hair extensions like it’s 2002. We’re stuck in a time loop. So Corporate Memphis has dominated for years.

The entire effect is dehumanizing with a pinch of fake whimsy.

So while a lot of people complain about AI generated art, sometimes humans come up with some pretty awful stuff on their own.

AI art generation is often surprising and weird, but at least it can be unique and different. Here’s something that popped up accidentally when I was trying to tell an AI image chat to “simplify it further” - thinking it would work on the last image generated. It didn’t do that, but instead came up with this:

AI image prompts often get things wrong, but sometimes the wrong outputs are quite interesting. Here’s what I got when I typed in:

give me an example of alegria design showing a purple person with big legs

So going back to the Google image above, I typed in a description into an AI image prompt and here’s what I got:

carton of a blond woman in a white tank top resting her arms on a desk, stylized

Now…what would you rather look at? The AI cartoon blonde or the (most likely) human-generated one by Google?

Now, none of this is meant to diminish talented human artists, but when it comes to corporate art, AI images are by no means any worse than the bland fare we’ve already been spoon fed.