Walking to my office generally means passing DJ Fawad’s food cart, a neighborhood fixture for coffee and breakfast sandwiches on the corner of Stone and Broad Street. For years, the wrap on the cart featured an electric-pink chain-link fence and a giant, floating bacon, egg, and cheese next to a similarly giant, floating coffee splashing out of its cup. But at some point in the last year, a yassified Memoji of Fawad himself, smiling and holding two perfectly frosted donuts, appeared on the side. “People love it,” Fawad told me on a recent morning. “They come up and say, ‘That’s you!’” To make the sign, Fawad put his photo through an AI app that did a passable job of rendering his likeness in cartoon form and sent it to his sign guy, who printed and installed it. The partial wrap cost $400 (you can still see the chain-link motif behind it). To Fawad, this was a pretty significant improvement from his options back in 2018, when he first got his cart wrapped. Then, he could only use a template provided by the sign-maker, which had little room to make adjustments, and it still cost him $2,600. So he’s into the new one, and so are his customers. “It makes people laugh,” he said.

Like it or not, the era of AI signage is upon us. It might look like a maximalist jumble of colorful chip bags with pixelated edges and blurry coffee cups set across a New York City skyline. Or a cartoony hamburger that is doing a little too much — the cheese drip a little too textured, the shine on the bun a little uncanny. (Hell Gate has noticed “Ghibli-esque pancakes, and hallucinatory beers.”) A friend described the emerging aesthetic as a strange kind of mid: “Too good to be made by a regular person, but too average in every way to be made by a graphic designer.”

The AI bodega is bespoke while also being completely impersonal. “Years ago, you would look at a sign and know, George built that or Sam built that,” said Paul Boegemann, who owns Paul Signs and has been in business for about half a century. “Now it’s a whole different world. Everybody thinks they’re a sign guy in their basement, making these banners and prints.” Mohamed Yar, the owner of Medina Signs, has seen the same shift in his business: Small-store owners used to text him their ideas or draft them on a piece of paper. Now, they mostly send over images generated by ChatGPT. Truthfully, that kind of thing can be fine for smaller signage — a poster to put up in your window for a breakfast combo — but for larger formats, he told me, AI designs are often a “headache for a sign-maker.” The images are usually low-resolution, and they don’t translate well beyond the small screens on which they’re typically created. Something generated on a phone also uses an RGB color scale, while printers use CMYK — when transferred over, vibrant colors become duller. “You have to tell each client that the hard copies will look very distorted and pixelated,” Yar said. He can work with his customers to make necessary fixes, but not everyone takes that step. So if your local deli has blurry-looking croissants on their window, the owner might have gone straight to Staples to print something as-is.

But it’s not just bodega and food-truck owners driving the change. David Barnett, co-founder of the New York Sign Museum and Noble Signs, told me that some of the AI slop showing up in our neighborhoods is coming from sign-makers themselves. (Other sign-makers I talked to confirmed this hunch — they definitely use AI to assist their work, they said.) Stock images, templates, and other ready-mades have always been core to the way bodegas look, and AI is now part of that process. Let’s say a bodega owner wants a specialty item on a sign — a hamburger topped with some avocado. If that photo is not already available in their image library, the designer making the sign may use AI to get it out the door faster. (Most of the bodega owners I talked to who had uncanny-looking window treatments told me they had no idea how the art was ultimately designed.) Which is why it’s not always clear which signs are completely AI-generated, which ones simply have some AI touches, or which are from a bygone graphics era that AI is stealing from — generally poorly. I even ran a few of the photos I took around the city through ChatGPT to see if it thought the signs were AI-generated. “The text is mostly legible and correctly spelled,” it responded. This, according to AI, was an indication that it wasn’t AI. (You kind of can’t say it better than that.)

“Over the last 30 or 40 years, the story of the sign industry is that it’s had a lot of artistry sucked out of it in search for a cheaper product,” Barnett said. “Now we have this new tool that’ll make it even faster, cheaper, and worse.” Even the stock-image bodega signage now being replaced, he says, still had a kind of human charm. “You ended up with this weirdly beautiful cornucopia of chopped cheeses, and it’s awesome because while it might not be ‘classically good design,’ they reflected a person’s eye, and it was a real New Yorker designing that sign.”

But not everyone thinks AI is a harbinger of sign doom. Boegemann recalled that when he started in the industry, signs were all painted by hand. Then in the 1980s, vinyl plotters came on the market, and people started using those machines to cut out letters for signs. A similar panic ensued. “Everybody was like, Sign painters are gonna be finished,” Boegemann told me. But Boegemann believes those painters evolved with the trends, learning how to design signs in a new way. “It changed the industry, but it didn’t replace the sign-maker,” Boegemann said. In his mind, AI is just another tool that requires skilled hands to use well, and he wants his designers to start using it more: “The AI is only as good as the person putting the information in.”

Perhaps to his point: A smoothie shop that recently opened in Bed-Stuy has what a lot of people clocked as an AI-generated logo. The awning reads “Blend & Bites,” but the logo, which features a smoothie, fruit, and a hamburger, reads, “Blerla & Bites.” When I talked to the owner earlier this month, he confirmed he had made the logo in five minutes with ChatGPT. I asked him if the store was named Blerla & Bites. He said no — it was Blend & Bites. This was his first store, he added. He was excited about the opening. I left our conversation feeling weirdly reassured. Most, if not all, AI design is slop nonsense thrown together in an instant. But storefronts across the city have long been weird hodgepodges, rife with misspellings and aesthetic incoherence. New designs are layered on top of old, creating accidental collages between eras. The bodega as we know it changes all the time, but it always stays weird. So Blerla & Bites is probably a mistake, but it’s possibly the most human thing about the sign.