Union workers at Powell\u2019s Books told the company there was something wrong with its new merchandise, but higher-ups ignored their complaint until a public outcry erupted, then publicly apologized.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It started when the company outsourced redesign of a much-loved t-shirt instead of assigning that work to one of three in-house designers who are represented by ILWU Local 5. The shirt had the image of a wolf perching on books above the words \u201cfiercely independent since 1971.\u201d When an image of the new shirt was shared, staff told managers that it appeared to have been created using generative AI (artificial intelligence). AI is a black box of wonders, but it also consistently renders images with bizarre features. It\u2019s a phenomenon that\u2019s come to be known as \u201cAI slop\u201d \u2014 low-quality, low-effort work put out by generative AI technology. In this case the image showed books whose spines only went half-way down, so that pages were exposed. No human artist would have misunderstood what a book looks like.<\/p>\n
After Powell\u2019s moved ahead with producing the shirts, customers noticed and reacted on social media. Embarrassed, the company issued a statement saying \u201cwe value the work of human artists,\u201d and pledging to employ local artists to design new merchandise.<\/p>\n
Local 5 responded with its own statement: \u201cWe appreciate the fact that Powell\u2019s is responding to this issue and also lament the fact that it took public outcry for them to do so.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tRelated<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Union workers at Powell\u2019s Books told the company there was something wrong with its new merchandise, but higher-ups…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":33059,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[489,156,31213,111,139,69,2781],"class_list":{"0":"post-33058","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-ilwu-local-5","11":"tag-new-zealand","12":"tag-newzealand","13":"tag-nz","14":"tag-powells-books"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33058"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33058\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}