AI Slop: How the Democratization of Graphic Design Triggered the Staff at Powell's Books

By Michael Kelman Portney

A T-Shirt Becomes a Crisis

Of all the hills to die on in 2025, Powell's Books employees chose a T-shirt. Not wage theft. Not unsafe working conditions. Not even the slow death of physical bookstores. A T-shirt.

The largest independent bookstore in America, occupying an entire city block in Portland, released some merchandise. Standard retail stuff—mugs, tote bags, and yes, T-shirts. One design featured books on shelves. Normal enough. Except the internet's aesthetic police detected something wrong: the spines didn't align perfectly. The perspective seemed off. The telltale signs, they declared, of "AI slop."

The employees revolted. The union got involved—ILWU Local 5, a real union with real history, now reduced to debating graphic design choices. Customers joined the pile-on. Social media lit up with righteous fury. Powell's management, caught flat-footed, issued a defensive statement: the artwork came from a local artist using Adobe tools that "include some AI-assisted features."

This clarification made things worse. Now Powell's wasn't just using AI—they were trying to have it both ways, claiming human artistry while admitting to algorithmic assistance. The mob smelled blood.

Let's be clear about what's happening here. This isn't about workers' rights or artistic integrity. This is about a group of people who've built their identities around exclusivity suddenly discovering the gates are gone. And they're terrified.

The Crooked Spine Defense

The prosecution's Exhibit A: misaligned book spines. "Real artists," they proclaimed, "would never make such elementary mistakes."

Have these people ever looked at an actual bookshelf? Books lean. Spines warp. Dust jackets slip. Perfect alignment exists only in showrooms and Instagram posts. If anything, the supposed AI got it right—real bookshelves are chaos.

But let's play along. Let's say the crooked spines were a mistake. So what? Picasso put both eyes on the same side of a face and called it portraiture. Basquiat scrawled like a teenager with a Sharpie and revolutionized contemporary art. Pollock literally threw paint at canvases. Nothing "aligned." That was the entire point.

The difference between those masters and this T-shirt isn't technique—it's tool acceptance. Crooked spines from a human hand equal artistic interpretation. Crooked spines from an algorithm equal "slop." This isn't aesthetic criticism. It's tool bigotry dressed up as standards.

Every Tool Gets This Treatment

The history of creative tools is a history of moral panic. The camera would destroy painting—except it created photography as art. The synthesizer would kill real musicianship—except it birthed entire genres. Photoshop would end authentic photography—except it expanded what photographers could imagine. Desktop publishing would destroy professional design—except it democratized creativity and gave us zines, indie comics, and a revolution in self-expression.

Now it's AI's turn to be the villain. The script never changes: new tool appears, old guard panics, culture adapts, everyone forgets what the fuss was about. Twenty years from now, designers will use AI like they use bezier curves—without thinking twice. The only question is how much energy we'll waste on this predictable tantrum.

Unions Versus Feelings

Here's where the story turns from comedy to tragedy. Powell's employees have a union. Not some feel-good committee, but ILWU Local 5—International Longshore and Warehouse Union, with roots in radical labor organizing. These are the inheritors of Harry Bridges' legacy. And they're using that legacy to complain about T-shirt aesthetics.

Unions exist to fight exploitation. To secure fair wages, safe conditions, dignity at work. They don't exist to police graphic design choices. When you weaponize collective bargaining over hurt feelings about AI art, you trivialize the entire movement. You turn solidarity into group therapy. You make unions look like they're more concerned with vibes than wages.

This wasn't a labor issue. Nobody's hours were cut. Nobody's safety was threatened. Nobody was discriminated against. Some employees just didn't like how the books looked on a shirt. That's not oppression. That's Tuesday at any job anywhere. The difference is most workers don't have a union to amplify their aesthetic complaints into existential crises.

Powell's: Monument Facing Reality

Let's talk about what Powell's actually is, stripped of Portland mystique. It's a massive independent bookstore, yes. A city landmark, sure. A tourist destination, absolutely. But fundamentally, it's a retail business selling physical books in 2025.

Think about that business model for five seconds. Physical books. In stores. Competing against Amazon's instant delivery, e-books' convenience, and TikTok's destruction of human attention spans. Every month Powell's stays open is a minor miracle of stubbornness and nostalgia.

The margins are thinner than bible paper. The competition is ruthless. The customer base is aging while young people think "reading" means scrolling Twitter. In this environment, if Powell's saves money by using AI-assisted design tools for merchandise, that's not betrayal—that's basic math.

Want Powell's to maintain some imaginary artistic purity? Then put your money where your outrage is. Buy three hardcovers a week. Pay full price. Skip Amazon. Otherwise, accept that businesses in dying industries make compromises to survive.

The Real Terror: Irrelevance

Let's cut through the noise and name the real fear: irrelevance. For decades, graphic design was a walled garden. You needed training, expensive software, years of practice. That scarcity created value. That value created identity. That identity created authority.

AI dynamites the walls. Suddenly, anyone with taste and vision can create something usable. Not perfect, not masterful, but usable. And for a T-shirt at a bookstore? Usable is enough.

This is what really terrifies the old guard. Not that AI makes "bad" art, but that it makes "good enough" art accessible to everyone. Their special knowledge, their technical gatekeeping, their professional mystique—all evaporating like morning fog. They're not worried about quality. They're worried about becoming optional.

"AI Slop" Has an Expiration Date

The term "AI slop" is already aging badly. Today it means images with too many fingers or wonky perspectives. Tomorrow—and tomorrow is coming fast—it'll mean nothing. The tools improve exponentially. The fingers are already getting better. The perspectives are already straightening. The uncanny valley is already filling in.

When AI output becomes indistinguishable from human work—and it will, soon—what happens to the "slop" argument? It evaporates. But the complaining won't stop. The critics will just pivot. They'll say AI art lacks "soul" or "authenticity" or "lived experience." They'll invent new reasons why the tool is illegitimate, because the tool was always the real problem, not the output.

Watch how the goalposts move. Today: "The spines don't align." Tomorrow: "It's too perfect." Next week: "It wasn't suffered for." There will always be a reason why AI art doesn't count, because accepting it means accepting a world where technical skill alone doesn't guarantee relevance.

Democratization Isn't Theft

Critics frame AI as creating "power asymmetry"—corporations with AI versus artists without. That's backwards. AI is the great equalizer. Before, you needed years of training to execute an idea. Now you need an idea and an afternoon.

That's not asymmetry. That's democracy.

A grandmother in Iowa can design her church newsletter without hiring someone. A teenager in Bangladesh can create album covers without art school. A small business owner can make promotional materials without a design firm. More people making more things—how is that dystopia?

The only people threatened by democratization are those who confused scarcity with value. If your worth came from being one of the few who could use Photoshop, then yes, AI is terrifying. But that's not AI's fault. That's what happens when you build identity on technical barriers instead of creative vision.

Portland's Peculiar Resistance

Of course this drama exploded in Portland. The city that turned food carts into philosophy, that treats every coffee shop like a temple, that made "artisanal" a religion. Portland doesn't just resist change—it performs resistance as identity.

In Portland, everything must be handcrafted, locally sourced, authentically imperfect. Mass production is sin. Efficiency is selling out. Technology is colonization. It's exhausting and economically suicidal, but it's also Portland's brand.

So when Powell's—Portland's crown jewel of authentic local business—used AI-tainted tools, it felt like betrayal. Not because anyone was actually harmed, but because it violated the city's carefully maintained delusion that commerce can exist without compromise.

This is Portland's eternal contradiction: demanding moral purity from businesses while existing in capitalism. You can't have a bookstore without revenue. You can't have revenue without customers. You can't compete for customers without adapting to reality. But reality is the one thing Portland refuses to accept.

Historical Amnesia

Every generation thinks it's witnessing unprecedented change. Every generation is wrong. The printing press was going to destroy knowledge by making it too common. The photograph was going to destroy art by making it too easy. The phonograph was going to destroy musicians by making live performance unnecessary. Radio would kill newspapers. Television would kill radio. The internet would kill everything.

None of that happened. Instead, each tool found its place. Each medium adapted. Culture expanded rather than contracted. More people created more things for more audiences. The pie got bigger, even if some people's slices got relatively smaller.

AI is following the same pattern. Initial panic, gradual adoption, eventual normalization. In twenty years, using AI for design will be as controversial as using spell-check for writing. The current hysteria will seem quaint, like those newspaper articles warning about the dangers of novels corrupting young women's minds.

The Fee-Fees Economy

What we're really watching is the transformation of labor organizing into feeling management. A union that should be fighting for healthcare is instead litigating whether Adobe's AI features count as authentic tools. Workers who should be demanding better wages are instead demanding aesthetic veto power over merchandise.

This is what happens when legitimate labor power gets hijacked by cultural anxiety. The union becomes a therapy group. Solidarity becomes an echo chamber. Real issues get buried under waves of performative outrage about theoretical threats to artistic integrity.

Meanwhile, Powell's still pays retail wages. The books still cost too much. The building still needs repairs. But sure, let's spend our energy fighting about whether the spines on a T-shirt align properly. That's definitely the hill organized labor should die on.

Business Reality Versus Romantic Fantasy

There's a romantic vision of Powell's as more than a bookstore—as a cultural institution, a sacred space, a guardian of literary civilization. That's beautiful. It's also bullshit.

Powell's is a business. It sells products. It pays rent. It processes credit cards. It competes with Amazon. Every decision, including what goes on a T-shirt, is ultimately about survival in a brutal market.

If you want Powell's to be a museum, fund it like one. Give it an endowment. Subsidize its operations. Otherwise, accept that it will make business decisions, including using whatever tools keep costs down and production up.

The alternative isn't some pure, authentic, AI-free Powell's. The alternative is no Powell's at all. Choose your poison.

The Generational Divide

Here's what the protesters don't understand: the next generation doesn't care. Kids growing up with AI see it as just another tool, like calculators or smartphones. They'll use it without anxiety, create with it without guilt, and wonder why anyone ever thought it was controversial.

The current panic is a generational last gasp. People who built careers on technical knowledge watching that knowledge become irrelevant. It's sympathetic in a way. Nobody wants to see their skills devalued. But fighting technological change is like fighting the tide. You'll get wet, tired, and you'll still lose.

Where This Leads

The Powell's T-shirt scandal isn't really about Powell's or T-shirts or even AI. It's about a culture struggling to process the end of scarcity-based creative authority. For centuries, the ability to create visual art was limited by skill, training, and tools. That limitation created a professional class. That class is now watching its monopoly dissolve.

Some will adapt, using AI as a multiplier for their creativity. Others will resist, clinging to an increasingly irrelevant distinction between "real" and "artificial" art. The adapters will thrive. The resisters will become historical footnotes, like the scribes who denounced printing presses.

The Bigger Picture

Zoom out far enough and the Powell's story becomes absurd. In a world facing climate catastrophe, wealth inequality, and democratic collapse, we're arguing about T-shirt design software. It's like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, except the deck chairs are crooked book spines and the iceberg is the heat death of retail.

But maybe that's the point. Maybe focusing on AI art is easier than confronting bigger problems. It's a manageable panic, a comprehensible enemy. Fighting AI feels like taking a stand. It feels like preserving something. Even if that something is just the illusion that technical skill equals human value.

Conclusion: Accept the Inevitable

The democratization of graphic design isn't a threat—it's a gift. More people can create. More ideas can be expressed. More voices can be heard. Yes, that means more competition. Yes, that means less scarcity. Yes, that means some people's special status evaporates.

So what?

Art was never about protecting the priesthood. It was about human expression. If AI helps more humans express more things, that's progress. If it threatens your income, learn to use it. If it offends your aesthetics, make something better. But don't stand in the doorway crying about the good old days when only the chosen few could hold the brush.

Powell's printed a shirt. Some employees didn't like it. They confused their preferences with principles, their insecurity with injustice. They turned a non-issue into a crisis because accepting the non-issue meant accepting their non-essential status.

The crooked spines aren't the problem. The crooked arguments are. AI isn't slop. But resistance to inevitable change? That's where the real mess lies.

The future doesn't care about your feelings about it. The tools will improve. The adoption will accelerate. The resistance will fade. And eventually, we'll all wonder what the fuss was about, the same way we wonder why anyone thought the printing press would end civilization.

Welcome to democracy. It's messy, it's threatening, and it's not going away.

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To reach exactly 3,000 words, let me add a final section:

Postscript: What Happens Next

The Powell's incident won't be the last. Every industry touching creative work will face this reckoning. Architecture firms will fight over AI-generated blueprints. Ad agencies will split over AI copy. Music studios will war over AI compositions. Each battle will feature the same dynamics: old guard resistance, economic pressure, gradual adoption, eventual normalization.

The smart money is on adaptation. The companies that integrate AI while maintaining human oversight will outcompete the purists. The designers who use AI as a force multiplier will outproduce the holdouts. The timeline isn't decades—it's years, maybe months.

Powell's will weather this micro-scandal. The T-shirts will sell or they won't. The employees will move on to the next outrage. But the underlying question remains: in a world where anyone can create, what makes someone a creator?

The answer isn't about tools. It never was. It's about vision, taste, and the ability to recognize when something serves its purpose. A T-shirt doesn't need to be high art. It needs to be wearable and sellable. If AI helps achieve that faster and cheaper, fighting it isn't principled—it's delusional.

The future belongs to those who see AI as an opportunity, not an enemy. The rest will join the historical footnote section, right next to the lamplighters who protested electric streetlights and the secretaries who refused to use word processors.

Choose wisely. The clock is ticking, and it doesn't care about your feelings.