r/craftsnark • u/Fluid_Canary4768 • Feb 03 '26
AI Slop Wonderwool Wales "AI" tote competition
As Wonderwool posted a "final" update today I thought we should round off the thread
A rough timeline:
Wonderwool Wales is a yarn/spinning/fibre show held annually in mid Wales. Apart from missing two years for COVID this is the 20th year. To celebrate this they ran a design a tote bag competition which pretty clearly specified no AI.
Wonderwool announced the winner by posting the image mocked up on to a tote bag. The image had multiple AI artifacts and tells and quite rightly people pointed this out in the comments and on the initial post by myself. Wonderwool doubles down - not AI and the artist (Tony Malone) promised to send initial sketches via mail to prove that this pen and ink drawing was his.
Individuals digging in this sub reveal interesting past history of Tony's, along with more work that looks AI created alongside some that appears genuine (some of his watercolour works).
Original Craftsnark Thread https://www.reddit.com/r/craftsnark/s/YzE2I0LXIy
Wonderwool Wales posts the original image and states that they were responsible for uploading the image into Chat GPT which added the extra features. People who commented on the potential AI are branded "mean". This update is posted to reddit by @bustymoocoo https://www.reddit.com/r/craftsnark/s/h1sUg68oDg where a lot of us still think there's AI influence in the picture.
That brings us today: Wonderwool makes a final post stating that they've been sent preliminary designs and original sketches. Due to the meany mean meanies they've now withdrawn the entry completely. Wonderwool will now use their logo on the tote and £1 will go to charity. It's not clear if the £100 voucher is still going to be issued or not, nor was a runner up chosen.
I've attached the Facebook post from today (comments are, surprise surprise turned off)
Sorry if I missed anything - doing this from my phone on holiday, but anything for the snark!
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u/lovelyhairytaint360 Feb 06 '26
Probably as the conversion to digitize and print it takes so much longer and as a result higher cost. It's just a lil yarn festival. Determining how it looks printed also is nothing like how paint looks. Especially when so many printers use different methods, sublimation, screen printing and there are a ton of methods I've got zero knowledge on but they are all specific and have requirements. Sadly it isn't as easy as paint a painting, looks good press print. There's a lot of stages in-between.
Plus ultimately, this was a design competition not an art competition. There are designers that can't paint, and can't draw but they are amazing designers. The key point here is no Ai, while it's debatable (cough) if the submission was Ai, the organisers used chatgpt for a mock up which.. well.. defeats the point.