Walk down any street in Edinburgh this August and you cannot miss them. Thousands of posters plastered across every available surface, advertising the enormous variety of shows that make up the world’s biggest arts festival. But look a little closer and some of those posters were not made by a human hand at all.
A growing number of Edinburgh Fringe performers are turning to artificial intelligence to create their promotional artwork, and the trend is causing serious concern among professional designers who fear for the future of their industry.
For decades, the Fringe has been a launchpad not just for comedians, theatre makers and musicians, but also for the graphic designers and illustrators who help bring those shows to life visually. The iconic poster has always been a huge part of the festival’s identity. Now, with AI image generation tools becoming cheaper and easier to use, some performers are bypassing that creative relationship entirely.
Designers working in the industry say the shift is already being felt. Commissions that would previously have gone to freelance artists are disappearing, replaced by images generated in seconds by tools like Midjourney or Adobe Firefly. For freelancers who rely on festival season work to keep their businesses afloat, that is a genuinely frightening prospect.
The concern is not simply about losing work in the short term. Many in the design community worry that if AI-generated imagery becomes the norm at events like the Fringe, it signals something much bigger. The Fringe is seen as a cultural bellwether. What happens here tends to spread. If audiences and performers accept AI posters without question at one of the most celebrated creative festivals on the planet, the argument goes, then the wider collapse of demand for human design work becomes far more likely.
There is also a question of what it means for the festival itself. The Fringe has always celebrated human creativity in all its forms. Critics of AI-generated artwork argue that using machine-made images to promote shows that are fundamentally about human expression is contradictory at best, and deeply hypocritical at worst.
Performers who have used AI tools to create their posters tend to offer a more pragmatic defence. The Fringe is an expensive undertaking. Hiring a professional designer, printing hundreds of posters and covering the cost of flyering teams all adds up fast. For a solo comedian or a small theatre company without financial backing, cutting costs wherever possible is simply a matter of survival. AI tools offer a way to produce something polished and eye-catching without spending money they do not have.
That argument does not sit well with everyone. Some designers point out that there are plenty of emerging creatives at the Fringe itself, art students and recent graduates who would jump at the chance to work on a poster commission even at a modest rate. Using AI instead, they say, removes an entry point into the industry for the next generation of talent.
The Edinburgh Fringe Society has not yet taken a formal position on the use of AI-generated artwork in promotional materials. The festival operates on an open access basis, meaning there is no selection process for shows and, by extension, no gatekeeping of how those shows choose to present themselves visually.
The debate sits within a much broader conversation happening across the creative industries right now. Illustrators, photographers and designers across Scotland and beyond have spent the past couple of years watching AI tools improve at a startling pace, and many feel that neither government nor industry bodies are moving fast enough to protect their livelihoods or establish clear ethical guidelines.
For now, the posters keep going up across Edinburgh. Some made with care and craft by human designers, others produced by algorithms in the time it takes to write a prompt. Most festival-goers probably cannot tell the difference, and that in itself is what worries the design community most.