404 Media's Matthew Gault Got an AI-Slop 'I Voted' Sticker

The sticker read "CEKEVPATIVG EDELDOA." It was supposed to say "CELEBRATING FREEDOM." Bronze laurels, a bronze bald eagle, the American flag, and a jumble of letters that looked like text if you squinted, all of it AI-generated.

"My polling place was handing out AI slop to midterm voters," 404 Media's Matthew Gault wrote after voting in his town of 12,000. "I put the sticker on reluctantly, but I was not proud." His democratic joy, he wrote, turned to shame.

Gault lays out the alternative himself. "Michigan runs a contest where students can submit their own idea for a sticker," he writes; Kentucky and Albany do similar things, and "Louisiana commissions local artists to produce gorgeous stickers." The only other place he could find doing what his town did was Denton, Texas, where at least the courthouse "is in the corner looking more or less correct."

The column does not name who commissioned the sticker or what it cost. Three of the AI researchers on our Who's Who radar linked the piece after it went up.