Oct. 30 update: My first version of this post indicated there may be only one poster that was not AI generated. A Snopes investigation has found the source of another. I've updated the piece to include this.
💙 Amanda
Happy Halloween to the US Department of Labor! They must be in the spooky mood, because their recent poster series is the scariest thing I've seen in a while.
The agency meant to "improve working conditions; advance opportunities for profitable employment; and assure work-related benefits and rights" may have outsourced much of its latest campaign for skilled workers to ... AI.
See for yourself.
That they are primarily AI generated is the strong conviction of designer and activist Mirko Ilić.
"This is an unskilled product for an industry that is advertising skills," he told me. "This is almost like the Saturday Night Live of posters. You put three idiots together and they say 'okay, we're going to hire AI to do labor posters.'"
The Department of Labor has been posting these fair-skinned fellas on social media since July. They're accompanied by slogans like "Make America skilled again," "Your nation needs you" and "American workers first".
Some have noted the similarities to Nazi aesthetics. But Ilić thinks the style is more a mix of American and Soviet post-war propaganda, with a dash of '90s Abercrombie & Fitch.
"The [poster makers] input into AI 'poster from 1950s', 'worker from 1950s', 'give me more cranes,' and that's how they ended up here," he guessed. "They don't know history. But AI reached into history for them. And then they got what they got."
And what they got really isn't subtle.
It's a campaign for Americans depicting an America that doesn't exist. It idealizes a white, male-dominated workforce in a country of church-going nuclear families. But that's a long-outdated American Dream. The US has changed a lot since the '50s.
For one, the share of the workforce that is male has dropped to just above half, while women now make up 46%.
Change in US workforce demographics, 1950 to 2024
Portion of labor force that is...
And while we don't have race and ethnicity data for the workforce in 1950, it has certainly become less white since 1980.
Change in US workforce demographics, 1980 to 2023
Portion of labor force that is...
To really understand the impact of some of these increases, we can look at the percent change.
Percent change in the makeup of the US workforce
The ironies of this campaign are just too much. It shouts "Make America Skilled Again" in a font generated by AI. And it hardly puts "American Workers First" with outdated imagery that only pictures a slice of reality.
Ilić, who founded a traveling poster show about tolerance a year after Trump's first election, summarized the campaign as "propaganda kitsch."
The Department of Labor's message: "If you're white, the future is yours."
FROM ELSEWHERE
Here's what I found interesting, important or delightful this week:
Dearly departed datasets. America's Essential Data is memorializing US federal datasets that have met an untimely end. If you know of any terminated or disappeared data, let them know by end of Wednesday, Oct. 29.
Peanut allergies aren't what they used to be. Researchers discovered a 43% drop in peanut allergies when health guidance changed from "keep kids away from peanuts" to "have at 'em!".
In this economy? Of course! About a quarter of Americans say they would buy a house in which the previous owners had been murdered. One in ten also say they can psychically see events into the future. How's that resale value looking?
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