Welcome to the new advertising landscape, where venture-backed companies apparently can't be bothered to hire a single copywriter to make sure their highway-speed messaging actually makes sense to human eyeballs.

But here's the silver lining: the street artists have noticed too. Among the most delightful responses is work from Eclair, the anonymous Bay Area street artist who's been subverting public space since the Snowden era. If you're not familiar, think Banksy but with a Bay Area sensibility — sharp, political, and deeply skeptical of exactly the kind of tech-bro nonsense that produces AI billboard slop in the first place.

Meanwhile, one of the stranger phenomena popping up alongside all this is a group called the "Squirrelites," which has been plastering posters and building a social media presence. One Bay Area resident did some digging and wasn't impressed: "Their whole website is just a place to buy AI poster templates," they noted, pointing out that the group's domain was only registered in March, has never been archived, and features suspiciously smooth, AI-generated squirrel imagery. As another local put it: "I, for one, welcome our squirrely overlords."

Here's what actually bothers us: public visual space is a commons. Billboards, posters, murals — these shape the character of a city. When that space gets flooded with algorithmically generated noise from companies that treat the Bay Area's highways like a cheap A/B test, it degrades something real. It's the aesthetic equivalent of spam email, except you can't hit delete at 65 miles per hour.

The least we can ask is that if you're going to buy a billboard on one of the most-trafficked corridors in Northern California, make it say something a human being actually wrote. Until then, we'll keep cheering for the Eclairs of the world — the ones who remind us that art, at minimum, should be made by people.