Passersby in Kingston Upon Thames have been cowering in horror after sighting a hideous AI-created Christmas mural, complete with mutant dogs and a snowman with an eye on its cheek
A giant festive mural in London created by an AI has sparked horror and mockery from passersby. Nothing says “ Christmas ” like not paying your artists and getting a bot to do an awful job.
Prominently displayed above Kingston upon Thames’ Côte Brasserie restaurant near the river, the huge billboard features hideously disfigured people, animals – and a snowman which looks like it haunts dreams for a living.
One person said the mural “celebrates the return of our dark lord Cthulhu”, noting the fact it had been created by artificial intelligence as the reason behind the deformities.
The mural bears all the hallmarks of AI slop – the people have decimated faces like they’ve been moulded from porridge.
It’s difficult to work out which are scarier however, these half-people, or the animals. The mutant canines look like they’re a result of the AI confusing dogs, chickens and fish
“It looks like a refugee camp/Christmas market mashup. I guess the prompt was ‘Reform Christmas nightmare,’” one user wrote. “They didn’t stop the boats… or the mutant dogs and two-headed snowmen.”
“Had to go see this for myself, and oh my gods is it worse than I expected,” software developer Stephen Oakman wrote in a post. “There’s another one of them as well that is even worse than this one just next to it.”
It remains unclear who exactly commissioned the artwork, with a source familiar to the situation saying that neither Côte Brasserie nor the Bill’s Kingston Restaurant had anything to do with it.
One thing is for sure – the public is not pleased with the AI hellscape. One user on Reddit described the scenes as similar to “Lovecraftian horror.”
They wrote: “What in the AI is going on here and just HOW did this carnage get approved. This abomination is also about 100 feet wide!”
Another person said: “So they didn’t even look at it once before printing it…You know what’s Christmassy? A snowman with a f****** eye on his cheek.”
One Bluesky user said: “I for one welcome our new Ai Robot Cthulhu overlord. Utter AI slop.”
It’s not the first time AI art has come up short – back in 2024 a bot had a crack at restoring the iconic Mona Lisa to its “original” state, with incredibly embarrassing results.
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