![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/500c76abc2058fd87fda8f6a5a3e2deaed-ai-bodegas.rhorizontal.w1100.jpg\")
<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\n Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photos: Clio Chang\n <\/p>\n
Walking to my office generally means passing DJ Fawad\u2019s food cart, a neighborhood fixture for coffee and breakfast sandwiches on the corner of Stone and Broad Street. For years, the wrap on the cart featured an electric-pink chain-link fence and a giant, floating bacon, egg, and cheese next to a similarly giant, floating coffee splashing out of its cup. But at some point in the last year, a yassified Memoji of Fawad himself, smiling and holding two perfectly frosted donuts, appeared on the side.\u00a0\u201cPeople love it,\u201d Fawad told me on a recent morning. \u201cThey come up and say, \u2018That\u2019s you!\u2019\u201d To make the sign, Fawad put his photo through an AI app that did a passable job of rendering his likeness in cartoon form and sent it to his sign guy, who printed and installed it. The partial wrap cost $400 (you can still see the chain-link motif behind it). To Fawad, this was a pretty significant improvement from his options back in 2018, when he first got his cart wrapped. Then, he could only use a template provided by the sign-maker, which had little room to make adjustments, and it still cost him $2,600. So he\u2019s into the new one, and so are his customers. \u201cIt makes people laugh,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/fc426e34c11195545e54e7fe48bff335ef-IMG-9011.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Photo: Clio Chang\n <\/p>\n
Like it or not, the era of AI signage<\/a> is upon us. It might look like a maximalist jumble of colorful\u00a0chip bags with pixelated edges and blurry coffee cups set across a New York City skyline. Or a cartoony hamburger that is doing a little too much \u2014\u00a0the cheese drip a little too textured, the shine on the bun a little uncanny. (Hell Gate has noticed \u201cGhibli-esque pancakes, and hallucinatory beers.\u201d) A friend described the emerging aesthetic as a strange kind of mid: \u201cToo good to be made by a regular person, but too average in every way to be made by a graphic designer.\u201d<\/p>\n The AI bodega is bespoke while also being completely impersonal. \u201cYears ago, you would look at a sign and know, George built that or Sam built that,\u201d said Paul Boegemann, who owns Paul Signs and has been in business for about half a century. \u201cNow it\u2019s a whole different world. Everybody thinks they\u2019re a sign guy in their basement, making these banners and prints.\u201d Mohamed Yar, the owner of Medina Signs, has seen the same shift in his business: Small-store owners used to text him their ideas or draft them on a piece of paper. Now, they mostly send over images generated by ChatGPT. Truthfully, that kind of thing can be fine for smaller signage \u2014\u00a0a poster to put up in your window for a breakfast combo \u2014\u00a0but for larger formats, he told me, AI designs are often a \u201cheadache for a sign-maker.\u201d The images are usually low-resolution, and they don\u2019t translate well beyond the small screens on which they\u2019re typically created. Something generated on a phone also uses an RGB color scale, while printers use CMYK \u2014 when transferred over, vibrant colors become duller. \u201cYou have to tell each client that the hard copies will look very distorted and pixelated,\u201d Yar said. He can work with his customers to make necessary fixes, but not everyone takes that step. So if your local deli has blurry-looking croissants on their window, the owner might have gone straight to Staples to print something as-is.<\/p>\n \n Note the \u201c34 words\u201d count at the bottom of this anthropomorphic guitar-playing tiger. \n An M.C. Escher portrait of shirts.Clio Chang.\n <\/p>\n \n An M.C. Escher portrait of shirts.Clio Chang.\n <\/p>\n But it\u2019s not just bodega and food-truck owners driving the change. David Barnett, co-founder of the New York Sign Museum and Noble Signs, told me that some of the AI slop showing up in our neighborhoods is coming from sign-makers themselves. (Other sign-makers I talked to confirmed this hunch \u2014\u00a0they definitely use AI to assist their work, they said.) Stock images, templates, and other ready-mades have always been core to the way bodegas look, and AI is now part of that process. Let\u2019s say a bodega owner wants a specialty item on a sign \u2014\u00a0a hamburger topped with some avocado. If that photo is not already available in their image library, the designer making the sign may use AI to get it out the door faster. (Most of the bodega owners I talked to who had uncanny-looking window treatments told me they had no idea how the art was ultimately designed.) Which is why it\u2019s not always clear which signs are\u00a0completely AI-generated, which ones simply have some AI touches, or which are from a bygone graphics era that AI is stealing from \u2014\u00a0generally poorly. I even ran a few of the photos I took around the city through ChatGPT to see if it thought the signs were AI-generated. \u201cThe text is mostly legible and correctly spelled,\u201d it responded. This, according to AI, was an indication that it wasn\u2019t AI. (You kind of can\u2019t say it better than that.)<\/p>\n \n ChatGPT gave this sign a 60\u201380 percent chance of AI usage in part because \u201cthe text is mostly legible and correctly spelled.\u201d \n A collage of stock images or an AI-generated blend? \u201cOver the last 30 or 40 years, the story of the sign industry is that it\u2019s had a lot of artistry sucked out of it in search for a cheaper product,\u201d Barnett said. \u201cNow we have this new tool that\u2019ll make it even faster, cheaper, and worse.\u201d Even the stock-image bodega signage now being replaced<\/a>, he says, still had a kind of human charm. \u201cYou ended up with this weirdly beautiful cornucopia of chopped cheeses, and it\u2019s awesome because while it might not be \u2018classically good design,\u2019 they reflected a person\u2019s eye, and it was a real New Yorker designing that sign.\u201d<\/p>\n But not everyone thinks AI is a harbinger of sign doom. Boegemann recalled that when he started in the industry, signs were all painted by hand. Then in the 1980s, vinyl plotters came on the market, and people started using those machines to cut out letters for signs. A similar panic ensued. \u201cEverybody was like, Sign painters are gonna be finished,\u201d Boegemann told me. But Boegemann believes those painters evolved with the trends, learning how to design signs in a new way. \u201cIt changed the industry, but it didn\u2019t replace the sign-maker,\u201d Boegemann said. In his mind, AI is just another tool that requires skilled hands to use well, and he wants his designers to start using it more: \u201cThe AI is only as good as the person putting the information in.\u201d<\/p>\n Photo: Clio Chang\n <\/p>\n Perhaps to his point: A smoothie shop that recently opened in Bed-Stuy has what a lot of people clocked<\/a> as an AI-generated logo. The awning reads \u201cBlend & Bites,\u201d but the logo, which features a smoothie, fruit, and a hamburger, reads, \u201cBlerla & Bites.\u201d When I talked to the owner earlier this month, he confirmed he had made the logo in five minutes with ChatGPT. I asked him if the store was named Blerla & Bites. He said no \u2014\u00a0it was Blend & Bites. This was his first store, he added. He was excited about the opening. I left our conversation feeling weirdly reassured. Most, if not all, AI design is slop nonsense thrown together in an instant. But storefronts across the city have long been weird hodgepodges, rife with misspellings and aesthetic incoherence. New designs are layered on top of old, creating accidental collages between eras. The bodega as we know it changes all the time, but it always stays weird<\/a>. So Blerla & Bites is probably a mistake, but it\u2019s possibly the most human thing about the sign.<\/p>\n Sign Up for the Curbed Newsletter<\/p>\n A daily mix of stories about cities, city life, and our always evolving neighborhoods and skylines.<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/7b8d05d26963c87e89593be2f3574bfe8a-image0.rvertical.w570.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n Photo: Clio Chang\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/ad614afcfd03e62bf87ce60e344b7cc365-IMG-4473.rvertical.w570.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/ccc35ebf753f3f39667608d6fc1f4909cc-IMG-8989.rvertical.w570.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n Photo: Clio Chang\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/c7950ca2e254ecdb8bc70b18654933f96e-IMG-8669--2-.rvertical.w570.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n Photo: Courtesy of the owner\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/313126b3d8a72722c91e3f9dfb8fc193c7-IMG-8995.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
<\/p>\n