TL;DR
Two Newcastle pubs — The Mean Eyed Cat and the Free Trade Inn — have announced they will no longer display AI-generated artwork on bottles and pump clips. The move has sparked a significant response from the craft beer community and reignited debate about AI’s impact on creative livelihoods.
”Who Are You Going to Offend? The Robots?”
Simon Hubbard, who runs The Mean Eyed Cat in Newcastle city centre, says he noticed “a spate of breweries who are just coming out with this absolutely dreadful AI slop” — mainly older, more established producers. The joint announcement with the Free Trade Inn became one of the pub’s most viewed Instagram posts.
Hubbard’s concern is straightforward: “People are going to be put out of work because of it. You would really have thought the creative sector would always have a space for creative people and ingenuity.”
Artists Push Back
Drew Millward, a designer who has worked with breweries worldwide including Leeds-based Northern Monk, says the issue goes beyond aesthetics. AI software is trained on millions of human-made images scraped from the internet, and Millward has friends who have been forced to defend work that AI was trained on. “Call it what it is — stolen artwork,” he says.
Ashley Willerton, a Durham-based lettering artist with 12 years’ experience, takes a more hopeful view. He believes demand for human-made art will persist, regardless of how cheap the AI alternative becomes: “It doesn’t matter how good AI gets. It will always lack a human touch.”
The Community Argument
Reece Hugill, owner of Newcastle-based brewery Donzoko, frames the issue in economic terms. “If I was to use ChatGPT for my designs rather than our designer Sean, that’s taking money out of the local area into the hands of a multibillionaire.” He also questions what corner-cutting on design says about a brewery’s wider standards — from ingredients to how staff are paid.
Looking Forward
The Instagram post has already prompted some breweries to reconsider their approach. As AI-generated content spreads across more industries, the brewery art debate offers a focused case study in what happens when businesses choose automation over local creative talent — and what it means for the communities that lose out.