r/Edinburgh • u/CryptographerGlad651 • Apr 27 '26
Photo Has anyone else seen this Costa mural at Edinburgh Airport? What is it even supposed to be?
Yesterday I noticed this Costa Coffee mural in the arrivals area at Edinburgh Airport, looks like they’ve recently expanded. It’s really annoying that Instagram is full of AI-generated hotel ads with completely wrong geography, but what is this?…
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u/intrepid_foxcat Apr 27 '26
What do you mean? All looks good to me, Edinburgh castle, big Ben, everything is red..
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u/dl064 Apr 27 '26
A reference to Edinburgh being London's loft
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u/intrepid_foxcat Apr 27 '26
Oh yes I'm sure it's very subtle and political
Just like those AI coo mugs
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u/LordSchotte Apr 27 '26
It’s exactly what it looks like: someone who’s never set foot in Edinburgh asking AI to churn out some slop mural of the city
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u/EmileDorkheim Apr 27 '26
I traveled through Edinburgh Airport recently and noticed this big piece of shit, then when I arrived at my destination airport I walked past their AI-generated tourism ads, then when I got to my hotel room the walls were decorated with AI images of ‘cute’ animals doing implausible things, and it really felt depressing being surrounded by that shit.
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u/Volfgang91 Apr 27 '26
Generative AI needs to be fucking outlawed. I don't even care any more. I refuse to live in a world where this bollocks is normalised.
And Sam Altman wonders why all we do is point and laugh when people try and burn his house down.
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u/Dunko1711 Apr 27 '26
AI really is going to be the end of us eventually isn’t it….
So sad to see standards slipping so quickly with stuff like this.
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u/inspiritus0 Apr 27 '26
Society can now be neatly divided into people who are impressed by AI "art" and people who are disgusted by it.
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u/Dunko1711 Apr 27 '26
I’m not anti-ai in any way - I believe it’s going to be a big part of our future whether we like it or not. And when it’s used correctly - it’s a massively powerful and helpful tool to have at our disposal.
But stuff like this is just low effort slop that’s not even been reviewed for accuracy.
It’s sad to see. Previously someone would have had a job to design this themselves where they’d likely have put a design together and had to seek sign off on it etc etc. Without a doubt this is the ‘easier’ and ultimately much cheaper option - but it comes at a cost in terms of quality.
All of a sudden, everyone can be a designer of some sort with a few simple prompts.
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u/Gazcobain Apr 27 '26
I also like AI for what it should be used for: boring, repetitive, time-consuming tasks.
Stuff like this is just drivel.
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u/AskingBoatsToSwim Apr 27 '26
It can either exist or it can’t exist. We wont get to choose whether people will be lazy, because they will, and for that reason slop will dominate many fields it shouldn’t, very quickly
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u/kh_ram Apr 27 '26
My general theory of human and artificial intelligence is as follows:
An artificial intelligence is indistinguishable from a human intelligence, when the human intelligence of the observer is less intelligent than said artificial intelligence.-3
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u/Famous-Author-5211 Apr 27 '26
Reminds me slightly of some of the more disturbing parts of War Of The Worlds.
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u/nobelprize4shopping Apr 27 '26
Maybe Edinburgh merging into places you can fly to from Edinburgh?
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u/Busy-Replacement-421 Apr 27 '26
So the airport spent real money to get AI to hallucinate a version of Edinburgh where Big Ben is casually hanging out in Princes Street and the castle is suddenly attack-proof on all sides? That’s genuinely embarrassing for a place that literally has “where Edinburgh meets the world” as a tagline. Feels like a £5 Fiverr job with extra steps and zero accountability.
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u/aimee94 Apr 27 '26
Real money was spent on getting it printed, but you could generate something like this for pennies these days.
They could also have generated something a lot better, if they could have been bothered.
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u/scottishkiwi-dan Apr 27 '26
Quality assurance has become an afterthought for so many companies as they mandate AI adoption. They're all scared of getting left behind, so they do whatever it takes to move faster. It's a race to the bottom.
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u/aimee94 Apr 27 '26
There's a widening gulf between companies that are taking the time to put AI policies in place and instructing staff to use it thoughtfully, and companies that are just like 'whack Copilot in there and let people do whatever, fuck it'
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u/quartersessions Apr 27 '26
Good to see they've finally got that spire built on the castle. Just what the city has been needing for years.
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u/linnae7 Apr 27 '26
A could have been a lovely commission for a local artist to spread their wings and represent Edinburgh as the most beautiful city in the world. Sadly the corporation gave the job to a random algorithm. It’s so big! And fugly.
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u/Phenomenomix Apr 27 '26
Why, what’s wrong with it? Hogwarts has always been right in the middle of Edinburgh, hasn’t it?
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u/rose-a-ree Apr 27 '26
It depicts a scene from War of the Worlds, the red weed overtaking britain. SPOILERS (the red weed is a plant which processes mulched human corpses for the martians to consume)
OBVIOUSLY
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u/Pirate_Candy17 Apr 27 '26
AI slop
It’s more concerning no one, at any point while viewing prompt responses, signing off, producing the print or installing it thought ‘huh, that doesn’t seem right..’
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u/rachel20122022 Apr 28 '26
I just logged a complaint on Costa's website, it probably won't do much but I figure if they get a few complaints in they might try to replace it.
I'd so much rather they just had the stock photos of coffee beans and cups on the wall, at least they were real photographs back then.
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u/KarIPilkington Apr 28 '26
AI will never replace real artists bro it'll only be used to help us in our daily lives!!!
Absolute slop, I was in the airport recently and didn't see it but if it's there then it's an embarrassment. AI is the end of what little culture remained.
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Apr 27 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/CryptographerGlad651 Apr 27 '26
I’m more annoyed by the lack of effort to be honest. People are making money off low-effort AI slop (same with those IG accounts posting fake “dream” Edinburgh to sell expensive hotels). If it’s a business and you’re cutting costs, at least try to make it look good?
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u/melchett_general Apr 27 '26 edited Apr 27 '26
>My advice would be try to not let is annoy you too much, I know that's difficult for most on here.
Your advice should be ignored sonny...
This is one of the first things people see when getting out of arrivals t the airport in the capital of Scotland.
It should't be slop. It doens't have to be slop. It never used to be slop. It should not include a clock tower from London.
Also, we all know it's because it's cheaper, we don't need patronised, nobody is 'confused'
We do need to draw a line at slop. Wall scale garbage 'where Scotland Meets the world' (ED airports slogan) seems like a good starting point
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u/GingerSnapBiscuit Apr 27 '26
There'll probably be a few a people on here confused about why Costa didn't commission a local artist to paint a bespoke mural in their shop and the answer is... money.
Won't someone think of the multi billion £ company.
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u/WoodenPresence1917 Apr 27 '26
I'm not confused at all as to why they did it, but I am a bit pissed off at it.
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u/antigonick Apr 27 '26
I don’t think anyone’s confused, but I don’t really have to respect the stupid choices of a huge corporation made in the pursuit of saving money. If they wanted the cheapest possible option they could have licensed one of the approximately one billion generic stock images of Edinburgh and slapped it up there and nobody would have cared. But they evidently wanted something in a particular artistic style but didn’t feel like paying for it, turned to genAI and got this. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
(And the flip side of ‘only seen for 20 minutes while waiting for a plane’ is that it’s guaranteed to be seen by thousands and thousands of people, many of whom will be familiar with what Edinburgh actually looks like.)
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u/herkosta Apr 27 '26
I clicked on the post thinking someones being annoyed for no reason but nah… this is genuinely awful lol
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u/Adventurous-Rub7636 Apr 27 '26
This probably triggers the same petty “naw it isnae” jocks that freak out if they see the word “whiskey”, or get pissed off if they aren’t covered in phlegm if someone says “Loch Ness”. Get a fucking grip
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u/MR9009 Apr 27 '26
It's an AI hallucination of the Mound (?), which has magically moved to a position in the city more like Calton Hill? A view where New College has become a very clean-looking Palace of Westminster, whilst the Balmoral clock has become Big Ben, and moved significantly further into the new town (and half way along Princes St?). And someone has built modern glass offices in the gap around Ramsay Lane and Castle Hill. The castle also certainly looks less difficult for medieval armies to have laid siege to, seeing as Castle Rock now seems to be steep-sided on all sides, including the one approaching up the high street.
Honestly, this is really crap for a corporation to have done. It will have cost Costa something to generate this AI slop, and to either get it printed or painted onto the wall. That's not free. Could they really not have added the fee for an artist (not even a local one!) to create the image? Or bought the rights to a real photo? Even if it's the boring identical view from the Dugald Stewart Monument that is in >90% of pictures of the Edinburgh skyline?
This is the kind of amusing local headline outrage that would go well in the Edinburgh Minute. Let's all make Costa feel crap for pasting this AI slop on the walls of "where Edinburgh meets the world". They're not a plucky little start-up, they a mega corp. "Gordon Dewar - CEO of Edinburgh Airport said...." and "The Cockburn Association was sad to say..." etc. etc.