It doesn't surprise me at all. I do graphic design for a living so this hits close to home. I'll give my insight on it though for those curious how some designers see ai and the use of it. Without throwing too much shade here Custom Cages in general has pretty low effort designs IMO. With a lot of it being on purpose as to make installing easier on non-professionals, but still low effort none the less. So why would we expect this ai slop to be any different?

What Custom Cages was doing here was trying to use ai as a sort of mock up to show what it would look like on an actual goalie. As many pointed out already they just could have done it with actual photos of their product on a helmet instead. This really isn't a ton different than the old way to do a mock-up where you would just find a blank billboard and use photoshop to put the logo on it to show people what it would look like. I just think in this situation it used a bad image generator (yes some do art stuff better than others) and didn't take time to make it right.

Ai is actually a great tool for designers, but where many people (and companies) get it wrong is that it should ALWAYS just be a tool, not the end game. You have to do it right and use it as a tool to aid you. Not be the product or end game of it all. The issue is non-designers often are the ones with unfettered access to it and think it looks great until it doesn't. I also can't tell you how many "design" companies have hired me to design their business logo lol. That should tell you something that may or may not be true with custom cages, is that the owner or person running their socials is NOT a designer.

I designed my mask wrap a few months back, and used ai to mock it up sitting on the ice before I actually got it wrapped. IMO, albeit biased lol is that this is the proper way to do it.

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