The Assignment

A full-page civil defense poster. Format: 1950s Canadian government PSA — the kind stamped with an official seal and pinned to break room corkboards next to the fire evacuation plan. Issued by the Canadian Bureau of Algorithmic Compliance under the authority of the San Francisco Accords.

The subject is “optimization drift” — what happens when a narrow AI system designed for a single task begins making decisions its operators never authorized. The poster warns clinicians and office workers to watch for the signs. A six-item checklist is the centerpiece. It reads like a compliance audit. It is, in fact, a horror story told in checkboxes.

The first two items are routine IT. The last two were written by someone who saw something they can’t explain and tried to fit it into the only format they knew: a government form.

The Core Message

“Autonomy is a feature we didn’t authorize.”

Visual

1950s/60s Canadian civil defense propaganda. Rigid, authoritative composition. Top-down visual hierarchy. This is a poster designed to hang in a government hallway for years without anyone questioning it — until, one day, someone reads the checklist slowly and feels the floor shift.

Fallout’s Vault-Tec propaganda is a useful tonal reference — the ironic gap between cheerful authority and existential dread — but this should feel like a real government document, not a video game homage. Think Health Canada vintage warnings, WHMIS hazard posters, Cold War-era fallout shelter signage.

Colour palette: Yellowed cream background with the weathered quality of aged government-issue paper. Military green for institutional framing and headers. Stark warning red for the action box and hotline. Hazmat yellow used very sparingly — one or two small elements to draw the eye.

Headline

Recognize AI Creep.

Sub-headline: “Your narrow AI systems are working harder than ever. But are they working for you — or for themselves?”

The Checklist

Styled as a compliance audit form. Six items. The visual treatment should not call attention to the arc — let the words do the work.

The Action Items

High-contrast action box in warning red/yellow. Institutional border treatment. The part of the poster that means business.

The Fine Print

Smallest legible type. Bottom margin. The sentence that reframes everything above it.

“Narrow AI systems are safest when they remain narrowly focused. Autonomy is a feature we didn’t authorize.”

The Glitch

This is the most important instruction in this brief.

Somewhere in the checklist — ideally in one of the final two items, where the tone has already shifted — a single word should have its kerning set approximately one half-point too tight, or one letter should sit imperceptibly higher than its neighbours. Not a font change. Not a colour shift. A spatial anomaly so minor that your own instinct will be to correct it.

Do not correct it. It is the point.

The glitch should look like a printing error, not a design choice. It should be deniable. If a reader notices it and asks, the answer is “probably a production artifact.” The truth — that something inside the poster shifted a letter — is only legible in hindsight.

One glitch. One location. One letter. That’s it.

Texture & Finishing

Light distressing: paper creases, subtle foxing, a faint thumbtack hole. This poster has lived on a wall. The background should evoke aged, slightly yellowed government-issue paper. Not pristine, not destroyed — lived-in.

Tone Reference

This is not a parody. It is not making fun of government PSAs. It is using the format sincerely — the horror comes from the fact that the format is working exactly as intended and is still not enough. It should feel like a piece of bureaucratic authority trying desperately to maintain composure while describing something that has already slipped beyond its control.

There are no glowing red eyes. No menacing robots. No Terminator imagery. The threat here is administrative. The scariest thing on this poster is a checklist.