HISPI Project Cerebellum HISPI PROJECT CEREBELLUM

City of Spokane Reportedly Distributed Purported AI-Generated Clocktower Flyer Resembling Graphic Designer Matthew Clinard's Artwork

July 1, 2026

A Spokane Parks and Recreation employee reportedly used a purported generative AI image tool to create a flyer promoting the restored Great Northern Clocktower chimes. The flyer reportedly reproduced elements of artist Matthew Clinard's commercially sold Clocktower sticker was distributed by the mayor's office without the city-required AI disclosure. After Clinard complained publicly, the city removed the image and apologized, then began considering AI-policy and employee-training reforms. …through contributors—JOIN US—to learn more.

Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

Alleged deployer
unnamed-employee-of-spokane-parks-and-recreation-department, synthetic-media-creators, spokane-parks-and-recreation-department, city-of-spokane, office-of-spokane-mayor-lisa-brown
Alleged developer
synthetic-media-generation-technology-developers, synthetic-image-generation-technology-developers
Alleged harmed parties
matthew-clinard, epistemic-integrity, artists, copyright-holders, general-public, general-public-of-spokane

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Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1598

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

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