Moleskine built its brand on human creativity. The company loves telling you that Hemingway and Picasso allegedly used their notebooks. Their limited editions spotlight real artists like Zeng Fanzhi, Ahn Sang Soo, and Momoko Sakura. So it's jarring to see their new Lord of the Rings collection ship with AI-generated artwork and barely a whisper about it. Some promotional images on the website carried a small disclaimer reading "Imagined by Moleskine, generated by AI." The Instagram announcement? Nothing. No mention of AI anywhere in those eight images.
The AI reveals itself in the details. A map posted to Instagram mimics Tolkien's iconic cartographic style but slaps on nonsense place names like "Der Rarmorth" and "Narmimtz." Another map on the website shows similar gibberish. This is a licensed Lord of the Rings product bearing the official trademark. Nobody on the team apparently knew Middle-earth well enough to catch obviously fake locations before posting them publicly, a situation echoed by the AI-generated artwork problems facing other platforms.
Cheryl-Jean Leo, who documented the discrepancies on her blog, noticed that the product descriptions themselves read like AI output. Three notebooks feature nearly identical blurbs with only a few words swapped. Each location is described as a "looming background."
The flat, minimalist art style makes the AI origins hard to spot. That's what makes this feel deceptive. Without the disclaimer, there might be no way to tell if the art is machine-generated.
The Tolkien Estate sued Warner Bros. for $80 million in 2012 for exceeding its licensing rights, calling certain merchandising deals "morally repugnant." Whether AI-generated artwork violates the specific terms of Moleskine's license remains unclear. But slapping algorithmic images on products marketed to creatives, while quietly removing disclaimers from social media posts, tells you where Moleskine's priorities are now. The notebook brand that once celebrated the human hand is betting you won't notice the difference, a common outcome when companies prioritize cheap expert labor over quality.