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The most obvious conclusion is that a human made 500,000 shirt designs?

Probably not a single human, you can go on crowd sourcing websites and probably find people who will pump out t shirt designs for a $1 a pop.

So do you think these people will make $500,000 from their T-shirts to cover their costs?! I don't understand why it's so surprising that somebody might automate this. You know we have thse things called "computers" today... right? :)

It's an obvious thing to do. Amazon already sell print-on-demand ebooks, allowing vendors to spam the products list with a torrent of shit at minimal cost so they can find out which bits stick. This is exactly the same principle.

(See also, in case you're reading this later and there are a lot of comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5310567)

You can probably to a single $1 design and create a number of products from it , as they seem to have. So I imagine the part that is auto generated is colouring etc rather than the design itself.

The "Keep calm and…" is not exactly something someone needs to design: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_Calm_and_Carry_On

Somehow I don't think spending $500000 on these t-shirt designs would be a good idea (compared to generating them with an algorithm).

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