Look at the back of Dave Compton’s shirt carefully, and you’ll notice that the left side starts to have garbled text.
It’s very impressive, though. If I’m wrong, and these are real, then I’m very interested why Dave was wearing that shirt.
Back in the day, it wouldn’t have been normal to have a custom shirt like that with different font sizes with your own name on the back stating what you’re doing in an obscure way.
The fact that this blogger, whose blog I'm reading for the first time today, has been posting archive footage and imagery, using a pretty similar format, from the same factory since at least 2019 (https://arcadeblogger.com/2019/12/26/atari-coin-op-archive-f...), and also the fact that the new post is his first blog post in 18th months, makes me think it's highly unlikely that this the post AI generated in any way.
I could see a cheap restoration introduction artifacts as a more likely reason for the look.
Completely depends on what they were shooting on, the state of the media, the scanning methods used, any post-processing, etc. At first glance this does not look AI generated to me but hey, could be wrong
In the late 70s and early 80s, there were custom "iron on" T-Shirt shops in most malls. They would have a wall of larger iron-on decals, primarily logos of sports teams and rock bands, but they also had custom letters, usually in the Cooper typeface. You'd tell them what you wanted, the size and color of your shirt and lettering, and they'd go in the back room and iron what you wanted on your new shirt for a few dollars. This was especially popular with youth sports teams in lieu of professional uniforms, families who wanted to match for a big trip (often with custom names like this), and, as you can see here, jokey custom workplace team shirts.
If you watch a late-70s or early-80s episode of The Price is Right, you'll almost certainly see contestants or audience members in these custom iron-on shirts - same font, same slightly disjointed look.
The left-hand text on Dave Compton's shirt is slightly blurry and unreadable given the resolution, not garbled. But it's not some AI nonsense.
DAVE
COMPTON
(King?) OF PACKERS
(He'll?) PUT IT IN ANY BOX
This isn't just a rah-rah team spirit shirt or something obscure, it's a peculiarly '70s innuendo combining thoughts about his job... and his sexual prowess. Sure, that kind of shirt would cause a modern workplace to, uh, send him packing. As they say, it was a different time.
Here's a thread on Reddit about one of those mall custom iron-on t-shirt shops: https://www.reddit.com/r/70sdesign/comments/hf6f0q/tshirt_ir...