Why AI designs are bad for your business

Where everything feels overly cinematic, images are high contrast, dramatic and too awkwardly composed. There’s always at least one textured typeface and an equally textured swipe backing the swathes of icons and emojis that litter the page.

Ladies and gentlemen, I think we may have an ai-pidemic on our hands.

Human beings have been marketing their products for millenia yet the practice of reproducing design work through posters can be traced back to the early 19th century with the invention of lithography. Since then the design world exploded with artists using print as a medium to push the boundaries of visual communication and explore how humans both react and interact with design.

With the uprise in mobile devices, this practice has translated into the digital space with further innovations surrounding interaction and animation, heightening the artworks ability to convey its core message in a memorable and engaging way.

Throughout all of this history, one detail remains clear. Design matters, it informs and it sells.

If a design fails to capture a person's attention in the first place, then what’s the likelihood that content will be received and remembered. What does it say about the business as a whole, would a person decide to trust an event or product that’s marketed through such AI generated means?

It’s a real uphill battle because I completely understand why it's being used more and more. We’ve all had this tool thrust upon us that just needs a few words to generate and share something in a quick and - mostly - free fashion, so of course its use is getting more popular.

In small doses, I do recognise its benefits with idea generation, transcribing and summarising expansive topics, speeding up parts of the development process yadda yadda and all that jazz.

It's just unfortunately alongside pretty much every part of the creative sector, AI is digging its unrelenting claws into the world of marketing collateral and quickly filling our spaces with a sea of dull, uninspiring visual noise.

Speaking of noise, why don't we look into why everything is becoming so generic.

In short, AI image generation is typically based off of a model known as diffusion.

This is a training method that involves taking a collection of images (aka, the entire history of everything on the internet), linking them with text markers to describe that image and then slowly adding stages of noise until it becomes indistinguishable. It then reverses this process and attempts to rearrange this mass of pixels back to a re-creation of the original image.

The model uses this method to ‘learn’ the most mathematically probable way it can rearrange a blank canvas of noise to statistically match the given prompts. It's all based on seeing patterns in the noise and recreating shapes based off of the knowledge it's gained taking them apart. Similar to how we look up at the sky and can pick out images in the clouds. Lovely.

Now all of this has been guided through a process called Reward Model Training, which is a type of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback also known as RLHF.

This is where a group of real human beings are tasked to continually assess these generated images based on their similarities to the given prompt, essentially marking how aesthetically pleasing the results are and whether it’s created a ‘good image’. Feeding this information back into the machine helps steer its decision making when generating further results.

Over time this essentially means the AI’s sense of ‘what makes a good image’ becomes heavily weighted towards an average. It learns to create in a style that is standard and astonishingly basic. Hence, the inescapable generic AI posters that are piling up in front of our eyeballs everyday.

With the rise of this monotonous-ness, we’re losing out on quirky individual flair. One business just looks exactly the same as another and the public falls into a feedback loop of accepting it and moving on without any real interaction or thought. Its quick, disposable design.

This is why it's important now more than ever to avoid this pull towards the generic and stand out with something human made.

Comments and feedback, shaming the use of AI generated content is growing. You’ll find that on any social platform. With that comes a developing distrust in a business from its use. Soon we will see a new criteria for promotional design success; to be eye catching, informative, aesthetically pleasing and now, ‘not AI’.

Consider how prospective clients would view your business based on the marketing you put out there. If you’re wanting people to support, attend or trust in your business as a whole, then please consider working with an agency on your marketing materials. This will put priority on your brand and give you the structure to avoid ever falling into this web of similarity.

Failing that, please consider using any from the vast number of free websites and software available for you to spend as long or as little time needed to get far more interesting and unique results.

For a library of stock photos; Unsplash, MorgueFile and Pexels. To process images and text theres; Photopea, GIMP, Paint.net and Canva to name a few. Each one of these are easy to pick up and will have a network of support to help you get to grips with creating your own designs.

I know that I for one would much rather support a business that takes this approach over anything AI generated.

Nothing would warm my heart more than being greeted at the door by a flyer created by a local business made in that beautifully familiar wavy word art. Or to come across a poster created with a hand drawn sketch and comic sans title advertising an upcoming event.

I’d take that over AI anyday.