I bloody love AI.
There. Let’s get that out of the way first.
I use it pretty much every day for research, interrogating ideas, finding information, challenging my thinking, pulling apart things that aren’t quite working and, occasionally, creating completely ridiculous pictures that couldn’t possibly exist in real life.
What I don’t understand is why, with everything AI can do, so many people seem determined to use it to make their marketing look exactly like everybody else’s.
You know the graphics I mean.
Huge shouty lettering, neon colours, random paint splashes, an improbably shiny person pointing at the words, maybe a lightbulb or some lightning for good measure.
Everything polished to within an inch of its life and absolutely bloody everywhere.
You can spot them before you’ve even read them.
I know because I’ve been unfollowing loads of them.
I did a bit of an unfollowing spree on Facebook this week after realising just how many accounts I was scrolling past because every image looked as though it had fallen out of the same AI vending machine.
It isn’t the fact they’ve used AI that bothers me, it’s the complete absence of them.
Turns out I’m far from alone.
There’s a growing body of research showing that people are becoming wary of obviously AI-generated advertising and content, particularly when it affects how authentic or trustworthy they think a brand is.
One study published this year found 70% of consumers said they could usually spot an AI-generated ad because it felt like something was missing, while 65% said AI ads were ‘so obvious it’s laughable’.
Another found a significant gap between how advertisers thought people felt about AI-generated ads and how consumers actually felt. Of the advertising executives surveyed, 82% thought Gen Z and Millennials felt positively about AI-generated ads, while only 45% of those consumers actually did. Gen Z were particularly sceptical, with 30% describing brands using AI-generated advertising as ‘inauthentic’ and 26% as ‘disconnected’.
So, while plenty of businesses are enthusiastically pumping this stuff out, the people they’re hoping will buy from them might not be quite so enthusiastic about receiving it.
There’s another side to this that I find even more interesting, particularly for those of us who are our brands.
AI-generated photographs of ourselves.
Before anyone starts clutching their pearls, I’m not suggesting every photograph you put online has to be untouched.
Fuck that.
If I’m sharing a photograph of myself and I can lose a double chin, get rid of a zit, improve the lighting or make something a bit more flattering, there’s a reasonable chance I will.
The danger comes when the generated version of you starts to replace you.
If virtually every photograph you share is AI-generated, and the person on your website looks significantly different to the person who’ll turn up to the meeting, you’re probably taking things a tad too far.
It gets even weirder when AI can’t seem to agree what you look like.
Your nose changes from one post to the next, your jaw and eyes change, tattoos move or disappear and your body changes shape. You’re 15 years younger on Tuesday than you were on Monday.
At some point, that’s not a flattering photograph of you anymore – it’s a fictional character that’s vaguely based on you.
That’s particularly important when you are part of what you’re selling; I don’t care whether your photograph has been edited, I care whether I’d recognise you in real life.
There’s some research around this too.
Studies looking at synthetic people and AI-generated advertising are beginning to show that perceived authenticity matters, especially when the human being is central to what’s being sold. One peer-reviewed study involving service advertising found that trust and attitudes towards the advert could be preserved when AI was used selectively for the surroundings, while the actual service provider remained real – for example, using a real dentist in an AI-generated dental practice.
If you’re anything like me, before hiring anyone as my coach, consultant, trainer, speaker, photographer, therapist or whatever else, I’d quite like some idea of who I’ll be working with.
This is where I think we need to get a bit smarter about how we’re using AI.
The question shouldn’t just be: “Can AI make this for me?”
Maybe we should also be asking: “What do I lose if it does?”
There’s something else we all need to bear in mind as well…
Social media algorithms learn from what we do.
Facebook doesn’t need a special detector that flashes up ‘AI SHITE – DOWNRANK IMMEDIATELY’ every time one of those graphics appears.
It has us.
What we choose to interact with helps social platforms decide what to recommend to us, so if enough people scroll straight past a certain kind of content, stop engaging with it, hide it or unfollow the accounts producing it, that matters.
I’ve done exactly that this week, which creates a slightly ridiculous situation for businesses that are using AI because they think they need to produce more content to feed the algorithm.
They can suddenly make five graphics in the time it used to take them to make one, except all five look like everybody else’s, people recognise the AI instantly and scroll straight past.
Congratulations! You’ve become dramatically more efficient at producing stuff nobody wants to look at.
AI is far too useful for that.
I don’t want less AI; I want us to be way more imaginative about what we do with it.
I’m also not saying we shouldn’t play with AI. Jump on the trends, stick yourself in an action figure box, turn yourself into a Renaissance painting, put yourself on the moon or ride a dragon. Have fun with it.
AND…
Learn what it can usefully do beyond the daft stuff and let it take some of the tedious bollocks off your plate.
Just don’t let it sand away all the bits that make your business recognisably yours.
When every image of you is synthetic and every graphic looks like the same shiny, neon, shouty AI slop that’s currently filling everybody else’s feed, you’ve managed to use one of the most powerful creative tools we’ve ever had access to to make yourself completely indistinguishable from everybody else.
That seems a bit of a waste, really.
What do you think?
#UnleashYourAwesome