Using generative AI art for marketing - Five downsides

By Markus Backman

January 23rd, 2024

You probably know that 2023 was a milestone for Generative AI (artificial intelligence). Simply put, generative AI is basically any media content or art created with artificial intelligence. With numerous AI inventions becoming accessible to anyone, the digital landscape changed for good in 2023.

Image -to-image rendering, deepfakes, flawless copywriting, text-to-speech services, and voice-altering with the help of AI applications became mainstream for anyone. Heck, this AI boom enables anyone to become a creative person, not just those assigned to such occupations.

Lately, I've seen lots of companies using generative AI art as a part of their content marketing. Based on my experience, as generative art AI implementations become accessible to anyone, AI-generated art loses its value. I'll explain why I think that below.

In this post:

1. It's astonishing, but it still doesn't look right

I would lie if I didn't admit that generative AI can create astonishing visuals and other creative work. I mean, you can create high-definition and graphically advanced visual art in seconds or create a blog post like this in the blink of an eye. That's impressive.

However, based on my experience, there's something off with a lot of generative AI content. This especially applies to the visual arts; you may perceive that such art comprises irrational attributes, such as people's hands being totally misplaced or details looking strange. It's like things don't always make sense, like the design is not obviously created by a human.

Something wrong here? You'll see how the road in the middle looks exaggeratedly big and wide compared to the rest of the infrastructure.

2. It's still highly recognizable

Throughout the internet, we can encounter photorealistic images of people and all that. Such creations are still highly recognizable. I'm not implying that that such creations look bad per se, but as they are recognizable and as you'll most likely know they're made by AI, I feel like they lose their value since little effort was put into creating them.

3. It brings inflation to content creation

As more and more content becomes AI-generated, it's losing its value since more and more marketers, content creators, and others are resorting to AI rendered visuals as a part of their content strategy. I like to call this "the AI inflation".

4. It's repetitive

I've noticed that in most cases, the work of generative AI is kind of repetitive as it mimics other, already existing content. The repetitiveness can especially be seen in the perspective and "camera angle" at which the art is placed. AI has a hard time perceiving perspectives, lightning, and dimensions correctly, making it a hard time to stand out, thus it's repetitive oftentimes.

If you pay attention to it, the dimensions and perspectives of the images are all more or less repetitive, as the point of view is placed in the front for most images. Furthermore, you'll see that the lightning effects are monotonous.

5. It lacks a personal touch

I've grown up in a culture where it's endorsed that working on something creative should always be done in the best practice and with plenty of time. During my academic years, I worked hard to deliver flawless writing and all, but then all of a sudden, Chat-GPT became mainstream. I think it changed the landscape forever when you could just create copy in a matter of minutes with the application.

Nevertheless, I'm not sure if these things can be speedran like that. Since the AI stuff is widely distributed nowadays, looks and feels repetitive, and is recognizable as AI, It may affect the personal input human made visual may contribute with.

Wait... Am I saying that generative AI is all junk?

No, I'm not implying that generative AI looks all bad. In fact, it looks pretty good most of the time. The challenge is that, as it becomes accessible for all and requires minimal effort to render, it's slowly losing its value as competitive content.

Final thoughts

AI art is all fine per se, and it has the potential to create astonishing visuals. However, this post intends to discuss how generative AI art may be affected when used in a marketing context.

I think that when the marketing landscape becomes filled with AI-rendered visuals, people eventually recognize it, resulting in it losing its value as quality content.