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🤖 AI Inspo Photo 101 - How to handle client ai inspo images.

In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 266 - AI Inspo Photo 101, one of the top hot button topics we're seeing in not just the Sugar Cookie Marketing group, but all baking-related groups is AI.

Specifically, this podcast covers AI-generated inspo photos sent to the baker by their clients - a niche aspect of the ever-popular AI debate. So, whether you're pro or anti-AI, your customers sending you AI is quickly becoming a part of the job (78% of respondents in a group poll said they've received AI-inspo from clients).

There are a few things we wanted to cover about AI-Inspo. How to identify it, how to address it, and how to incorporate it all make for the better baker. If you don't like AI, you'd still stand to gain from this podcast since we cover the response when someone sends you an AI photo (also, how to handle it in your terms).

🖼️ How to Spot AI-Inspo Photos

As AI gets better, 🔍 it's getting harder and harder for even bakers to spot the nuances of artificial cookie images. So, before we talk about how to address them when you're emailed them from clients, let's talk about 8 ways you can kinda spot AI (they'll have to check a few of these boxes to pass as AI):

• 🤖 Impossibly smooth flooding: zero flood lines (especially on lettering), no slight orange-peel texture, no settling marks.
• 🤖 Gradients: seamless airbrushed-looking color fades across a whole cookie. Possible to recreate with Eddie - but a tell nonetheless.
• 🤖 Detail finer than most marker tips: Even the finest edible marker still has some thickness, and writing with it creates variable line thicknesses, too.
• 🤖 Lettering: Probably the biggest tell - when the lettering is too perfect with no pressure variations (ya gonna know when Corrie has pressure piped something)
• 🤖 Physics-defying details: Shadows are the biggest giveaways, but the detail work that just wouldn't exist naturally on a planet with gravity. That said - always look for the shadow issues.
• 🤖 Too many colors per set: Not saying it's impossible, but the average dozen cookies isn't going to have 32 colors. If a cookie has that many colors, it's either AI or baked for content.
• 🤖 Lighting/reflection discrepancies: Reflections too perfect? That's a tell. Lighting sources not having a natural gradient towards darkness? Another tell.

🖼️ How to Handle the Client

🗣️ You may be considering grabbing your soapbox to preach to your clients that AI is a job-destroying machine eating up creativity and spitting out audible pollution in residential neighborhoods while burning through the water supply due to the open-loop systems that cool the faceless computers, but now is not the time to chastise, dear baker. 

• 🤖 Validate, don't correct: "I DON'T ACCEPT AI IMAGES" would look like, "Oh wow - love this! What a cool concept. While this looks to be an AI-generated image, I think we can adapt it to real-life cookies. I appreciate you giving me your design direction." 
• 🤖 Translate render to real life: "I think we can adapt this floral into a piped flower that looks like example." This way, they know what's possible (and within your wheelhouse) and what won't make the final cut.
• 🤖 Email examples: "Here are a few similar sets I've done that match your theme here. We can adapt these to your inspo photo to design a really unique set." 
• 🤖 Agree before money: Add to your invoice - "Final design is based on the baker's quoted concept; online inspiration images may include AI-generated finishes that can't be 100% replicated." Don't just leave this hidden in your terms; bring it to their attention. 

🖼️ How to Use AI as a Tool

"I'll never use AI." Yes, you will, and you already do. It's frankly now baked into my car's infotainment screen when I navigate to the nearest Olive Garden. AI is everywhere, so how can you use it to your competitive advantage? 

1. 🤖 Use AI to brainstorm complex theme ideas (I think Corrie had a "spaghetti rodeo theme" the other day that AI helped out with). 
2. 🤖 Use AI to help you mix color palettes or scale a recipe (Corrie did this the other day at the local grocery store, Giant).
3. 🤖 Have AI help you with a copy outline - you go back in and write the content. 

✈️ Letting AI ride along with your business journey is a good strategy, but letting AI fly the plane is a recipe to crash and burn 🔥 (well, you'll kinda just be forgotten and blend into the word salad).