When Chat GPT first popped in to my world I thought it was magic. I’m a creative person with a million ideas but I’m often bogged down in the admin of running creative businesses and find myself with less and less time to actually create. This was a tool that allowed me to outsource the boring stuff. I could feed it masses of data and ask it to summarise what would take me hours of research and learning, in seconds. The answer to my prayers.
I fed it information about my candle business, my youtube channels, I let it help me with SEO, titles, even (shamefully) copy for our online shop. The minutia of running e-commerce and the never-ending algorithmic changes of social media could be given to this robot and I could get on with the projects gathering dust at the bottom of my to-do list. We’d all been living in fear of this ‘AI’ future but, if this was it, it seemed pretty great to me!
Then came the posters.
I’m not sure when it happened, but didn’t it feel like overnight? One day I opened instagram to a sea of AI generated graphics. I wrote it off as a trend, like the snapchat filters. They all looked the same so it wouldn’t be long before people got bored. Not only did they not go away, they became videos.
Then came the data centres. I say that as if they hadn’t been there all along, but we didn’t know. The average consumer did not know. Suddenly there were people posting videos of looming warehouses on the edge of residential streets, there were statistics about water consumption and the impact on the environment. This was spun in to, ‘don’t say please and thank you to Chat GPT’. It seemed other-worldly.. unreal. Not real, in fact.
This is where I draw a parallel with smoking and sun beds - stick with me - Warning the public about health risks isn’t enough to stop them from participating in something they enjoy. A photo of diseased lungs on a cigarette packet never stopped a smoker lighting up. A sign outside a tanning shop, warning about the dangers of skin cancer, isn’t enough to stop them walking through the door. Threats to the environment have never been enough to trigger change in the average consumer.
We’re a vain species. I’ve always said, the photos on the cigarette packet should be cosmetic. ‘You will age X times faster if you Y’ would be far more effective that, ‘this could kill you.’ I’m not defending it, but that’s who we are. Humans care about how we are seen. This is why the biggest shift in AI consumption will be led by SHAME.
Don’t get me wrong, AI is booming. The number of people using it in their daily lives, let alone for work, is growing all the time. It’s far from dying a death.. but admitting you’re using AI is losing its appeal rapidly.
As with everything these days, you must be either for or against. There’s no room for grey. You’re team blue or team red and team blue must never befriend team red, lest you be ousted from your gang forever. As is also true, of this all or nothing modern mentality, this isn’t a reasonable stance. You cannot put the genie back in the bottle and so much of what we’ve used for years, is powered by some kind of AI.
As someone who enjoys learning new skills and is a creator at her core, a little bit of me dies every time I see AI ‘art’ being proudly displayed by a business. ‘Surely it’s not that hard to learn basic Canva’, I think to myself. But who am I to judge, when I did exactly the same thing with data analysis, anything relating to numbers, and even work (like copy) that I was entirely capable of doing myself.
Because I wasn’t using generative AI, I convinced myself that I was above it, but I’m not. It just so happens that my strengths lie in the visual, so I was never tempted to ask it to make me an image I knew I could make for myself. Someone with no creative spark is using this tool in the same way I was, to supplement natural talent and interest and streamline something that would have taken them a long time to produce.
I recently started a new business, yet to launch, and the fresh instagram feed I have over there has been eye opening. I have access to multiple accounts with different themes and I’ve interacted with different posts on each, intentionally curating the spaces. The accounts with business/creative themes are attracting SO many anti-AI posts. It feels like more than 50% of the feed is ‘if your event poster is AI, I’m not coming’ and artists showing literal cut and paste, mixed media signage, to combat the trend for computer generated everything.
On some accounts I see nothing about AI. My husband shows me a video at least once a day that he doesn’t know is AI. I have friends who use AI for everything and friends who wouldn’t know what Chat GPT was if you put it in front of them. In your own bubble, things feel very loud and you assume that everyone is hearing this same noise, but we’re living in totally different online worlds.
For me, the masses of, ‘I think less of you if you use AI’ had an immediate impact. Even as an individual, perception is important to me, but as a business? It’s everything. If your visuals flag as AI to customers who live in that same bubble, it’s over before it began. You may be safe with your regulars who don’t care much or aren’t chronically online, but you could be deterring a whole new audience with that first impression, in exchange for the time it would have taken to make your own image.
Once the public shaming is a mainstream message, I truly believe that that will be the downfall of generative AI. I have never known something turn so quickly on its heels as this. From, ‘everyone use AI, it’s fantastic.’ to ‘I was wrong, don’t use AI’ from the same creators. And, for the most part, it was because they didn’t want to be seen as people who used something that is being criticised en mass. It’s not altruistic, it’s not because they want to save the earth, it’s because they want to save themselves.
Once the visual trends started, I started to see the patterns in captions too. These posters all looked the same.. but then so did every infographic, every YouTube title, every listicle. There was a specific Chat GPT tone that was hard to ignore. I realised that every question I asked, it told me I was a genius. Nobody had every had such an amazing idea, I was sure to be a runaway success. It’s like a ever-positive magic 8 ball. You shout in to the void, ‘am I wrong’ and a voice bounces back, ‘NEVER’.
It’s not a helpful resource, it’s a useless sounding board that will always tell you what you want to hear. It’s an algorithm, just like every other platform, designed to keep you coming back, feeding it, helping it to learn from your every waking thought and question. The more we ask, the more it understands.. the scarier it becomes.
I’m not going to lie to you and pretend that one day I closed Chat GPT forever and never looked back. I didn’t. I still use it. It’s not going away and the use-case for data analysis just can’t be argued against. I can give it 10 years of data and it can instantly pick out what I need to know. Does that put me in team red or team blue? I don’t think either would claim me. I don’t like AI generated images. They are stealing work from real, human artists and they’re duping people who don’t know better. AI creative writing is equally terrible in every possible way, but grammar tools? graphic design software that helps smooth and polish human creations? There’s a lot of grey.
Here’s something that fills me with hope, in a world that feels like it’s being taken over by robots.
I am contacted multiple times a week by companies who have started AI apps that help you run a business. They’re looking for creators to promote these services. In the same way every sponsorship goes, they offer money for me to endorse something, lending my social capital for a moment, to convince you that this thing is worth your time and money.
AI cannot sell you something.
People buy from people. If AI was all powerful, why do they need me to convince you to use it?
I have noticed people arguing with AI creators in instagram comments recently, which is kind of hilarious. They’re marked as an ‘AI creator’ ,right next to their name, but I don’t think everyone spots that. These accounts are a little terrifying because they’re obviously trying to create something that does replace their need for us.. but they can’t.
There’s an uncanny valley element to anything computer generated that looks so close to human but isn’t. People will become more savvy, spot them more quickly and, as if influencer trust wasn’t already at an all time low, they will just cease to believe anything they see online, let alone be sold to.
The perception of AI is mostly negative, but the tools they offer are intoxicating. People look past the photo of the diseased lungs, to take out the cigarette, because it’s just too tempting. They know they shouldn’t but they put in the prompt and ask for the image because it’s just too easy. The only thing that will get in the way of that temptation is knowing that opening that box will make you uglier. People will see you differently, your image will be tarnished and all you have to do to rehabilitate it is STOP USING GENERATIVE AI.
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