There’s this weird thing going on with Linkedin where it’s becoming more human. It still has the professional tilt but people are bringing more of themselves to the party every day (just check out nick power’s posts). I’m really enjoying that.

In other news, as of typing this I haven’t watched The Studio on Apple TV yet but I’ve been waiting for this one for a long time. And if you’re in the market for a waffle maker. This is the one!

I went online on Wednesday and was immediately under the impression that I was no longer employable. I didn’t actually do anything. In fact, it had nothing to do with me at all. OpenAI released their new image generation model and the internet was losing it.

My feeds were full of Studio Ghibli style images, historical ads retrofitted with someone else’s product, and mediocre direct response ads. I felt like a lunatic because everyone was celebrating and I was confused. I had to try it.

The prompt felt specific enough. I intentionally left out brand elements because I was curious what it would pull, and I’d made sure to double check my spelling. This is what it came up with:

My festival inspired podcast poster (taking orders now 😂)

Title? Nailed it.

Channels? Missing the Apple logo but solid.

Weekly podcast? It’s in there.

Guest list? Oh boy… this is where things got weird.

I checked my prompt and made sure I wasn’t missing anything. Nope, it was solid. No typos, no repeats, and no confusion. A few remakes later and it still didn’t get it right. Ok fine, everyone seemed to be creating photos and applying filters, so let’s try that.

Who’s this guy? Temu Dmitry?

That’s not me. It’s eery, but not me. What if we tried creating me in a Gorillaz style? This one wasn’t bad actually. Insane, but not bad.

…the future is coming on…

One more… let’s try to use Spider-Man #1 as inspiration.

Introducing Incredible Guy (ChatGPT named him) with typos and Spider-man’s boots

This one was odd. Notice the typos and repeat text plus the blatantly obvious use of Spider-Man’s trademarked glove and boots (I love you, Marvel, please don’t sue me!).

And then it all clicked for me. This is a huge step forward but it’s still not there.

So why are people freaking out?

They’re excited and rightfully so. On it’s own this technology is incredible! It can mimic pretty well (eventually great for brand consistency), it can generate real looking people (save money on photo shoots and stock), and those people actually look real with the appropriate amount of limbs and digits. This is massive.

Is the technology better? Absolutely!

Is the work good? Not really. Not in a brand context at least. Sure, the outputs look mostly clean and certain styles look beautiful—this is why you’re seeing Studio Ghibli everywhere—but right now it's just a bunch of copycat ads and generic content. Which if we’re being honest with ourselves is no different from the current crop of AI design we see everyday.

But go take a real look at all these posts claiming this is finally the moment. All of their examples are either plagiarized versions of old ads, a knock off of your favorite cartoon, or just generic direct response ads.

These ads will either get you sued or they’re going to blend in with everyone else doing the bare minimum and that’s because they’re not on brand. I’m not even talking about colors or typography here. I’m talking consistency. All of these graphics can only really be created once. Every next graphic is slightly different from the one before it and when you compare image 1 with image 5 they’re completely different from one another.

This is another version of the poster from above. At no point did I provide any creative direction. All I asked for was to fix the typos and this is where we ended up.

Another version of the poster that completely transformed on it’s own

Consistency matters. Brand matters.

Your brand is everything. It’s what builds trust with your customers. If you’re not showing up consistently in your branding and voice, you may break through once or twice but you’ll never be consistent enough in a customer’s life for them to recognize or remember you.

To get anything remotely close to on brand here you still need a brand, you still need copy, you still need a concept, and you still need creative direction.

You need to know what you want to get an output that remotely resembles something usable and if I've learned anything in almost 20 years in marketing it's that Marketers rarely know what they want. I’m not picking on Marketers but they’re the primary user here.

Creatives will use this to do busy work but they’re not going to be using it for real creative work. My concern is that Marketers will attempt to and only end up hurting their brands in the process.

Should Creatives use this?

You know me. I love AI. I use it daily. I make a living off of incorporating it into brands and their processes but this ain't it. Not yet.

I’ve gotten into a few debates this week about it with other Creative leaders and there are some really loud cheerleaders and their rationale makes sense (it’s primarily around speed). The thing that they’re not realizing is that within their prompts and use cases they have everything listed above—a brand, copy, a concept, and very specific creative direction. You can come up with some amazing work when that combination is available to you, but if you’re winging it like I was, it’s ugly.

But we should still try and drive the conversation about how to use it because when the technology does get there, we need to teach our teammates to use it for the busy work. Why? In a world where everyone has access to these tools, it’s your Creative—not your product—that is going to be the difference between your work and everyone else's. AI will write more and more code to commoditize products, it won’t come up with the strategies, campaigns, and real groundbreaking Creative that this kind of technology should free us up to do.

Curious what you all think on this one. Am I right or am I just resisting the future?

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