Imagine if you hired the same marketing firm as your competitor for your big new campaign. You'd never do that, right? ...Right?
Well, that's what everyone is doing with generative AI. The result is a new and frightening sameness. Why?
AI models are tuned to produce a peak. They are convergent in style and form. They will give the same ideas to everyone. And those ideas can change overnight at the whim of the frontier model companies.
In March, I wrote a piece on Medium with a number of samples of slop design that I had found over several months. Everything looked like that at the time. And then OpenAI updated the image model used by ChatGPT, and now everything looks like this. And who knows what the next image model change will make everyone's flyers and posters and promos look like.
The goal of any advertising campaign is to stand out enough to make an impression and then encourage someone to act — to vote for a candidate, attend an event, eat at a restaurant. But the very nature of AI-made "design" is the antithesis of that. AI "art" is never divergent, never imbued with emotion, never truly original. And people are inundated with the work of one "artist" in their feeds.
If you need originality and emotion and the ability to inspire trust in something or someone, that's a problem! And that's not to mention the embarrassing lack of quality control or the many, many other negative characteristics of generative AI imagery.
Large language models are simply unsuited for creative tasks and always will be. That's why I don't use them in my work.