Hello [local business owner]! I see that you've started posting new ads and menus on Facebook, Instagram and sometimes even outside your store on physical signs, and they're starting to look suspiciously oily, with this weird, caramelised art style. You, having employed artificial intelligence to make the ad, might think it looks great. You’re probably excited (as a struggling small business owner, I empathise!) that it cost you almost nothing. But I am here to tell you, no, to beg you, please stop.
Why? There are many reasons. Let's go through some!
Firstly, it shows that you'd rather prompt something into a machine than hire a local graphic designer, artist and/or photographer, which tells your potential customers that you don't give a shit about the community you're a part of. Or that you'd rather offload the cognitive effort of coming up with a new poster to a glorified autocorrect, instead of just coming up with something cute, simple and personal yourself. Even the corniest blackboard trivia, or small A4 sign taped to a window made using MS Word on a yellowing printer in the back office, is preferable to an AI-generated ad, because at least you made it.
Next, it shows to a huge and growing sector of your customer base that you don't care about any of AI's myriad of issues. People– the same people who you are hoping will buy your coffees or eat dinner at your tables--are now very aware of AI's dangers and downsides. Maybe they used to work in a job where their dipshit boss has laid people off thinking AI could replace them; maybe they or people they know live near a data centre and are being radicalised at the speed of light. Maybe they can just read the news. Whatever the cause of their opposition, every time you post an AI ad on your Instagram page you're actively telling those people you don't care about any of those very important things!
It feels almost quaint, then, to have to point out that every time you post an AI image of a burger or a t-shirt you're also essentially lying to your customers, because those images aren't fibbing like a stock photo of a kebab used to, they're not even real things. They may as well be unicorns. Have you ever seen an AI-generated sandwich on a poster before? It's a computer guessing what human food looks like, and its ghoulish inaccuracies manage to make them look worse than any actual sandwich could ever.
Then there are accuracy concerns! I saw this poster (not an ad, but still) below shared on my local subreddit the other day, and it blew my mind. Not only does it mention emergency instructions without actually providing them, but the phone number is wrong. If the business owner can't be bothered double-checking that a printed poster has the correct phone number, how can we trust or be expected to have any faith in anything else that business is selling?
Hawker shops dog wash poster
by u/Ill_Translator7545 in canberra
Finally, we come to the fact that AI-generated ads simply look like shit. Like, even if this was a genre popularised by human artists, it would still look like shit. Because these ads are made by machines, and machines cannot either think nor produce art. Everything looks the same no matter the prompt. Fonts are always spooky, food and products always have a sheen to them, there's always a weird thing going on in the background, every single thing about them just looks bad. AI ads are, if nothing else, just a terrible look for your business! You're undermining every cent you've spent on decor, fittings, fixtures and stock by using them!
The reason I'm pointing all this out is that I feel, in the most generous corner of my soul, that a lot of small businesses (like yours!) aren't using AI to make their ads with genuine malice in their heart. There's this fancy new tech that every email and social media platform and mainstream reporter has told you is world-changing, and you’re trying it out and saving money in the process. I can't hold that against you like I would, say, a cake shop refusing to make cakes for gay weddings. Those people are beyond saving.
But if you own the café down the road, or the pub that does pretty good schnitzels on a Tuesday night, and you otherwise do good things and have loyal customer bases and would, if we had a polite conversation about this, maybe agree that AI poses a massive threat to our economy, environment and collective cognitive abilities? And that even if you’re not personally endorsing any of the sector's ruinous politics and policies, you’re still sending a message of support to them by embracing the tech's usage, and that matters to a growing number of people?
I feel like you can be very gently persuaded that hey, we know things are rough right now, but you don't need to make them rougher for everyone by using this shit.
