Is AI slop adversely affecting your brand communication? Time to rethink

In some of our recent client review meetings, some marketing teams complained about one thing in one voice. Why are their ads not getting attention as before? Why are their social media handles not getting any organic growth? Even our leaflets and flyers seem like they have no life in their content? As a creative partner for the brand, we were bound to answer these questions, especially when we are handling these brands for more than a decade.

Usually, such meetings end up in an argument that it is because of the creative fatigue happening at the creative agency that the creatives have lost life. But nowadays, every creative agency strives hard to change their team working on a particular brand now and then to bring in new perspectives and freshness in the creatives. After due deliberation both the client and the creative agency found out the culprit, a relatively new one though. It was the AI slop creeping into every stage of the process of a creative output. From start to end of a creative output, AI is being used freely with very little input from human minds in the process of creating an advertisement, be it a flyer to be distributed to the end customer or an ad to be shared on social media or be it an outdoor advertisement or even video content.

AI Slop and AI fatigue

By definition, AI slop refers to substandard, algorithmically generated digital content that prioritizes volume over value, completely bypassing the human creativity and rigorous effort required for meaningful engagement. This results in content which is repetitive, layouts which are generic, use of fonts which are not aligned to the brand character, videos being generated only for click bites but doesn’t do any good to the brand communication and so on. Just look around and we can see the same looking ads coming out of competing brands and except for the logo we won’t see any difference.

A hiring ad of a company and its competitor looks the same, admission notice of every college looks the same and even the layouts and fonts used are all the same. This over use of AI in creating brand communication is affecting most of the smaller brands as they think it is cheaper to create ads using AI than entrusting it to some professionals in branding & advertising.  Already world over the complaints of AI fatigue is rising up.

Talk to the youth and they will all agree on this. Most of the youth do not like and actually hate the AI generated posts on their feed. The young generation love the raw look and genuine posts even if those images / videos are not perfect. It is the human intervention in a design that makes a creative output connect to the target audience rather than a purely AI made content. It is the little decisions of a human mind that defines the flow of information or the story telling on a good advertisement. AI has to be used as a tool to expand the imagination of a creative output but not as an end in itself.

AI is a wonderful tool in the hands of those who use it responsibly and judiciously

Artificial Intelligence tools are revolutionary and has changed our perceptions and is still rapidly evolving. Any new technology that gets popular through free of cost usage will create a hype and everyone who needs it or not, uses it just for the sake of curiosity. This happened in the use of AI in advertising too. Each individual in the process of a creative output started using AI tools without any application of their own human mind and its experiences.

Nobody would believe how much AI slop has creeped into each process in a creative output. It all starts from the discussion in the marketing department of a company. If an idea which is presented by the marketing head to the marketing team is just received from a single prompt given by him to an AI tool, the same must be in the hands of his competitor too.

The brief given to the creative agency is full of AI content which most of the times are hilarious, like ‘Kerala means lush greens, hornbill, rain, white elephant etc. Also, there will be a reference picture, of course created by AI.  And the worst part is that when the creative agency produces something which doesn’t look like the reference then the work gets rejected. So, the next time the creative agency will produce something similar to the AI reference picture they get as part of the brief. Now everyone is happy and this continues and within a short period all your brand communication looks sloppy and lifeless.

AI is a wonderful tool when it is used along with human review. Also, the one who uses the AI tool should have the necessary training to use such tools, especially in prompting. When you ask for just ‘a poster for Onam with this logo’, the AI tool will give you just that. When you know to prompt with all the necessities of a good creative ad like even font selection, layouts, imagery used, placement of the picture, alignment and importance of the content and so on AI would give you a better ad. It is as simple as that as we all know.

But the catch lies in the fact that for all these to be incorporated to a prompt, a person must be a genius in advertising, branding communication, copywriting and designing all at once. It is very rare to find such talents. That is why big brands are still having their creatives done by specialized creative companies. To use an AI tool to create a wonderful video ad one has to know the exact movement of the camera, lighting, positioning and such many criteria to be given as input to the AI tool. In short at every stage of a creative output there should be a review and application of human mind as to at what extend AI can be used or else the creative output will be the same you got yesterday and the same that your competitor is going to put out there tomorrow.

Recently I did an experiment with a new client. The client, which was a hospital, needed a script for a corporate video. We presented three scripts one of which was entirely written by a simple AI prompt and the other two were written from our own experiences and thoughts. The client had already heard a script from another company. The interesting part was that when we started presenting our AI created script it was exactly the same as the one presented by the earlier company, even the characters and the basic storyline was the same. The other two scripts were new and fresh in the perspective of the client. This doesn’t mean the use of AI in creating a script is bad but more thought process and human experiences have to be given as input to create a good script using AI, which again will be better in the hands of a professional in the given area.

Loyalty of a customer is earned only through genuineness in your Marketing or Brand communication. Especially in today’s world every country is creating its own laws to control the use of AI, to make its use available only in the hands of the people who can use it judiciously.

Genuineness is the key to connect to your customer

Remember that your brand connects to the customer only when they feel the genuineness in your communication. Your customer has grown from the early curious days of AI created content. Now even a 10-year-old kid can recognize an AI created content. The new IT laws and media laws also has put out strict rules regarding AI content in a brand promotion post. When you have to create a brand promotion ad and you have to state on it that it is AI content, then and there itself the ad has lost its genuineness. The youth may like to watch comedy / spoofs / jokes created using AI content, but definitely they are not going to get connected to a brand promotion ad if they feel it as weak in its genuineness. For brand custodians, navigating this sea of automated noise requires a renewed commitment to authentic human storytelling.

So where is the boundary?

As new rules are definitely going to control the passing of mis information through AI generated content it is safer if every AI generated content in a brand’s communication is reviewed by human minds. Using AI to create scenarios or non-human visuals does open doors of imagination for advertising designers. At the same time better avoid using AI tools to generate human images especially showing human faces. The reason to avoid human faces is that on one side it won’t come through as genuine communication for the viewer and on the other side there is every chance that some look alike person may sue the advertiser just because most AI tools create human faces from its huge collection of faces uploaded by the public. While creating a brief or communicating to your marketing team / creative agency just give your idea a thought using your own human intelligence and then give a precise or short brief to create your ads. Otherwise, your brand is going to suffer in the long run even without you recognizing that AI slop has crept into your brand communication. The ads become lifeless and the brand becomes lifeless in the minds of your customers.

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not in any way represent the views of exchange4media.com.