If you are running a small business, I welcome your AI slop. I welcome it because it’s probably not as bad as what you were producing on your own before, and I appreciate that you are taking full advantage of the tools at your disposal. That’s right, unlike so many other nay-saying designers, I want you to go for it, and I’ll tell you why.
If there was a bell curve of quality in the design and marketing world before, AI has definitely raised the bar on the low end up to a very different level in the blink of an eye. Your grammar and sentence structure have improved, even if it is annoying. You are making a statement now, even if it does resemble your competitors. Your graphics may also look like everyone else’s, but they are no longer PowerPoints posing as advertisements or Canva templates fooling you into thinking you have branding. And you are pumping messaging out into the world at a speed and cost that you were not able to do a short time ago.
What I love about all of this is that it makes an even stronger case for trained designers. The bottom 30% of the design world just got a facelift, and now everyone on that end of the spectrum looks alike. I love what I’m seeing so much that I want to share three things you can do to elevate your AI game right now.
1. Don’t start by asking the AI for ideas.
Oh, it’s got them all right, but they come from the average of everything that’s out there. Instead, start by taking a few minutes to tell the bots about your customers, what they care about what your brand positioning is and how you are different from your competitors. Can’t you ask the AI to tell you? You sure can? And what you will get back will be average if you aren’t inputting your own data or information. This simple first step can go a really long way toward setting you apart from the pack, especially if your competition is using AI as well. If you develop a strong customer profile based on your own real data and experience, and upload that to your AI for reference on all of your products, you are going to get a very different result. You should only need to do this once if you save it to a referenceable file in your app.
2. If you have any branding whatsoever, please feed it to the robots before you start.
Young and inexperienced designers will ignore your branding and just start designing. So will the AI. Like the young designer, maybe the AI will grow up one day and learn about the historical significance and appropriateness of fonts. Maybe it will develop a more sophisticated understanding of color theory. Maybe it will develop a unique voice and tone that isn’t trained to be painfully average. Maybe it will stop using gradients to make every part of a layout look like it glows from within. But until the AI matures, you basically have a junior designer with a repetitive bag of tricks pumping out a signature brand of visual AI slop.
What you can do instead: Feed it some of your own fonts, colors, imagery and words, and ask it not to improvise on those. Brand managers monitor their vendors to ensure brand guidelines and brand positioning are properly implemented. Do that with both your junior designer and your AI designers. If they screw something up, make them fix it. Yes, I know business owners are impatient, and the rework is frustrating, especially when the AI drifts, but just remember how much faster and less expensive the AI is than a human, and take the time to do this.
3. Cut down on the crap (the AI slop).
The old rule of thumb in advertising was that you should ideally catch someone’s attention with 1 image and 7 words. I guess no one fed the AI any of the advertising textbooks. It will give you two headlines and several cute sayings for one flyer or ad. I’m going to need you to pick one. Yes, only one. Get rid of the others. Yes, all of them. Once you have picked one, the real challenge is – don’t repeat that one cute, little headline. Nope, not even small at the bottom. Nope, not in a cute starburst. Nope, not again near the phone number. Nope, definitely not as a callout in a different font. You get to use a headline once.
Once you have succeeded in picking your headline and giving the ad a slop haircut, keep going. Remove every single thing that is repeated on the page. Every line, every number, every bullet and every picture. See if you can focus on a single image and 7 words or fewer in a headline. Compare your initial draft with the revised version, and see if your message isn’t more clear, your brand doesn’t look more like your brand and the final product isn’t a little less obviously AI.
Follow these three rules, and it will set you apart from 99% of the AI slop that’s out there. And if you can afford a designer, please use one for new brands, new campaign designs or anything you want to stand out, because they, too, are using AI, but the AI in their hands is a very different tool. If you can not afford a designer, enjoy the speed and ease with which AI will allow you to generate your own materials, but don’t fool yourself into thinking this is going to differentiate you and improve your brand positioning. It’s just an easy button that will bring you up to average at best, and help you get more average into the world. And when there is more average in the world, we will be even more in demand.
Lara August is the Founder and CEO of Robot Creative, a marketing and branding company in San Antonio, Texas. She has worked with hundreds of small businesses over 30 years and consults, speaks and writes on marketing strategy, brand development and what it actually takes to build a brand that stands out.
