SWIFT MUGSY

Say No to Clankers: Ditch AI

Literally anywhere you go, there are clankers offering you the “optimum AI experience”! There’s AI in your browsers, AI in your email, AI in your shopping, AI in your underwear drawer… and, no, that’s not an exaggeration. The problem is that AI is now so prevalent and ubiquitous that it seems utterly unavoidable.

But, here’s the problem that businesses are going to start running into more and more: people – buyers – are completely done with being sold to by clankers. There are entire vendor events that are being boycotted because the organizers used generative AI art for their flyers. People are tracking down and flagging AI-written books and patterns like bounty hunters. The conversation becomes more and more heated especially among the educated when the fact of destruction of rare books to train AI models comes up.

It is impossible to understate how much damage the entire AI industry is doing to our society. From the physical damage being done to the planet to states of “AI psychosis”, it’s becoming more and more obvious that there is only a very limited range of ethical applications of AI, and those aren’t even that great (yet).

If you’re going to stay ahead of the pack, you’ve got to align your marketing strategy with human-based creations. Period. End of statement.

We know what the appeal seems to be: it’s hard for especially small businesses to find it in their budget to pay for really good advertising images and copy. There’s a long list of companies we’ve known personally who have struggled with coming up with really compelling marketing, but turning to clankers isn’t a short-cut that should ever be taken because customers absolutely hate it.

Rejecting the Clankers

We’ve tracked several discussions over social media of late asking about how consumers and would-be buyers respond to AI generated work. In the board game community, the overwhelming consensus is, “Why would I want to buy and play a game that someone didn’t bother designing?” Event organizers auto-reject artists who use AI art or copy. Publishers are taking the same policy with books and stories.

Remember that everything that generative AI creates was trained on something that already exists, and that means that the more iterations of any particular work, the more it will resemble the original – which is why Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein gets flagged as AI by alleged AI detectors (not consistently, but enough to raise eyebrows). What it can’t do is create anything novel or original, it can only regurgitate what it’s already been fed.

Yes, even when it’s hallucinating.

There are two main responses when a human detects AI. The first is that they notice immediately that something is “slop”; this has been likened to the “uncanny valley” reaction, that uncomfortable feeling when something is not quite right. The second is when they realize after they’ve consumed the media that it’s fake, and then they feel betrayed. People want to believe that a kitten would snuggle up with a litter of puppies before the mother cat takes it back, but that’s not how it works.

When people feel betrayed, they reflexively blame the person who betrayed them, regardless of intention.

So, even if you thought you were saving some money up front by making a shiny new menu, it’s not going to do the job that marketing is meant to do: attract paying customers.

Why do we market?

Even if you’ve already poked around and tried to use a clanker once or twice, it’s (usually) never too late to go in the more authentic, human direction.

We (collectively) engage in marketing and advertising activities to create lots of reactions: we build communities, we tell stories, we create a sense of intimacy and trust with the public. You could be the very best marketer in the world and have your brand and name known throughout the land, but if no one is buying your product, you’re not engaging in commerce.

If you’ve seen our Portfolio recently, you’ll see that we created some email copy for a brand last year that really resonated strongly with their community. That company – Mysterious, LLC – has been aggressively against using any kind of AI generated anything to the point where they were called out when a generated image snuck into an email, but that wasn’t the fault of the author: Adobe failed to flag an image as slop. (It does that a lot, by the way.) The work that we do for them takes a lot longer to produce because it’s not just a matter of prompting and production: it’s discussion and drafts and pointing out errors and getting great ideas to make it better.

That’s going to show in the final product. It always shows in the final product – and in the first product, and in the iterations, and in the marketing, and in the copy, and in every single stage and facet of your business.

Toot-toot

Obviously, we’re ready and willing to help you with creating your marketing plans and schemes, and we specifically do not use any tools that rely on AI. I know, that sounds crazy in today’s age, but we might be positively anachronistic in our devotion to avoiding unwanted integrations. We only use open source software without any kind of cloud service required, and we even go so far as to protect our (and your) work by maintaining our own cloud server protected from scrapers and bots.

We recognized very early on that this AI thing was not at all what it was dressed up to be, perhaps because we were raised on a steady diet of science fiction that illustrated all the incredible ways this could go horribly wrong. The Butlerian Jihad from Dune, for instance, or the rogue AIs in Altered Carbon are two examples that come to mind immediately. Who knew that letting tech bros create the Torture Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel Don’t Make the Torture Nexus could go so wrong?

(If you really like that image up top, you can get it on a t-shirt. We have nothing to do with them, we just think they’re cool.)