By Jadyn Buccilli
Staff Writer
Over fall break, I attended the annual Oktoberfest celebration in Historic Smithville, where they often have a variety of food stands and vendor tents. As usual, I had a great time, but I have unfortunately noticed that some of the vendors had begun using AI art on their advertisements and even their merchandise.
Luckily, the tables that I purchased items at did not use these obnoxious “works of art,” but I couldn’t help but notice how this use of artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly common.
The next day, I took a trip to New York City, and some of the street food vendors had menus that were all made with AI, and even posts from my former school district used these platforms to make Instagram posts for the school. It’s everywhere, and it’s infuriating.
It is much easier to tell that a graphic is made with AI or not than some may think. These products are often overstimulating. They use the same scribble font and have cartoonish elements that are simply unnerving.
The advertisements made with these features are not aesthetically pleasing, which is the point of graphics in the first place. I purposely avoid companies that implement these graphics. Not only are they aesthetically unappealing, but they show laziness on the behalf of the company.
I even noticed ads I get on YouTube are using AI, whether it is just a voice or sometimes even a badly animated video that is made using AI platforms.
I get especially upset about this because I am a publicist for one of the College’s organizations. I spend a minimum of 30 minutes and sometimes hours coming up with aesthetic social media posts, and it does not cost me a single penny.
Websites like Canva, Picsart and CapCut have non-premium versions that still have more than enough resources to make a decent advertisement. If you do not want to make an advertisement yourself, hire a publicist who will make a much better flyer or video advertisement than anything AI could make. Even a badly drawn picture on notebook paper is better than the “slop” I have been seeing recently.
Many of the AI advertisements I have been seeing are from smaller businesses, which is a shame because I believe in supporting small businesses when I get the chance to. However, not being a large corporation chain is not an excuse for using websites that are terrible for the environment to make an advertisement that doesn’t even look good.
This goes for large corporations as well, which certainly have the money to pay humans for their work. It makes it that much more infuriating because I am sure that the employees that work for these corporations are underpaid as well, yet there are still budget cuts that are being made.
There are prices to pay for being a business, and one of those prices is advertising. If you cannot afford the time to make your own advertisement or the money to pay a publicist, owning a business may not be for you.
My biggest fear is that this practice will become the norm and that actual hard work from humans will be lost. In a world where generative AI is taking over, whether we like it or not, we must continue to fight for human creativity whenever we can.
