It’s not often that I’m on social media, honestly the only time I am is usually work related, but in recent times I have noticed a disturbing trend. Most of the posts that I’m seeing these days ... are not real. 

What I mean by this is that I scroll and see obviously, or sometimes not so obvious, generated content like cooking videos, advertisements and artwork. What feels worse is that a lot of these are being created by businesses. 

This doesn’t just apply to the internet these days either. If you drive around the area, you’ll see advertisements and signs that are very clearly generated by AI.  

The way you can tell is that they all seem to follow the same format. They all use similar designs and faces for the characters being used, and the colors and layout for the words are clearly following a uniform aspect ratio that algorithmically is meant to be eye catching, which I can’t deny is eye catching. 

The problem for me is that by doing this you are actually losing the individuality that you can create for yourself and your business by creating it by hand. When everything is streamlined to be eye-catching, at some point nothing stands out anymore. 

Seeing all of this AI generated content almost gives the internet an uncanny feeling as I scroll through and can hardly find anything made by an actual human. 

What makes it worse is I know there are plenty of talented artists around the area that can do these projects but are now being ignored in favor of "the easy solution." 

To put it in perspective, imagine one of our local farmers at the farmers market selling their produce that they worked hard cultivating into a delicious product. Everyone loves to support local farmers and eat fresh fruit during the summer, right? 

Now imagine they set up their booth, and another person is also selling fruit right next to them, but the fruit is an edible version of the kind that your grandma decorates with. It’s close enough to look like the real thing, but if you actually take a closer look, or even a bite, you’ll realize there is something wrong. 

At first the local farmer might not have any trouble outselling the fake fruit salesman, but the problem is the faker is constantly improving their recipe. After enough time the fake fruit gets to the point where it’s close enough to the real thing that most people might turn a blind eye, while also being cheaper and guaranteed to be consistent in size and productivity. 

The farmer selling real fruit now faces a problem since the real fruit takes time and effort to grow and is sensitive to outside factors. At this pace if the farmer has a bad season, the fake farmer could claim their consumer base. 

This on one hand isn’t inherently bad since it could be argued that as long as people are getting fed — that’s what matters. On the other hand, it is directly harming the farmer who does the hard work to produce real fruit. 

Now let's relate this back to AI art and design. A person who is putting time and effort into creating something eye catching and unique is going to start being outpaced by those just generating the product.  

In the eyes of a business, it often doesn’t matter if a certain product is lesser quality; what matters is that it is getting out and making money. This directly eliminates the need to even hire a professional artist to create the work as any person with a computer can now create a product. 

I’m not saying all of this to fully demonize AI, for years there have been applications for this kind of technology that help make the artistic process smoother for artists. The problem is that the tool is being used to replace the individual, which I think is directly eliminating a specialized skillset. 

I think with all kinds of artwork, whether it be a full picture or even an advertisement, the most important aspect is to display a person’s individuality. This is not something that I’m seeing with the AI generated content. 

This is disappointing to me because I do believe that anyone is capable of being an artist if they try hard enough. Even if what you’re putting out isn’t necessarily great, it is at least something you created and can be proud of. 

Even if you aren’t confident in your artistic abilities, there are so many people you can find that do have that talent and would be willing to help you out. This applies to any creative endeavor whether it’s creating an advertisement, a webpage or a company mascot. 

At the end of the day, if we are going to advocate for supporting small businesses, I think that should include supporting local individuals like our artists.