If you are involved with marketing in any way, you will have no doubt felt the pressure from beancounters the finance team (p.s. as a former accountant, I am allowed to poke fun at the purse string holders) to use AI to generate assets and save precious budget.
Rarely a day goes by without me seeing a new board-level executive to hit an arbitrary target to prove that AI is being embedded in operations.
In many cases, it makes sense and there is no doubt that AI can unlock productivity gains that enables impressive output.
But….. it is not always impressive. I wanted to share a personal AI facepalm that made me laugh, but also serves to show that it is just a tool and the real skill is in the hands of the operator. Blind faith in AI creative skills remains, in my humble opinion, bonkers and you must always apply the human brain to anything that you put into auto mode.
The background
This particular example requires a bit of a back story. In our household, we have a red VW Up car on loan from the grandparents for our two sons to drive. Whilst I am not generally one to name a car, the Up has become known as ‘The Red Peril’ in our household.
One of said sons sent me a message saying that he was thinking about pimping his ride and was joking about adding a spoiler.
It was the end of the day and I thought it would be amusing to mock up a massively pimped Red Peril to help him embrace his inner Essex self.
Cue a natural visit to the AI overlords.
Round One : ChatGPT
I confess that I didn’t spend long on this, so it is perhaps unfair to really criticise, but I uploaded the following photo and used a basic prompt (I was in a rush!) of ‘Add a huge rear spoiler, massive chrome wheels and paint a flame down the side‘:
ChatGPT’s brain whirred into action and, in extremely impressive time, generated its take of my vision of the pimped up Red Peril.
This is what it suggested:
Now, I will concede that the wheels, spoiler and flames are pretty much spot on and it was exactly the sort of ridiculous pimping that I had in mind, but even the least interested in cars will no doubt note that this car is neither red (making the ‘Red Peril’ moniker somewhat redundant) or a VW Up.
I did my best to contain my disappointment and politely pointed out that, ‘That is no longer a VW up!!‘.
It must have been having a bad day, as I didn’t get any of the polite chat that you often see. I was hoping for the classic, ‘My bad. You are right’ type conversation, but it simply went back into image generation mode and came up with the following improvement:
It was definitely an improvement, in as much as it is sort of like a VW Up, and there is no denying that the spoiler, wheels and flames are decent but who asked it to change the car to white? I admit that I didn’t specifically ask it to maintain the red colour but the filename that I upload was red_peril.jpg, so I foolishly just assumed that it would keep the car red.
Round Two : Claude
I have found, in recent months, that I am definite a Claude person rather than ChatGPT disciple. It is especially strong in certain areas, with coding being a particular strength, but I hadn’t really tested its creative skills in any real anger.
I was excited to see how it would compare.
I was then really encouraged by the conversation that it had whilst thinking (a feature that I always like as it fills you with confidence, but also helps to debug if it gets things wrong):
I love the banter. I felt as though I was going to have another great Claude v ChatGPT showdown and that my growing faith in Claude was going to be proven to be correct.
Its (sorry, like giving cars names – I will not personalise Claude as a personal friend) thinking is spot on, with logical comments along the way, and who cannot smile at the final sentence? Brilliant stuff.
So, was the Red Peril transformed into the beast that I had pictured in my brain? Was it a chariot that has never looked more committed to its own identity?
I would like to add a drum rolll. But will add some vertical space to create a sense of anticipation as I am sure you are looking forward to the perfectly pimped Red Peril and don’t want to spoil the great reveal….
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I am not sure where to start really 🙂
It is truly dreadful and I am reasonably sure that Peggy (my dog) would be able to do better if I gave her a few hours with a trackpad and an image editor.
How can the final output be so divorced from the excellent transcript that I added above?
Sigh. This contest most definitely goes to ChatGPT.
The perils of AI
I hope you may have detected that this blog post is intended as a bit of fun. Obviously, I could have had better results with better prompts and I am not suggesting that everything about AI is flawed.
But there is a serious point. I have actually seen people blindly pressing the ‘go’ button on AI asset creation and trusting it to get it right. That is lunacy, as it probably won’t get it right.
It is really important to remember that asset creation, in particular, is still in its infancy and the output so often fails to live up to the promise (I am thinking of you, Google Nano Banana Pro, amongst others).
Yes, it is cheap. Yes, it can do things on unprecedented scale. But cheap does not always work and there is a real risk of damage to the perception of your brand if you are pumping out ‘photos’ of six fingered models.
You pay peanuts – you get monkeys.
You will be pleased to know that the Red Peril has not been subjected to the Claude treatment.