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 gene