Go prompt yourself - Shawn's Sense with Shawn Loughlin

Now that we have that self-indulgent 20-year anniversary business behind us, we can return to our regularly-scheduled programming: me talking about that most cherished of television shows: Mad Men.

 

Mad Men, a show that tells the tales of New York advertising executives in the 1950s and 1960s, is always moving, from era to era as the gang works from campaign to campaign. It’s always a new product with new artwork and a new strategy, but one principle always remains the same: it’s all about standing out. Be it on a magazine or newspaper page, a billboard or a television ad, the goal of effective advertising is to stand apart from your competition.

 

It was with more than a snicker, but less than a full-on profanity-laden meltdown that Publisher Deb Sholdice and I scrolled through an e-mail from Huron County. “What’s happening on Ontario’s West Coast?” the e-mail asks. Well, let us tell you: A.I. posters.

 

One after another, the county told us (and this isn’t to take a shot at the county - whoever sent out that e-mail was simply aggregating what had been sent to them by area service clubs and organizations) about events, all spooky in nature for Halloween, and the posters looked exactly the same, all spit out by the same artificial intelligence programs that help make deeply uncreative people feel creative for the first time in their lives.

 

With the exception of one event at the Huron County Library itself, everything was made using A.I. To be clear, the same A.I. because, despite coming from different organizations and different parts of the county, they all looked exactly the same. Boring and lazy.

 

Sure, they get the information across and they likely don’t take a long time (I’ve yet to use that cursed technology and I don’t plan on doing it anytime soon - so I technically don’t know for sure, but I can assume), but they tell everyone that you don’t care enough to put in the time or the effort into properly marketing your event. A dashed-off robot poster, at least to me, readies me for a half-assed event run by people who don’t care. If they don’t care enough to communicate the details of their event to potential patrons in a singular and creative way, I would suggest that you should not expect that to change when it’s time for the actual event on offer.

 

This will be an awful time in history for visual design. There’s simply no way around it. Fake, cartoonish people all over, the same uninspiring fonts and style templates and tons of mistakes. Families are even using A.I. to touch up pictures of their loved ones to accompany their obituaries these days. I have to tell you, if my children gave a newspaper a picture of me that sullied my image with poor animation, done by a robot, I’d find a way to haunt them for the rest of their days.

 

If you want to stand out, hire an artist, a proper graphic designer, or try and create something yourself. That’s really the only way you can do it amid this deluge of A.I. slop. 

 

And that’s not even getting into institutions that base themselves in creativity using it. You want to encourage children to be creative, to be their best future selves and to realize their full potential? You don’t advertise to them with A.I. slop. You need to set a better example.

 

At the risk of self-identifying as a prime target in the inevitable robot uprising when it goes live - though it won’t have as cool of a name as SkyNet when it does because some idiot like Elon Musk is doing the naming, so it will be inherently more stupid to be sure - I urge people to try and get creative on their own, you might just find it rewarding.