In this solo podcast episode, the host critiques the rampant use of low‑quality AI‑generated images in marketing. He argues that instead of elevating brands, many marketers employ AI merely to speed up content creation, resulting in visuals that look cheap and betray a lack of effort. Drawing on human evolution’s honed pattern‑recognition abilities, he explains that audiences quickly spot the “waxy” skin, odd shadows, and lifeless eyes of AI‑generated faces, turning AI shortcuts into a brand liability. He likens today’s AI clipart to the cheap royalty‑free stock photos of the past and cites advertising legend Bill Bernbach to illustrate how poor advertising can swiftly expose a bad product—or, analogously, a lazy brand. The host contends that the perceived efficiency is an illusion: prompt‑engineering replaces skilled photography with a “microwave” solution, and psychology shows people judge quality by the worst element they notice. Ultimately, he warns that consistently using fake‑looking imagery may become a brand’s identity, urging listeners to reconsider their visual strategy, subscribe, share, and visit kexino.com for more insights.
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This is probably the first ever podcast episode you've heard that talks about AI in marketing, right? Okay, maybe not then. It seems to me that rather than use AI to make us and our brands better, whatever that means, we're using it to make us faster, even if our standards of quality take a dive. Nearly every AI-generated image that I see accompanying an article or a blog post or social media thread, whatever, just makes me want to projectile vomit. We spent decades teaching people to stop with the crap stock photography, you know, the man with the headset looking at you on the contact page, right? Or the woman sitting on her own laughing while eating a salad for some reason. And yet now we're churning this stuff out using AI without a care in the world. You know, over hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution, our brains have got really, really good at noticing things that don't seem quite right. Oh, look at that! Is that an innocent-looking log drifting up the river? No, it's a crocodile. You know, we had to learn this stuff to stop our species dying out, right? It's the same thing for human faces. We needed to read people's emotions in order to transact, to build social groups, communities, culture, tribes, etc., right? To read habit, happiness, fear, sadness, anger, and so on. You know, the brain is a fantastic piece of hardware at pattern recognition. Show someone enough AI-generated faces and they'll notice that sort of waxy-looking skin and the slightly wrong shadows and how the eyes look through you rather than at you, you know. We're actually educating our audience to recognize our shortcuts. I think we've reached the point where using AI-generated images for marketing purposes is now seen by audiences in the same way as when we used low-quality royalty-free images in the past. You know, since our audience is as fluent with AI as we are, in many cases they're thinking we're lazy by using AI images that clearly looked like AI images. So what does that say about our brand to our potential buyers? Bill Bernbach, the advertising guru He, he, he made a quote— well, he's quoted as saying something along the lines of, 'Nothing kills a bad product faster than good advertising.' Okay, it means that while poor products can linger in obscurity with little or no promotion for years, okay, excellent advertising will quickly expose their flaws and they'll disappear in a very short space of time. And I think this is the same way here, where nothing exposes lazy thinking faster than a sophisticated audience. The funny thing is, we're not actually being more efficient. We're just moving the effort from one place to another. Instead of finding the right photographer, for example, we're prompt engineering our way to mediocrity. It's like we're replacing a skilled chef with a very expensive microwave. Psychology tells us that people judge quality by the worst element that they notice, not the best. So our brilliant strategy gets undermined when it's paired with imagery that tells people, "Pff, we couldn't really be bothered." But perhaps the real question we need to ask ourselves isn't whether AI images look fake, but whether looking fake has become our brand. Thanks for listening. If you like what you heard, please pass it on. I'm not saying I'm right, I'm saying many out there are wrong. Please subscribe, share, comment, whatever works for you. Find out more at kexino.com. That's K-E-X-I-N-O. Hope to see you again here soon.