Jimmy Kim and a co-speaker discuss how AI-generated lifestyle images are flooding brand marketing. Perfect lighting and flawless skin are cheap to produce at scale, but social media users spot them instantly and call brands out. Nike faced backlash for an unedited AI caption, showing the reputational risk of relying on AI content.
One thing that I think about when I think about AI imagery, a little bit less on the product side, but is like the lifestyle scenes that I'm seeing now, right? They're generated happy family on a beach or like a woman doing yoga in the sunrise. Like we've all seen those before and they used to require like a real photo shoot, but now brands are generating 5 of them in just minutes for $0, right? And it shows the lighting's too perfect, the composition's too symmetrical, the skin tones are kind of flawless. Like you mentioned before, customers have been trained by social media almost to spot AI imagery. I don't know how much you're seeing this on social, but like if you post something that's AI, dude, there's so many comments that people are like calling people out right now, right away. And they're getting better at it every month, I'll admit that. But I think that all brands that are using it are aging themselves out of credibility ultimately.
You know, if anyone's gonna listen to this, Nike was an offender of this recently. They did like an AI caption or something, not even the image itself, but they did like an AI caption, no human editing. And dude, if you look at all the top comments, people were calling them out, and that actually is quite damaging. But to add kind of some nuance to what you're mentioning around like the AI imagery, I'm not gonna say AI imagery isn't entirely bad. Not all of it is bad. I do believe they're actually cases where it can work.
