Ad Industry Improving AI Image Realism
Unhappy Lego fans recently accused the toy maker of using artificial intelligence to generate images of Ninja go characters on its website.
The pictures showed hallmarks of what has quickly become recognized as the AI aesthetic, including over saturated and dramatically lit images of characters with impossibly shiny faces and hair. One character even had an extra finger, turning its C-shaped grip into a claw. The AI-generated pictures were swiftly removed from the website.
“These images were used in a test, which happened outside of our usual approval processes, and we will take all necessary steps to ensure that it won’t happen again,” a Lego spokesperson said.
For commercial artists and advertisers, generative AI has the power to massively speed up the creative process and deliver personalized ads to customers on a large scale—something of a holy grail in the marketing world. But there’s a catch: Many images AI models generate feature cartoonish smoothness, telltale flaws or both.
Consumers are already turning against “the AI look,” so much so that an uncanny and cinematic Super Bowl ad for Christian charity He Gets Us was accused of being born from AI—even though a photographer created its images.
Creators, production studios and advertising agencies as a result are finding workarounds to make AI imagery more palatable to consumers. They’re using well-worn tools such as
Adobe’s Photoshop to add, rather than take out, imperfections; learning to write elaborate AI prompts to achieve the aesthetic they want; and collaborating with AI artists who have mastered specific styles.
A team effort
Some advertising executives see a time when the months long production schedules and expensive, labor-intensive photo and film shoots currently required to make some ads get replaced by a creative director and a computer running generative AI software. Right now, that isn’t the case.
Creatives are finding campaigns built on generative AI still require the expertise of scores of professionals, sometimes as many as for a campaign without AI. And to avoid that “AI look,” some marketing companies are working with talent not usually called upon in advertising circles.
Digital marketing agency Media.Monks in February introduced a roster of AI artists: animators, colorists, directors, photographers and other creatives who have mastered the art of AI generation and offer a distinct visual aesthetic. Media.Monks maps specifications of these aesthetics, such as the artists’ preferred color grading, lighting, saturation, signature camera angle and depth of field in a photo or film, as part of long, detailed, generative prompts, so the final product is highly stylized—and miles from the generic polish of AI.
Production studio Tool and
WPP agency Ogilvy have both designed systems for turning the brand assets of clients such as style guides and products into parameters, and using them to generate new work aligning with a brand’s aesthetic.
This method also generates imagery that reduces “hallucinations” such as extra fingers and weird-looking teeth that still haunt AI imagery, although it doesn’t get rid of them altogether, said Antonis Kocheilas, Ogilvy’s chief transformation officer.
For many creatives, the key to avoiding extra digits, unnaturally shiny hair and the overall jarring AI look is to also use tools developed long before the AI era.
“You may have to start with an AI prompt, but then you need to refine it, and you might even need to use some traditional tools like Photoshop to make it even better,” said Vaunn Yevo, a visual artist and designer who uses generative AI for commercial work. Yevo routinely uses standard editing software to add details like textured facial hair and skin pores to otherwise flawless generated imagery.
