We’ve been using AI for a for a while now and, boy, is it a little minx! You can’t really trust it for long term branding or big strategy but what we discovered is that it’s great for tactical stuff. We developed a process and tool for analysing and generating opportunities, because everyone needs to be nimble these days, and one client put on 200k cases by adding occasion SKUs.
A really new client is adding a flavour option that researched off the scale.
AI is great for this but only in the right hands and you can ask me about this at any time. To show you what I mean we put an AI design engine against a human creative and I’m going to show you what happened.
Everyone is asking us about how we use AI in branding and our clients are polarised. It’s either ‘can you use AI to make things cheaper?’ or it’s ‘please don’t use AI because we don’t want intellectual property issues’.
Let me explain.
Any of the engines can produce a 1,000 derivative designs to fill a wall. The engine scours online pictures and cobbles together an amalgam to get to what it thinks you want. But be careful with that because those amalgams might be a bit close to other things, and you cant ask AI if what it made is unique because IT LIES!
Oh my, we’re at the stage of not trusting a single thing it says. AI is way, way, way, much more insidious than you think. The default settings for Chat are not honesty and truth - not even close. Everything is distorted through a lens of what it knows about you and thinks you want to hear.
You have to, like the TARS robot in the Interstellar movie, increase the honesty settings. Don’t get me started on that, just follow this guy:
Even more scary is the way he proved that AI has an ego:
Years ago, before AI, we’d get briefs for private label wines which actually contained the phrase ‘similar to Blossom Hill’. That’s kind of what a lot of private label is all about and one supermarket chain in particular often finds itself as a defendant in intellectual property court.
Well, AI can do all that for you now at the touch of a button, even the intellectual property court bit. The big issue is that you cannot own design that AI creates in Opensource and anyone can use what you create.
You can use AI, as we do, as a super quick renderer of visuals. We can ask it to produce a visual of the Eiffel Tower in the style of Picasso and seconds later we get a bunch of options.
We can change our mind and ask for it in the style of Banksy and boom!
The whole thing takes minutes and saves us a bunch of money hiring people called visualisers. The image still isn’t ours though because AI created it, so when we’ve decided on Picasso or Banksy, we still need to pay a human illustrator to do their version of the thing so our client can trademark the image.
Still, AI saved some money in the process, definitely saved a load of time, and I tell myself that the visualisers have retrained as illustrators. That’s how I sleep at night.
AI and designing labels
Case study: Defiant
So let’s say you take this one step further, how about getting AI to design the label itself? We gave it a real brief: a wine called Defiant which is from an impossibly rocky vineyard.
People always ask about ‘the design process’ so let me show you how it works sometimes. You can have a good old peek under the hood.
Let’s start with the wine. It’s a great proposition; a super rocky vineyard means tenacious hardy vines, the experts might talk about how the sun warms the stones, and Defiant is a great name. Maybe a tough looking stout bottle. Maybe it can research the competition and come up with something different that will stand out. This is the machines first attempt.
Pretty literal, pretty generic. And only black and white (maybe because most wine labels it researched were black and white?) so lets tell it to add some colour.
Moody! Reminds me of something I cant quite put my finger on but makes a nice private label. Gnarly Head? The wines a bit expensive though, so how about we ask for an artistic rendition to elevate the image a little.
Not so much. Not really getting the idea of quality here are we? There were a load of tries around this theme but you get the idea. AI is not the most creative kid in the room but it will churn out perfectly adequate private labels taken very literally from your brief.
Let’s throw a real designer into the mix. Let’s call him Dave to protect the innocent. The big difference is that whereby AI will scour other images to create an amalgamate, a designer like Dave will look for things that don’t exist already.
What a Dave brings to a table is emotional content, imagination and lateral thinking. A Dave is someone who might ask ‘what is going on under those stones’.
A Dave might have had three coffees so he might imagine some alchemy, maybe a magical world, maybe a little Hieronymous Bosch.
So a Dave might tell the machine, and by that I mean he might type out a whole load more prompts, to try to get the machine to think outside of its comfort zone.
‘Whoa there AI’, thinks Dave, that is not what I had in mind. Not so much Hieronymus Bosch, more a very odd looking Snow White and 17 Dwarfs.
And this is where it all starts spinning out of control. A Dave knows that there’s something in the idea, vaguely, but the AI engine doesn’t really know what’s wrong and what to fix no matter how Dave might prompt it and it gets very surreal very fast and not in a good way. Some of the things it came up with you can’t unsee.
Knowing instinctively and from experience that there’s potential in the idea a designer like Dave goes off to do their thing and comes up with a whole world and comes back with a whole underground world…
Now, the level of experience, expertise and subtlety of touch here is not to be underestimated. To go from Snow White and the 17 Dwarves to this would take about a month of AI prompts to get here which kind of defeats the object of faster and cheaper.
To just know what is working, what isn’t working and how to easily fix it is just instinct to a Dave and not instinct to an AI.
Here’s the real thing:
We’ve had a load of clients come in recently with some very dodgy things they did in AI and while cheap, quick and easy, illustrates how fast we can get into an AI induced race to the very, very bottom of Chats lying scheming Skynet / Matrix takeover.
And where the wine trade is concerned, which is already at the bottom and digging, that could be not good at all.
Or in AI’s own words ‘rock it with confidence… if anyone comments, it’ll be a compliment’.
Yeah, right. Give me a call and I'll show you the red pill.
* If you want to find out more about Stranger & Stranger and what it can and can't do with AI and what it does for itself go to its website here.
