Does Creativity Matter in a World Full of AI Content?
For a business owner trying to grow their brand on social media, it is easy to ask the “creative team”, which is likely just one person, to create helpful graphics for social media. This employee likely doesn’t do social media full time and therefore has other tasks to manage. The pressure from posting consistently and balancing their own everyday tasks can lead to the employee using AI tools. AI tools are a quick solution to speed up the process for developing graphics, captions, and other marketing content. Today anyone can write a prompt that will quickly satisfy their needs, but is the result truly effective?
Where does AI lack?
There are so many chat bot models, for example, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Copilot, that will generate whatever type of content you need. Have you ever been scrolling on Instagram or TikTok recently and seen a graphic or video that doesn’t look quite right? It is likely because the image is AI. AI has taken over the Internet, and it can generate an image of a person advertising a product that upon first glance looks great, but when you look closely, you realize that the person has 16 fingers and one ear! While AI does provide speed, the quality of the content is not up to par with genuinely created human content. Humans bring emotion, an authentic brand voice and a creative brain to the table.
Let’s Put This to the Test!
Using ChatGPT our team asked AI to generate a graphic advertising for MediaBrush Marketing’s launch of their new website and compared it to a graphic that a content creator at MediaBrush Marketing (MBM) designed. Can you tell which graphic was created by AI?
The prompt that we entered into ChatGPT was: “Generate a graphic for MediaBrush Marketing in Binghamton, New York, make it Instagram size 4:5, and make it about launching their new website”. The MBM designed graphic is simple, supports the brand theme and shares the message that MediaBrush Marketing has a new website and gives you the link alongside a peek at what it looks like. This design is straightforward, pleasing to look at and successfully communicates the announcement of the new website. On the other hand, the AI design does not use MBM’s correct brand colors or logo. Although the branding could have been provided to ChatGPT, the goal was to see whether the tool could accurately understand and represent MBM on its own. The AI graphic is also confusing and takes a long time to read because of the high volume of text on the graphic. Effective social media graphics should show the main idea visually, while the caption can provide added context and detail. When too much information is crowded into one graphic, users are more likely to scroll past it before understanding the message MediaBrush Marketing was trying to put out.
This test shows that while making the AI graphic took significantly less time, it is not media that would be successful online. In this competition, the graphic generated using human creativity wins!
AI as a Tool, not a Substitution
All of this to say, AI is not bad, and whether you think it is fortunate or unfortunate, it is not going away. This is why as marketers we have to take advantage of it and learn how to use it effectively. When using AI, write thoughtful and direct prompts to not leave any room for it to guess on its own. You can use AI to support the brainstorming process by helping to make outlines, suggest changes, show multiple variations of the same template, and more. Speed up your marketing process by having AI handle simple repetitive tasks that allow you to spend more time letting your creativity shine while telling your brand’s story.
Not sure where to start or tired of relying on AI for your graphics? Explore MediaBrush Marketing and see how MBM’s creative media services can elevate your business’s social media with clean, engaging and effective visuals.