The AI Content Performed the Worst

The companies building AI have already told us what they think of AI pictures. You just have to look at how they sell themselves.

Last September, OpenAI launched its first big brand campaign for ChatGPT, and every frame of it was shot on 35mm film. They hired directors, photographers and stylists, and they built real sets. They even said so in their own words: “Every frame was shot on film, shaped by directors, photographers, producers and many more masters of craft.” ChatGPT did have a role, but only in helping to plan the shot lists. It didn’t make a single picture.

That same month, Anthropic launched its first big campaign for Claude. It came from the agency Mother and was directed by Daniel Wolfe. And just last week, Apple, a company that builds AI into its own products, announced a launch with its 1977 rainbow logo, embroidered by hand by the artists Maricor and Maricar. The film they made shows the stitching itself, not just the finished logo.

I keep coming back to that. These companies have better access to the tools than anyone in the world, and when the work really mattered to them, they hired people.

There’s a reason for that, and it shows up in the numbers. Ipsos and Syracuse University studied 3,000 consumers in the US and found that human-made ads scored 14% higher than AI-generated ones on predicted short-term sales, and 17% higher on long-term brand health.

We’ve seen the same thing from the inside, with one of our own clients. They’re a big tech brand, and they brought AI into their content workflow earlier than most companies did. What I respect is that they also measured how it performed. When the results came back, the AI content had performed the worst of anything they’d put out.

So they reversed course. Today their imagery gets less retouching than we were doing for them before AI came along. Their answer to content that people didn’t trust was to make it more real: skin that looks like skin, and a product that looks like the one you actually hold in your hand. We make fewer passes on every image now.

You might expect a post-production studio to be worried about that, but we aren’t. Knowing what to leave alone has always been part of our job.

I want to be clear that I’m not against AI. We use it every day at Bespoke. We use it to build our own apps and to rethink how our workflows run, so they’re more efficient and more streamlined. It helps our team catch mistakes before they happen, and it takes some of the load off our production team. That’s where it has done the most for us, and most of it is work that nobody outside the studio ever sees.

But the picture people actually look at still has to come from somewhere real. The companies making the tools clearly know that, and our client learned it from their own numbers.

If you’re a photographer wondering where you fit in all of this, remember that the people who built these machines hired photographers for their own ads.

And if you’re a brand trying to decide where AI belongs, my advice is to put it where it saves you time and to keep it out of the images people judge you on. Then measure the results, because your audience will tell you.

So what does the future look like? I think we’re in a lull right now. Brands are still finding their way with AI, but it isn’t only about AI. The world feels unpredictable at the moment, and when it does, budgets tighten and creative work gets more cautious.

The people holding the budgets are saying the same thing. When the World Federation of Advertisers surveyed senior marketers last year, 93% of them said the geopolitical environment was less predictable than the year before, and about a third said it had compromised their creativity. One CMO described it plainly: brands “keep their heads down and just scramble to execute.”

That’s the quiet a lot of us have felt this year.

Still, I don’t think brands will end up replacing artists. I think the real opportunity is in reaching more audiences, ones that are smaller, more diverse and more specific, across more channels, and every one of them needs its own content. That means more work, not less. It’s slow right now, but once things settle I expect an explosion of it. The world just has to hold together long enough for brands to get there.

I think it will.

I’m curious where you think we are. Are we still in the lull, or are you already starting to see it turn?