BillboardDesign.com & Wes Frick Design is no longer using AI imagery in advertising campaigns. Even though it can make highly detailed images that could work out well for the brief, it could potentially devastate a brand’s marketing campaign on social media. People are very divided by this issue.

We have decided to no longer use AI. We have banned the use of ai-generated imagery for all projects moving forward. We will be designing original content and/or using licensed imagery created by and paid to human artists and designers. There’s already so much real content that can be used, and we’ve designed thousands of billboards without it.

We’ve found that audiences overwhelmingly hate AI based on many paid ads on social using AI content. Many times, the true reactions are mostly angry, laughing, and sad reactions, with strong, heated words in the comments such as “If the ad uses AI, I’m not buying the product.”

To a lot of people, AI causes a strong negative feeling, and there’s many ethical concerns regarding copyright, artists not consenting for their artwork to be used in training, and people not being able to appreciate a piece that wasn’t created by hard work.

This type of response is not good for a marketing campaign. Audiences should be able to be entertained, connect with real images of food, images of real people, and images that aren’t problematic. We’ve seen a lot of people say “We never know what we’re looking at, if it’s real or not.”

Our position as a billboard design service is to provide maximum value, strategy, and experience to the campaigns. We have been using AI in the past, but we’re no longer investing in it. We’ve designed thousands of great billboards without the use of AI and we’re going to continue to get better, manually, and design billboards in an authentic way.

Insider’s Reaction: As, like a lot of our readers, we are still coming up to speed on artificial intelligence, so we asked this followup question.

Wes, can people tell the difference between AI and original content or is the reaction that they “learn” it is an AI image? If they can tell, do you have an example?

There are several ways to tell that I can dive into. Images of people will be slightly darker and strangely high resolution-looking, but when you zoom in they look weird. Here’s a grid that shows a few different images and what they look like.