Speaker 1: 0:00

Have you asked AI to create a graphic for you yet? Well, I have, and it's not as easy as a lot of folks say it is, but the technology is getting better by the day and there are many who think that it could replace graphic designers and photographers in the not-so-distant future. What do you think? Do you think we are on the precipice of asking AI to create whatever we are thinking in just a couple of clicks of a mouse? Are we seeing the end of the graphic designer To help me explore this topic today is my friend, brad Ball.

Speaker 1: 0:35

Brad is the co-founder of Ardent Creative, a full-service creative agency specializing in design, development and marketing. Although Brad is a successful entrepreneur, he's also an award-winning artist. For Brad, the two cannot be separated and with the advent of AI encroaching the creative industry, he has a few things to say. Let's dive in. Welcome to the Buzzworthy Marketing Show. Ah, there he is, brad Ball. He is in the house. Welcome to the show, thank you. Watch out Now. You got that fan. What's this fancy background? You've got here. You got the roar boy.

Speaker 2: 1:19

Alice, or what's what's going on here? No, it's just a graphic, it's my. I converted my movie room into my like my podcast recording room because it's quiet I can show things in the background if I want so nice, nice.

Speaker 1: 1:29

I remember, uh, the last time I was at your place seeing that, and um, now I have my new place and we're putting up. We don't have the big screen. We have a large oled screen, but our room is not quite as big as yours either, though, but we finally got it set up. We've actually watched some tv on there, um, but that's not what we're talking here to talk about. We're talking about ai encroaching and taking away brad ball's job as a graphic designer and creative, so we you and I were at an event in texas a couple weeks ago, and we were discussing you know, your take on it, and I don't want to muddy the waters. I want you to start our conversation off of like what you? What do you think about all of these people saying that AI is the death of graphic designers?

Speaker 2: 2:20

I mean, I think AI is a death to a lot of different things as it relates to our industry and graphic designers as a whole. If you are a production designer, then that's really going to encroach on what you're doing. If you're actually a creative designer that's using your mind to create these new ideas and new things, it's going to be much harder for AI to take a hold of that or replace you, and so I have a very different take on AI, because everybody's all in on AI, right?

Speaker 2: 2:49

And when people are zigging, you tend to zag. What are the things that people aren't doing? Everybody's throwing ads in Facebook. Well, if it's influx with ads, where's your audience actually at? Are there other avenues that would be cheaper for you to target? And it's the same thing with AI. You've got all these people going all in with it and I've seen a lot of mediocre AI content and you created. And that's where designers and creatives really can stand out, because you have that presentation, that creative aspect that you lose otherwise.

Speaker 1: 3:33

Yeah, I think that it's interesting that you see marketers screw everything up. That's one thing. You get technology, they're going to screw it up, right. I was just listening to a book on sales yesterday and they were talking about, like, the advent of the phone, and it's like marketers came and took over the phone and telemarketing, you know, and just like made that a horrible thing, right. And then it was email, and then email marketing became a horrible thing. We're all battling all of the spam, right?

Speaker 1: 4:00

Well, ai is the new of that, and I feel like we have a lot of marketers out there. I mean, I think the first one we saw was the people like hey, here's a hundred AI prompts, so I'll get you anything you want. It's just like you don't need the prompts, right, they're just they're just trying to monetize the technology, while while people don't know what it is. And I think that you really don't have that much of an adoption yet, and so I think that's why we're seeing so much of this happen. But you bring that really good point to the conversation is that it's the human element that will never be taken away, and that AI really is just a machine regurgitating information that has been given through the internet or your input, right. So where do you see in your industry and you're part of the industry where do you see AI really helping graphic? Good graphic designers, I should say leverage the technology.

Speaker 2: 5:02

I would say, I mean, we're not there yet, and a lot of the graphic design technologies.

Speaker 2: 5:06

you know, Adobe has some stuff, Canva has some stuff, but I mean, I would still say it's mediocre. I think some of the best things are the generative fill and Photoshop. Those can be really good. Same time, you can have some issues with it, and so you really still have to guide and navigate through these AI tools. But your big companies like Adobe, now Canva and even Getty Images is doing it as well. That's where these imagery tools are going to come in really handy in the future. But I don't think it's going to replace photographers, because to get the shot that you want, you still need to set it up and stage it properly, because you can prompt AI all you want, and I've tried it and tested it and 99% of the time it does not get the image I want, because I have a specific idea that I want to portray and it just doesn't get it.

Speaker 2: 5:55

Now, if it's more fantasy or theoretical, it can do that, because it's not as specific as what most marketing companies need, right. But tools like changing out clothes to different colors and things like that, using one image and enhancing it through a those capabilities are much closer now than they were a year ago.

Speaker 1: 6:15

Oh yeah, I've just used Prezi as the platform I use to create slide decks and it had AI, was able to take one of its themes and my bullet points and get about 60% of the slides at least the formats of the slides in Right, and then I spent the rest of the time putting in the images and stuff like that. And it's funny because it actually threw me down a rabbit hole because I wanted to get an image of just all yellow Camaros, right, and just like the whole parking lot of them, right. Could not find that, of course, and so I'm like I wonder if Wally or Dolly, whatever it's called the Chet GPT I started like can you give me an infinite parking lot of yellow Camaros, right? Made it happen. It was awesome, but if I got too detailed on what I wanted, it would hallucinate horribly. So I think I think you hit on the head, is like it's, it's getting there. If you're not too picky, you could get it to do some things. But like I wanted to have like Bumblebee transformer pop up in the next frame and he's like well, no, that's trademarked and I can't can't do anything with that.

Speaker 1: 7:24

So then I had to create, I had to go back and be a graphic designer for a second and create something that would go with what they had, uh, created. You know that the ai had created for me to make it seem fluid, right? Yeah, so I think that we I said I and I think that's always going to be a thing is like what? Like you said, the artistry is human and we're still working through, like the trademark and the um, intellectual property of creative, you know what? Who owns it? They just passed a law. I think the supreme court just passed a law says anything's created with ai is not copyrightable or trademarkable, right? And?

Speaker 2: 8:01

which is a whole other process as it relates to designers, because so I'm a big branding guy, right? If I can't trademark a brand, then what's the point? Right? And so I think there's some nuances to that that you can get around some of that. But, for me, AI is a tool to ideate, to come up with more ideas.

Speaker 2: 8:19

And so if I want to present a concept to a client using Midjourney or ChatGT-4 or Dolly and some of those tools are really good because I can portray a complex idea in a matter of minutes versus hey, I got to sketch all these things out and tell the story, those that ideation 3D modeling shading.

Speaker 2: 8:40

Those things make it a lot better. Now getting into the final product. That's where we're definitely not there yet. To support what you already have. It's great, and I can. As a graphic designer somebody that used to do press checks I can look at an image and be like, yeah, that's AI. You can tell pretty quickly Even some of the really realistic faces that you might see. There's always a detail, whether it's their hair or stuff like that, that it just doesn't get right, or hands and stuff like that. Oh yeah, and.

Speaker 1: 9:09

I actually kind of got myself in trouble.

Speaker 2: 9:11

the other day on social media Somebody posted an AI image and it was. The content was good, it was, but the image just it hurt. It was not a really good image, because you can tell it was AI it had text on it and it just it hurt.

Speaker 2: 9:24

It was not a really good image because you can tell it was AI. It had text on it and it just that's all I saw. And, as a graphic designer, when you see that it just explodes and pretty much everything else kind of becomes, the content becomes meaningless, right, because image is worth a thousand words, right, and so that's the caveat to why I think graphic designers at this point are okay. I'd say production designers have the biggest concern your VAs, people overseas. Because when you look at AI and if you've done any overseas development or we've done only a little bit because we had a hard time getting to the finish line they do a piece of it and what we've learned is you've got to do the front 20% and the left it's 20. When you sub it out, they can only do the middle part, and ai is very similar to that. You've got to really guide it, have that conversation. It produces something, but then you got to take that and turn it into the professional work that you really want to give to your customers oh, I love that.

Speaker 1: 10:23

Yeah, and you know, I was just. I had a friend of mine, justin. He that's. All he does is oversees VA work, right. And so when AI came on the scene, he's like I'm either getting in front of this or it's going to bury me, and he's been able to actually utilize AI to help leverage those VAs to do more faster, more efficient and all that good stuff. I think there is that efficiency, but like the demand of how many it will take, I think, is what you're talking about. Like you're, you're not going to have, you're not going to need me, you might only need three, when you used to need 10 VAs, right, it's much like copywriting.

Speaker 1: 11:01

You need one now versus five. Right and the copywriter is more of an editor than it is a copywriter now.

Speaker 2: 11:12

Yeah, and you still have to really edit some of the content to make sure it doesn't sound, you know, robotic.

Speaker 1: 11:14

Yeah, that's where the editing comes in, though, right.

Speaker 1: 11:17

A friend of mine, russ Ruffino. He was talking about the fact. He's like AI gives me step one. He was talking about the fact is, like AI gives me step one, which is don't have a blank sheet of paper or a blank screen in front of me as a copywriter.

Speaker 1: 11:31

And I think that in graphic design we get that way. I know that when we shoot, when Getty Images first came out, I would go there for ideation because it was better that that bank of creativity was better than going to the internet, to you know, google, and saying show me images of blah, blah, blah zebra's dancing in tutus or something like that, right, and it's like if I went to getty and I'm like, oh, there's an idea, oh, and I get that. And then I'm, I'm getting those ideas, inspiration, boom. There it goes. And as a um, as a uh, a project manager, it allowed me to say, hey, I like this style here, this style here, give it to my graphic designer.

Speaker 1: 12:08

I think we might see that here in the near future, and I think you were alluding to it as the fact that we could have clients actually do a chat with a AI bot. That's really kind of just doing a pre-production brief, right, like a creative brief, like what kind of styles do you like? And you could literally show them styles and go I like that one better. That's awesome. Do you like this type of font versus this font? And it's like build all this whole creative brief around it, right, and then put all the content that they need in there and all that stuff and then boom, there it is.

Speaker 2: 12:48

Now the graphic designer can just hit the ground running. We built out forms within our own internal systems where, when somebody fills out a questionnaire, it can actually spit out a full creative brief using AI technology, so then we don't have to redo it, which is pretty powerful. Those tools are what's really going to maximize our creative efforts, so we can actually focus on the things that we're hired to do, which is the creative things, the research and customer identification of who your ideal customer is. Chat GPT can understand and find all of that information without having us to spend days or hours trying to get that.

Speaker 2: 13:17

And so those are the cool possibilities, but as it relates to the creative mind, it's not going to replace that anytime soon, unless it becomes sentient and self-learning and feeling and all that which I guess that's the corner you never know? Yeah, I mean, you know Terminator time. I think that's what most people are scared of. Is that type of thing?

Speaker 2: 13:38

But, you know, have you been frustrated dealing with an AI chat bot because it just doesn't understand what you want or need? And, I think, at some point, the humanity. Even after COVID we all went remote right there's still an element of face-to-face humanity that people need and I don't think that's going to get replaced, especially as it relates to the creative thing, and even as I work on, I'm finishing up a book right now talking about the art of an entrepreneur, and it's about how we're all creative as people and as entrepreneurs, we tend to forget that point.

Speaker 2: 14:15

You know our vision. You know a lot of business owners are visionaries. Well, what is that? That's a creative mind, and the more you tap in that creative mind, the more ideas you have, the more focused to see the nuances of the business and how to grow it or navigate trials become more apparent because you're using that part of the brain, and so I don't see AI replacing that anytime soon.

Speaker 1: 14:38

I liken AI as a toddler, like a five-year-old toddler, with all of the knowledge of the world at its fingertips. Right, it can recall any fact, can do research in a blink of an eye the whole nine years, but it has no idea how the world works. Right, it doesn't understand fear. It doesn't understand want, envy, any of the human emotions. It can describe them for somebody because it can go out and say how do people describe emotion? Right, what emotions could come up in this type of situation? Right, this is all just regurgitating information and re that was what is it? Ml was long form transformer, lmts or something like that. It's like a transformer is actual in the acronym that describes AI. It's just transforming what's already there. Right, you have to tell it what reality is and it can tell you step by step on how to get something done, but it's not going to tell you well, this is how you should feel afterwards. Or dot dot dot. It can say most people feel this way. Right, it can only reference, it cannot create. I don't think.

Speaker 2: 15:52

Well, no, and what happens when it runs out of information? One of the reasons why it grew so much in the last several years was the opening of the internet to its database and database. You know, once we stop teaching it, does that mean it's at a ceiling, it's not going to learn and grow anymore unless it becomes self-learning. You know, those are the, the questions that you know. Not everybody's asking. It's like oh, it's ai. Uh, now the tools of images and processes, things like that, that we can utilize, those are going to get better and better. We ran across one we're playing with because we do development. It's called FlatLogic and basically you can go through much like a chat GPT and describe all the different pieces that you want, and the more detailed you get with it the better. But it will spit out web applications, not really websites in a matter of minutes.

Speaker 2: 16:45

And so yesterday we tested and it came up with 55,000 lines of code and it saved 380 hours of development time just while we were testing.

Speaker 1: 16:54

And it beta tested well.

Speaker 2: 16:56

Just from an initial look of navigating what it created, it was amazing and everything was there and obviously you have to have a developer go back through it, but 55,000 lines of code in a matter of minutes. And so those technologies are much more of a deal breaker.

Speaker 2: 17:13

And I think the big thing as we navigate this. In our industry there's a lot of smaller agencies. You know, in our industry there's a lot of smaller agencies, whether they deal with home services like plumbers or pest control companies, and they'll just do smaller websites. I see in the next two years, websites, as we know it, on that scale are going to all be built by AI.

Speaker 1: 17:34

So I have a friend who actually can build AI websites, and so it's. It's made for authors that you know. They they basically put their book into the system and it creates a whole sales funnel for the, for the author, and it does it in a couple minutes. It synthesizes the book, it and it creates copy all that good stuff for you and then it even does all the design and not holding yards and sets everything up to the point where it's like okay, where's your Stripe account? So when you sell, it's right there. It already does all the upsells, cross-sells, anything like that. You just put in the data and it does everything for you. And so now you can do a funnel, a book funnel, in five minutes, six minutes after you make it.

Speaker 1: 18:15

It's crazy and I think that you're going to have a lot of that. I think that CRMs are going to take that like high level or or anybody has a custom CRM. They're going to sit there and go hey, we're just going to have an AI be able to do landing pages, be able to do funnel pages, be able to even build out simple websites four page, five page websites for a painter or plumber or anything like that and it's going to be there and then it's going to be up to the marketer and the entrepreneur to come up with the uh competitive advantage of that said plumber right, because the ai can only synthesize what's already been out there.

Speaker 2: 18:50

You have to find out how you can be different, because you know better is not better, different is better well, and in our industry we're all in AI right, we're looking at it, we're using these tools, but, you said it earlier, not everybody's adopting it and, as it relates to a lot of the companies in these bigger companies, they're not going to use it, they're not going to know how to use it, and that's a really cool opportunity for agencies that are utilizing these tools. It should make you more efficient, more profitable, profitable and save you time because you understand and use these tools and then you can go and create products around utilizing these tools for your customers.

Speaker 1: 19:32

Right, oh yeah, A hundred percent, Like in. I mean, even if you'd look at like your trades, like you were saying, you know, using AI to do the simple things like get people into your schedule, right, how much, how cool would that be for some. You know what would take a person. Maybe five minutes can be done in split second, right.

Speaker 2: 19:53

Oh, when are you?

Speaker 1: 19:54

available. I'm available anytime tomorrow or the next three days between this, this and this. Okay, here, here are three. Pick one of these three times done and it's going to go and figure out what route you're on. As far as what they're already doing to maximize the gas consumption and time consumption, the people on the road and all the other things that the human can't, really doesn't have time to do, right? So these, these other efficiencies that go on top of that customer experience, that's going to get put into there. So what do you if somebody hasn't adopted AI for their business? And since we're on trades, let's talk about a trade any service-based business, right, it doesn't have to be a trade, but any people serving people. If they haven't already, where do you suggest small business owners start their AI journey?

Speaker 2: 20:44

The easiest answer and the simplest is chat GPT Okay.

Speaker 1: 20:49

And where should they start playing with it as it relates to their business?

Speaker 2: 20:55

I would say customer research, you know, identifying who your best customer is, because a lot of people just hey, we do this and they don't really know their ideal customer where they're at. And ChatGPT is a great place to start identifying that and building either its content or really navigating the structure behind who that ideal customer is. And that's the first place I would start, unless you've done it. And then there's steps after that of you know how can we bring AI into the content and to what we're doing, because a lot of these service based businesses, they're just out in the field and they're not doing a lot of marketing, and if they are, it's just Google ads. Well, how can you utilize AI to produce more content for your, your company, that you're not doing already? But good content? That's the hard part because it does take time, and so I'd say that's the first step as a tool would be using just ChazGPT, because it's the simplest, it's easiest, it's the most robust at this point and most widespread.