Is AI costing you customers

The age of AI in Skagit Valley and how Buisness should respond.

stop, before you decide anything, both using and not using ai will indeed cost you customers, relationships, destroy or erode confidence in your customers and business. Counter to that, if you are t using it you are loosing out to out of city, state and even country competition who can leverage skills to become more professional in appearance.

We are living through a new internet age, a compeltly shake up of the old guard, the rules being re written. Companies that have existed for decades will be elapsed by newer, smaller groups and agencies. Ever more ever, a regular person has almost every resource at their finger tips. So how could it ever be bad to use ai with your business and do you even need it at all?

The quicker answer is yes and no…..ai has almost had the complete opposite effect compared to other industries, when it comes to creativity and ai, the people have spoken magnanimously in favor of not wanting it.

You’ve seen it everywhere, in billboard ads voice over commercials with fake celeberies, in movies, in the Super Bowl created by major companies. In video games, visual 2d art, anything ditifwl, web design, marketing, seo, graphic design, photography, videography, animation, copywriting, emailing. Recently, I’ve been seeing an extent excess of graphic design ads on instrageam and Facebook, from creators that used to make things and started utilizing ai in ways that angered people.

So where is it a bad idea to use ai? The better question is actually how much ai should be used in any of these processes. Id say a general rule is it almost never completly replaces the human element. If all you need to do is type in some prompts chances are people won’t connect, care or see the human elect in what you’ve made.

Websites: while ai can be used durring much of the process, I’d never encourage someone to utilize it for the entire site. Ai is great for getting 70-80% of the architecture down but the user experience and content must and needs to have a human element, after all you are trying to attract humans, not ai. A combination of using ai for copywriting, spell checking, best use practices for various parts like ai, marketing, page layout, file names for images, researching competition and getting a professional unbiased review of your work. Before ai, many of the website jobs where seperate, getting photos was a photographer, -graphics by a designer, the actual website itself designed by a web designer, the branding usually done by a designer of higher Possition, marketing for a variety of purposes including unfluwnfe over invinotry or apperance of the store front page and content. Seo search engine optimization done by a seperate team.

Graphic design/logo/imagrey. This is a big one and is what many are guilty of. Even with more custom prompts, ur not going to get the best results or even something that Inique. Design is a skill, a skill that takes years to grasp on. The elemts and principles of design are the framework, developing your own style and being able to adapt to others. Understanding a range of industry to even design for those people. Ai can be great for creating smaller graphics, or icons where doing it yourself takes too much effort. But, the layout needs and should be done by a person always. Seeing more and more ai graphics has had a somewhat opposite effect, people are so sick of it. It was bad enough when every company advertised to us, now it’s every person that 3ants to start a business and can click a couple prompts out to make a full page graphic. This is the type of stuff that kills a business. Quality always over quantity. Advertising is not the place to use ai ever. There are certainly exceptions, but for anyone in Skagit valley I can garuntee that people here want to see human made stuff. The fact that we are now over indsted with si content makes the actual skill of graphic design so much more valuable. The ability to make attractive advertisement or material that appeals more to a visual sense and has its own style means allot more people more then ever.

Image generating. This is almost the biggest no no out of the list, with an exception. Generating images from scratch for commercial or advertising use almost always backfires, especially if you’re not honest when you post it. Ai has a certain sheen and perfection that again fails to represent the human conditions and personality that we all value. However, editing photos with ai, perfectly fine and no one will know. Ai had the same effect on photography as any of the other skills, it flooded the market, the people realized hey this isn’t what i want.