“I’ve got ChatGPT to do some designs for my wrap, and I’d like you to use them on my Van”.

“I’ve taken your design and run it through ChatGPT to see if it could be improved, and I like what it has produced”.

Not a day goes by without a few customers insisting that we use their designs from ChatGPT or similar.  These requests are getting more common by the week.

While it is exciting that we can see a wrap design in an instant, it is also concerning if you want a design that is unique and doesn’t feel like every other design that AI produces.

We have seen it in the way AI produces LinkedIn posts, sporting club posters and business promo flyers – you can smell it from a mile off, and it smells rotten!

First adopters of AI in any creative space look professional; they get comments on how engaging the post sounds or how professional the flyer looks.

A few weeks later, when everyone’s post, everyone’s flyer, or everyone’s van wrap has the same feel, it becomes a problem.

Researchers at Boston University have looked into this exact idea with 4 million artworks and 50,000 users over time, and what they found is that even artists themselves, who are trained to be creative, found that the more they used AI, the lower their creativity fell, both in terms of the ideas they were expressing and, visually, the styles in which they were expressing them.

Excerpted from “Generative AI, Human Creativity, and Art.” Eric Zhou and Dokyun Lee. Boston University Questrom School of Business.

 

A flyer or social post is here one day, gone the next, but it still has a reputational impact on those who use AI to produce them.

Van wrap design is a little more personal and long-lasting! What happens when, in a few months, you start seeing a lot of vans on the road that have the same general feel? You become invisible!

When a van wrap design, like anything that is creative, is new, interesting, or different, it attracts attention and retention. If it’s not, then it just becomes like wallpaper, a sideshow that nobody notices.

There is another issue that is unique to the AI design of van wraps. It is nearly impossible to transfer the visual design into files that can be printed for a wrap.
Wraps are printed from high-resolution vector files and high-resolution pixel files, and AI only produces low-resolution files at this stage.

When asking ChatGPT about the source files and whether it can create vector files, you will find out that it cannot.

The source files don’t exist; AI has created something from everything that is out there. It is unique to an extent, but it does have that familiar ring of everything else, kind of like a knock-off brand in the supermarket – side by side, they are different from the original, but without the original nearby, it still gives the same vibe.

Vector files still need to be manually created from the AI image, and that’s a lot of work to get them looking the same.

When a customer runs our design through AI, you can guarantee that AI is removing anything that is new, interesting, or different, as that is what AI does: it asks itself “what should a plumbing van wrap look like?” And then proceeds to look at every plumbing van on the internet and produce the average of everything it finds.

That’s ok if you are running an average plumbing company, but if you want your van to attract customers and grow your business, then it isn’t for you.

Maybe this is just a season, and we will get through it once everyone realizes that AI design has its limitations. Those who know it now will have a head start on the rest with the advantages of unique design.

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