A canine accessories company has launched an advertisement generated by artificial intelligence. They claim it is not AI garbage because they put a lot of effort into making it realistic. For the public, this poses a problem: it is increasingly difficult to distinguish the authentic from the fake in advertising. Even if the visual result is good, knowing it is artificial generates immediate distrust.
Artificial realism as the new advertising standard 🤖
The technique used combines generative image models with manual adjustments in textures, lighting, and movement. The team invested hours refining details such as the shine of the fur or the shadow of the collar on the dog. However, no matter how polished the result, the process remains synthetic. Technology advances quickly, but transparency does not keep pace. The problem is not AI, but how its use is communicated.
The real dog and the fake collar: a digital soap opera 🐶
Now it turns out that even dog collars need a making-of to prove they are not a machine's dream. Soon we will see labels on ads like: this dog is real, the collar too, but the grass was generated by a neural network. And in the meantime, real dogs still don't understand why their owners take photos of them from twelve different angles. Ironies of progress: we sell realism, but what is lacking is honesty.