Island Businesses: Please Knock It Off With The Ai-Generated Advertisements

To the editor: An ad in the Current recently caught my eye and gave me the ick. It wasn’t because of the message behind it or its resonance, but because it was clearly created by generative artificial intelligence (AI). It came from a respectable Main Street business, so I would like to talk about it.

I don’t fault the Current. Their free content model necessitates ads to run and reach their millions of readers. They do us a critical public service of reporting at all hours of the day and night.

Nor am I anti-AI. I created and sold a business with a machine learning expert over a decade ago. I transparently and openly use machine learning to optimize my business. It’s remarkable. I use it for one express purpose: to free up more time and resources for the creative work that my associates and I can do.

For me, creative work is skilled usage of the spoken and written word with deep understanding of audience, as well as the arts of graphic design, color theory, photography, painting, illustration, and all manner of artistic mediums enjoyed by humans. It is also time and space for observation and the refinement of personal taste. The work is craft.

I have a stake in this, and I’ll say so plainly. I run a PR office based on Nantucket, which serves businesses in the sectors of trade, non-profit, hospitality, and art. But so does every islander who values what makes Nantucket feel genuine. When a business hands its creative voice to a generator, it may save a little time and money. What we lose as a community is proportionally far graver, and something harder to measure… Enough of those types of choices, and our shared audio visual culture starts to look like eerily polished _ _ _ _.

This summer we talked openly about what felt hollow in influencer culture, with international reverberations, and islander humor. AI-generated advertising deserves the same scrutiny. And we all know how much we enjoy proper critique here…

Before anyone plays the lack-of-budget hand, let me be clear: I would much rather see a simple handwritten or handmade ad than a synthetic one from a business that does not wish to allot resources for the arts. Though I can say, after serving five years on the Town’s Cultural Council, that arts and culture here desperately need patronage. This isn’t a pitch for my or anyone else’s services. It’s a call for preservation of place, and a desire to be a sustainable one that draws from and utilizes its own human’s resources to create content that is aesthetically pleasing.

By example, Nantucket used to have hundreds of beautiful, understated wooden houses here filled with natural fiber design. The kind that end up on Pinterest pages, and in dreams. I was recently in José Reyes’s original workshop admiring his basket-woven wall. These houses were priced for the creative class to live in. In my lifetime alone, many hundreds of them have been torn down and replaced with cheaply renovated and overpriced rentals, brimming with materials linked to PFAS and other carcinogens, which leach into our water, land, and air. Is it cheaper to build that way and maintain a short-term property than a long-term one? Absolutely. Does it support or sustain our culture or provide space for creatives like José to craft? No. It's the same trade of cheaper now, costlier to the culture later.

Nantucket has a skilled bench of year-round and seasonal photographers, craftspeople, artists, illustrators, writers, and graphic designers, both independent and agency-based. Many will work with specific budgets if asked. We also have many people here who value craft and provenance, and will patron businesses who choose to, over those who do not.

By all means, use AI to optimize your mundane spreadsheets, meeting recaps, and repetitive data sorting that are not fun for most people with a pulse. But please, let a human being handle creative work if you enjoy being in a creative world of lasting good taste. If you need further reason why, please see Shawn Smucker’s article, “Please use AI”.

Ava Rollins