Making Things Look Better Is Older Than AI
You pick the photo where you look good. You move the lamp before taking a picture of your product. You spend an unreasonable amount of time choosing a font because the first one makes your business look like it sells printer cartridges.
You care about the impression people get. Of course you do. You want them to see the value you see, and sometimes that takes a little help with the lighting.
Put an AI label on the image, and that same effort to make something look better can suddenly feel suspicious.
I find that strange, considering how much effort people have spent making things look better for a very, very long time.
A needle shop was already doing this centuries ago
One surviving advertisement comes from the Liu family's needle shop in Jinan, China, during the Northern Song dynasty, between 960 and 1127. Its bronze printing plate carries the shop's name, a white rabbit emblem and copy promoting the quality of its needles. Customers were told to recognize the rabbit outside the shop. The National Museum of China describes it as the earliest known advertisement featuring a trademark. National Museum of China
Somebody selling sewing needles had already thought about recognition, a quality claim and an image people would remember. The rabbit helped you find the shop and distinguish it from the others. The needles still had to work when you got home.
That example gives the argument a much longer history than fonts or Photoshop. It also helps explain why people bother with branding in the first place. A product can be useful and still need help getting noticed, understood and chosen.
The camera has always had help
Photography gets treated as a record of reality, even though somebody chooses what goes into the frame. The photographer adjusts the light and the angle, then moves the background because nobody wants the extension cable in the product shot.
And the editing started early. The Met documents manipulated photographs from the 1840s onward, including retouching, painting over images and combining separate photographs. People were doing this long before Photoshop gave them an undo button. The Met, Faking It
Look at Hollywood. Makeup, lighting, sets and CGI all help create the thing people see on screen. An actor can look extraordinary under those conditions and perfectly ordinary buying toothpaste. The audience understands that a film is a constructed experience.
Brands work on that impression too. The bottle in the ad gets better lighting than the bottle sitting next to your sink. The hotel room is photographed with the bed made and the curtains open. Nobody is asking the photographer to include the suitcase you will eventually leave on the floor.
There is nothing inherently dishonest about showing something at its best. Careful presentation can help people appreciate a value that a badly lit photo would completely miss.
AI makes the same impulse easier to act on
AI lets someone explore a setting, change a visual treatment or build an imagined scene with far less production work. More people can make something polished. They can try more versions. The desire behind it is familiar: make this look good enough that somebody pays attention.
That includes plenty of fake shit. A person can now manufacture a customer, a testimonial or an impressive result with very little effort. A generated product image can also promise a feature the actual product never had. The person publishing it is still responsible for the expectation it creates.
That responsibility existed with a camera and Photoshop too. AI makes the gap between a convincing image and an actual experience easier to manufacture.
Which is why authenticity matters more now. A beautiful image tells me less about the quality of a business when almost anybody can produce one. I want to know whether the product works, whether the person knows what they are talking about, and whether the experience matches the promise.
You can use the tools to give people a more attractive version of what you do, with the lighting and the font you wish everyday life came with.
When somebody buys it, meets you or works with you, they should recognize what made them interested in the first place.
