I work at a small business - very small. Before I was hired, it was fully a family (and one family friend) business. Recently my coworker asked me to find a new picture to use for the birthday cards that we send out every week to clients. A cursory google showed that the one we were using currently was, in fact, an adobe stock image being used without payment. Illegal, but in that kind of 'nobody cares and it's not like adobe is losing sleep over it' kinda way.
My searching found a few usable public domain images which I showed my coworker. Unconvinced, he waved our boss over, who gave the go-ahead to look at paid options. The website we tried to purchase one from was, unfortunately, broken. My coworker says, 'it's okay, I'll just generate something'.
So he did. A pile of green presents, but not quite right. Ribbons curl off of nothing, and edges of presents duplicate in a weird soup. The whole image is low-quality, and I had to painstakingly edit the gifts out of a background which included an unexplained, floating table-like slab beneath them. Eventually the new card graphic was complete, after about an hour and a half of work.
This whole thing felt so dumb to me for various reasons. Firstly, the business was objectively penny wise and pound foolish, considering they just paid me $25 to do something they could have bought off a website for $10 and received a better product. But also, that money could have gone to an artist. Instead, generative AI was used to make a subpar product that betrays its origins if you look at it for more than a millisecond. It makes the company look cheap. Not the kind of thing I'd want on my birthday card.
This is a death by a thousand cuts. Beyond obscene shovelings of venture capital into black holes like openAI, small and medium businesses use generative AI because they think it saves them money. They think it's a quick fix instead of having to drop money on a graphic artist or a designer or an illustrator, because it basically is - as long as you're okay with the result being heartless shit. I'll be printing out the new cards tomorrow, and I don't look forward to it. Every card sent will be a little admittance that we don't really care.