Why AI-generated Visuals are weakening your brand

Greater cost efficiency through quickly creating of some AI visuals. Are you prepared to pay the price for this?

Let me tell you the plain truth: If you plaster your brand’s walls with AI-generated images, you are paying a high price for it. It has the potential to weaken your brand and negate years of investing into marketing and communication.

Please don’t water down your brand – here are the most important issues

Key facts about the AI-look problem:

• Overly exaggerated perfection leads to artificial look
• Incorrect details, like hands or faces
• Emotional weakness – the images appear superficial without humane depth
• Destroys identity due to interchangeable design – every brand looks and feels the same.
• Trust is deteriorating, as 70% of people do not trust companies to use AI technology responsibly.

Solutions?

• Rely on experts – art directors and designers are not expendable, but rather even more important for a consistent brand presentation
• Use AI as a tool for finding ideas and concepts, but as the actual solution.
• Stay true to the brands identity and corporate design by editing and reshaping AI results

Without refinement, retouching and well-thought-out prompts, you will most likely to end up with interchangeable, emotionless and artificial images that everybody else is using as well. We already had this problem with stock image photos in the 2000s. Now, since AI-generated images always come with this ai-ish look, the problem becomes even more critical.

How AI images can seriously damage your brand

Challenges for your brand’s identity

AI images used without professional supervision and creative retouching can undermine your brand identity. They rarely adhere to existing brand guidelines and appear incongruous. This gap between the output of AI image generators and your brands identity guidelines can lead to incongruities. And that ultimately leads to a less trustworthy brand, which must be avoided.

Typical drawbacks of AI images.

• Unrealistic perfection – AI-Images appear unnatural and artificial
• Incorrect details – the use of AI becomes noticeable due to common faults
• Lack of distinction – the typical AI-style is to be seen everywhere on the internet.

Wrongdoings such as these can undermine your brand language and lead to mistrust in your audience. Interestingly enough, many young people in 2024 considered AI artworks to be “embarrassing” according to a study.

Mistrust due to AI flaws

The flaws of ai-generated content not only influence the aesthetics of your brand, but also, even more importantly, the emotional connection with your clients.

• 70% of people who are acquainted with AI doubt that companies use this technology responsibly
• Even more people assume data policies to be violated through the use of AI

‘A real artwork’, created per hand with Photography and 3D rendering techniques made by Rüdiger Lauktien.

Why experts are unexpendable

Well, to make sure you don’t end up using imagery for your brand or products that unknowingly misrepresent your brand you’ll need the expertise of professionals. That still holds true in 2026 and beyond.

The role of an art director

An experienced art director is crucial if you are dealing with visual brand management. Yes AI-tools can deliver images quickly and cheaply but neither strategic design nor brand identity is something they understand. They just let the dice roll, but someone with experience in dice rolling is needed there. Someone with skills like these:

• Prompt accuracy – accomplishing the perfect result using the first prompt seems rather impossible.
• Emotional intelligence – understand the needs of the target group and being able to translate them into a concept.
• Strategic thinking – developing designs that reflect the brand’s core values.

The ability of humans to take determined and genuine decisions makes them unique. People approach their choices in a way that AI can never reproduce.

Professionals for post-production

One of the major key factors in attaining the best possible results in using AI images is a professional post-processing or image editing.

• Attaining a 100% realization of the desired concept by the use of image editing
• Precisely refining or redraftig typography
• High-end retouching according to brand guidelines and marketing standards
• Corrections of errors and reshaping of the image in accordance with the art directors instructions

Uniting human and AI know-how

Um die besten Ergebnisse zu erzielen, kombinieren Experten KI-Technologien mit menschlicher Kreativität. Dabei folgen sie einem klaren Prozess:

1. Kreative Impulse durch KI

Use AI image generators to come up with new ideas and establish a general direction for style and implementation.

2. Refinement by experts

• Adjustments in accordance with your brand language
• Retouching and post-processing
• Inclusion of taget group needs

3. Quality control and assurance

Have the results verified by a creative professional regarding technical and legal aspects and for compliance with the style guide.

Conclusion

This approach outlines how a creative process of developing high value visuals can be optimised an accelerated using AI as a tool without violating style guidelines or diluting your brand identity. When efficiency and creativity go hand in hand results will skyrocket and improve your value in the marketplace, rather than relying only on super-fast and cheap ai-tools without using your brainpower and skillset.