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Printing with AI: What You Need to Know About Designing Marketing Materials Using AI Art

We live in a time where printers are easy to come by and graphic design tools are becoming much more accessible to artists and non-designers alike. With the ubiquity of AI, the hype to create digital art is about to take a surge. But what does this mean for small business owners who want to try their hand at creating their own marketing materials?

As AI image generators scale up and get better at creating images, it’s only a matter of time before it becomes a household tool for marketing teams, particularly design and content. We talked to award-winning UX/UI expert and Digital Room, Inc. Creative Director Soo Chyun to help us paint a better picture of how businesses adopt AI. We also listed guidelines on how to customize print materials using artificial intelligence.

What is AI Art?

AI art refers to images generated by artificially intelligent software or machines. These AI image generators are programmed to learn from what already exists on the internet as well as the prompts human users request. They are built with algorithms capable of analyzing massive amounts of data including images and text to deliver results that are as close to the art that human intelligence can create as possible.

Believed to be the domain that stands to gain most from AI content generation, marketing inevitably takes the lead in the use of AI. In a benchmark study conducted by Influencer Marketing Hub, they found that 61.4% of respondents have used AI in marketing activities. In another research, consulting firm McKinsey & Company foresees that by 2023, about 70% of companies will have adopted AI technology in one way or another.

Guidelines in Using AI Art

AI has a long way to go in terms of creativity, something humans have become quite good at. While it’s true that more companies are adopting AI to forward their marketing campaigns, it remains important to understand the do’s and don’ts of designing marketing materials with ai art. It is a tool that humans should wield and regulate. Chyun summarizes the role of AI in marketing appropriately: “Design and art are based on human interpretation, which means making new things and breaking the rules. As it is now, AI only copies what’s given by humans and can’t go further than that.”

Get a better understanding of AI art generators. Take the time to read about your chosen tools as you explore their capabilities, limitations, and terms of use. You’ll find that AI companies in general dedicate a page, sometimes more, on their websites to explain how their tools should and shouldn’t be used, the features they’re currently developing, as well as a list of disclaimers. Educate yourself on how to safely use AI content generators especially if you’re looking into creating images for commercial use.

Use AI art generators for research. AI art generators are a lot like search engines where you type a query into a search box and then wait seconds for results. While Chyun believes that AI can’t go further than mimicking human intelligence (at least not yet), AI tools can be useful in making designers’ lives easier. “I see AI as good research material for designers, when they need more variations for their ideas or research certain elements that are hard to search from the stock photos. It will [also] help by using less low-level designers to do repetitive work; rather, AI will develop multiple variations to help [with] massive marketing material assets,” she explains.

AI image generators can help you brainstorm ideas on how to design logos, product images, and posters. AI, having read a huge chunk of the internet, can help you come up with new angles and visualize them with their built-in mockup tools.

Experiment with prompts and requests. It’s common for AI art generators to be programmed with various art styles that you can apply to images you’ll generate. Some companies also offer instructions on how to create prompts to achieve the most realistic and accurate results possible. Test a bunch of keywords and detailed descriptions when generating images or artwork ideas via AI tools. You can include elements like lighting, resolution, orientation, level of noise, and more.

Build your own concepts based on results you generate. You’re probably wondering if you can use AI-generated art for print on demand. The debate on whether using AI image generators is ethical is an ongoing one and it raises a caveat to anyone who wants to use AI tools especially for commercial purposes. As AI generators are great for brainstorming ideas, it’s not recommended to claim generated images as your own. You can, however, create original designs that are unique to your brand based on your research with AI.

Be mindful of bias and potentially sensitive and offensive images. In an article published by Slate, another controversy surrounding AI image generation is the alleged racial bias exhibited in image results. Heather Tal Murphy wrote about her experiment with a few image generators where she looked up photos of various couples. Murphy noticed that AI’s results primarily showed Caucasian people until she added the word “poor” into her search query — only then did the image generators deliver results that showed brown-skinned people. Bottomline: AI may have an extensive knowledge of the world after reading about it on the internet, but it isn’t perfect, and it requires human intelligence to identify potentially sensitive images.

AI Art Generators You Can Try Today

Fotor AI Generator. Fotor was founded in 2009 and started as an online photo editing software that grew bigger as they added more graphic design tools, pre-made templates, and royalty-free stock photos. In 2022, Fotor upped its game by launching its AI Image Generator, AI Background Remover, and AI Photo Enhancer. Fotor has a free three-day trial and offers two types of paid subscriptions, Fotor Pro and Fotor Pro+ which give access to a massive collection of templates, premium photos, fonts, and cloud storage.

NightCafe Studio. An AI image generator known for its Stable Diffusion App, NightCafe Studio uses text-to-image generation to execute their ideas in a range of presets like anime, oil painting, and CGI. All you need is your imagination, and the machine will do the rest. It’s perfect for when you want to visualize your ideas in specific art styles and take inspiration from generated samples. NightCafe Studio may be used for free using credits you can earn every day, but premium plans offer access to credits that never expire, advanced search, and more images you can generate.

Dall-E 2. Developed by OpenAI, the same company that gave us ChatGPT, Dall-E 2 can generate more realistic and accurate images better than its predecessor Dall-E 1. According to OpenAI, they launched Dall-E 2 with safety in mind so that it has limited ability to turn up images that demonstrate violence, hate, and explicit content. Use of Dall-E 2 is free — just sign up for an account on their website or use your ChatGPT login details.

Craiyon. Craiyon draws images based on text prompts for AI art within minutes. While Craiyon acknowledged that their machine is still learning, it helps when users are specific with their image requests so that they’re able to create better images. Craiyon’s free account gives you access to unlimited images, but they also offer premium subscriptions for those who want to gain early access to new features and want watermarks and ads removed from their images.

DeepAI. Like many other image generators, DeepAI relies on text prompts to create images, but it can also render your ideas in different art styles like Renaissance, street art, 3D, and more. DeepAI also allows for its images to be used commercially but since all the images are in public domain, you can’t truly own them. Using DeepAI is free, but they also disclosed that the resolution of images they can generate is limited which means they may not be ideal for printing.

Start Bringing AI Art to Life

Once you have created the desired output from any AI generators of your choice, you can easily print your designs on high-quality materials with PrintPlace. We offer a wide range of custom print services including:

All of which can be customized to meet your specific needs. Our user-friendly interface makes it easy to upload your designs, choose your preferred print options, and place your order. We use only the best materials and printing techniques to ensure that your marketing materials look professional and eye-catching. So whether you are promoting a new product, announcing an event, or simply looking to enhance your brand image, our printing services can help you achieve your goals.

To Print or Not to Print, You Can Use AI to Work for You

It seems no matter where you look, AI is being posed as something that’s going to put designers and writers out of work. But the truth is AI is still quite far from making creative decisions independent of human input. Chyun encourages designers to see AI for what it is — a tool — and not as a threat. “They need to meet mid-way. Designers and artists must understand that AI is here to aid their work, expand knowledge, and add more variations to create a rich portfolio and outcome. Companies must also realize that they simply cannot use AI to develop sensible, high-quality designs and art.” Whether you use AI art tools to generate images for print or digital, keep these guidelines in mind and remember who you are creating content for — your audience.