Fuck Your AI Flyer.

I've been noticing what feels like an infinite loophole with businesses using AI: a business cannot afford a designer, so they use AI for their marketing and design materials, but then potentially lose business because of their use of and stance regarding AI. 

Generative media is quickly taking over everything from flyers and advertisements to Facebook posts, product photography, social media graphics, and even entire brand identities. It is genuinely scary how quickly businesses can lose their credibility and individuality due to poor time delegation, a lack of effort, and the assumption that AI is the next best solution.

A lot of business owners have understandable reasons for turning to it:

“We can't afford to pay a professional.”

“I wouldn't know how to do these things myself.”

“AI is faster and saves time. Running a business is already time-consuming.”

And while I can understand where all three of these arguments come from, I don't think they justify relying on AI for your business's identity and marketing. There are alternatives for all three, and sometimes those alternatives might require a little more time, effort, or creativity...

But isn't that part of building a business that's worth while?

Affording Professional Work

If you as a business owner cannot afford to outsource a designer, marketer, or content specialist, there are so many people entering these fields who are looking for opportunities to build their experience and portfolios.

Students, recent graduates, and newer freelancers are often navigating their pricing, client workflows, and portfolios. Many are willing to take on smaller projects or work within smaller budgets because they are still establishing themselves in the industry.

Of course, you should still respect someone's time and compensate them fairly. Because they're new, shouldn't mean they should work for free. But there is a huge difference between saying “I cannot afford professional work right now” and saying “there is no affordable human option.”

And if you genuinely have absolutely zero budget for professional help, there are still so many useful tools available, some free and some paid, to help with design-related projects.

Programs like Canva, PowerPoint, Adobe Express, and VistaCreate offer user-friendly templates for repeatable assets such as social media posts, stories, flyers, presentations, and other marketing materials. Some can even help you build a basic logo to begin with.

I completely understand wanting your business to look professional and well-established from the very beginning. But creating the bare bones yourself is not something to be embarrassed about. It is an honest way to grow your business and establish its identity until you can build enough of a budget to refine things later.

Your first flyer does not need to look like it belongs on a billboard. It just needs to look human; now more than ever.

Not Knowing HOW

Getting started can be overwhelming. I can empathize with that.

But starting or running a business means more than making a profit and selling a product or service. It also means figuring out what makes your business different from everyone else's; Your identity, your voice, your visuals, your communication, and the way you interact with your customers all contribute to that.

AI can produce something that looks professional, but looking professional and actually being distinctive from your competitors are two very different things. Generative AI is built from patterns learned from existing material, much of it created by and stolen from real humans. When you ask it to create a logo, advertisement, product image, or entire brand identity, the system is drawing from a digital filing cabinet of existing patterns, styles, colour palettes, imagery, and ideas. This opens a whole new can of worms regarding legality and ownership.

And that is where I think businesses can accidentally lose one of the most important parts of their identity: originality.

When your entire visual identity is being generated from patterns learned from an enormous hoard of existing creative work, it becomes much harder to argue that the result came from a genuinely individual creative process, even if you formulated a realllllly fleshed out prompt.

If you have no budget for professional help and want to build a loyal consumer base, sometimes you have to be willing to learn how to do some of these things yourself. That doesn't mean you suddenly need to become a graphic designer. Everyone starts somewhere. You can learn the basics.

There are countless YouTube tutorials showing you how to use Canva, PowerPoint, Adobe Express, Photoshop, Illustrator, and just about every other design program imaginable. You can learn how to make a simple social post, edit a photo, set up a flyer template, choose a readable typeface, or build a basic visual identity. And if even that isn't accessible to you yet, there is no shame in starting with what you have.

We have become so accustomed to having technology do things for us that we've forgotten how effective simple, physical communication can be; A handwritten sign in Sharpie on printer paper might not win a design award, but it can still communicate something incredibly valuable: a human being made this and is putting genuine effort behind what they're offering.

You made it, and that doesn't go unnoticed by consumers. Consumers value personal effort and authenticity, especially in a day and age where technology makes everything appear the same and seems to be everywhere we look. Sometimes an imperfect piece of communication feels more trustworthy than something polished but obviously generated.

This is also why I find it interesting when businesses publicly make a point of saying that their marketing, products, or imagery are human-made, or that they do not use generative AI. For some consumers, that statement isn't simply about ethics. It can also communicate something about the business's values, the effort they put into their work, and the kind of company they want to be.

When a business openly takes a stance on AI, it can absolutely divide consumers. Some people appreciate the transparency and human effort. Others don't consider AI use important at all. But either way, it becomes part of how that business is perceived. It's very rare when a business takes a stand against AI that they lose customers; displaying their stance against using AI usually attracts a larger supporting audience.

That is why I think this conversation is bigger than whether or not AI can make a nice-looking flyer.

If your business is willing to cut corners when it comes to authentic marketing and communication, what else are you willing to cut corners on when it comes to quality?

Not everything has to be perfect right away. Lay the foundation. Learn as you go. Improve it when you have the resources. 

Time Is Limited as a Business Owner

Business owners have to delegate their time carefully. I understand that as well.

When there is a limited budget for different areas of a business, that can mean one person suddenly becomes responsible for marketing, customer service, hiring, bookkeeping, social media, operations, and everything else that comes with keeping the doors open.

But I don't think “AI saves time” is as straightforward as it sounds.

You still have to figure out what you want it to create. You have to formulate a prompt, provide information about your business, upload logos or brand assets, explain your desired style, review what it produces, identify what's wrong, make revisions, generate more versions, choose one, potentially edit it again, and then prepare the final asset for wherever it needs to go.

At some point, you have to ask yourself: how much time did you actually save? You're saving time, but you're losing support from consumers too.

AI can absolutely make certain tasks faster. But faster does not automatically mean better, and it certainly doesn't mean more effective. AI is a very powerful tool, but it still can crumble under the pressure of too many or too little details, and algorithm-based confusion.

The time you spend trying to get a machine to understand your business could instead be spent learning how to make something yourself, finding an affordable template, creating a simple system you can reuse, or even just making something incredibly basic that feels personal to your customers.

This is where I think businesses sometimes miss the bigger picture; Not every business needs an expensive branding package. Not every small business needs a professional social media manager. Not every flyer needs to be billboard worthy.

But every business should care about how it communicates with the people supporting it.

Human authenticity means more to us now than ever as AI continues to develop in ways we could never have imagined. As more businesses turn to generated content, the businesses that put genuine human effort into what they create may become increasingly noticeable.

Maybe the goal shouldn't be to make your business look as polished as possible. Maybe it should be to make your business feel real.

Because putting in those extra moments of time and effort to show your customers that a human being actually cares about what they're building says something far more valuable than a perfectly generated advertisement ever could.

And if you're willing to cut corners when it comes to how you present your business, customers are allowed to wonder:

Where else are you willing to cut corners?