Intro

Let’s talk about the importance of a comprehensive website project brief. We all know that a business’s online presence is of hugely important for success and growth. To keep your website competitive and relevant, website updates and enhancements play a crucial role in attracting and retaining customers. Your website is a significant investment and needs to be treated as the valuable asset that it is. A neglected website is like buying an expensive car and never servicing it, it will run ok for a while, then it’s performance will start deteriorating and if ignored, the cost of major fixes could end up costing a significant amount of money.

It’s important to maintain your website in relation to technical improvements, content updates, as well as keep up to date with software updates, theme files & plugins (WordPress). This will keep your website running efficiently and send signals to search engines that your website is healthy and meeting algorithm standards, which helps rankings. When you need website updates, all these factors must be taken into account by your web developer. Therefore, clients must understand the significance of creating a comprehensive project brief that provides clear instructions regarding goals and requirements.

The Comprehensive Website Project Brief

1. Alignment of Goals: A project brief acts as a guide that ensures that both yourself and your web developer are on the same page when it comes to your goals. Web developers have a lot of skills, but being a mind reader isn’t one of them. By clearly articulating the desired outcomes, a brief ensures that everyone involved is on the same page from the get-go.
2. Efficient Communication: We all communicate in our own way and most of us assume that we have articulated our thoughts clear enough for anyone to understand. A project brief allows for detailed and seamless flow of information, reducing the risk of misunderstandings, errors and frustrations.
3. Time and Cost Efficiency: A comprehensive project brief saves time and resources by eliminating the need for frequent revisions and iterations. Back and forth emails and phone calls take up a lot of time and a project can drag out when requests, feedback and instructions are not actioned quickly.

8 Steps To Create A Comprehensive Website Project Brief

Step 1: Define Project Objectives

Clearly articulate the goals of the website update and enhancement project. Will you require content updates, site structure changes, new pages, addition of new functionality, design changes, information for customers to download? Being able to clearly define what the final look and operation of the website should look like helps the developer review, analyse the requirements and action and/or make recommendations for better/alternative options available. These could be around: improving the user experience, increasing conversions, or enhance visual aesthetics. Defining the project also helps Identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will measure the success of the project.

Step 2: Identify Target Audience

To better design changes in your website, it is important to understand your target audience and their needs. Designing and providing updates to your website should consider demographics, user preferences, and behaviours to tailor the website update to suit your audience. This will help in designing an engaging user experience and optimising conversion rates.

Step 3: Evaluate Current Website

An evaluation of your website is to go through page by page and look at what is working and what isn’t. This could be design elements, accessibility, the flow of clicks to reach the desired information or CTA (call to action). What are the site’s strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement. You could also compare your site to an impressive site of a competitor and see what you like and would like to add to your own site. Also, analyse the user data in Google Analytics, Google Search Console, user feedback, and customer support inquiries, to gain insights into pain points and areas that require enhancement.

Step 4: Define Functional Requirements

Specify the features and functionalities that are essential for the website update and enhancement. This may include content management systems (CMS), e-commerce capabilities, support chat, integration with third-party tools like a newsletter program, popups, mobile responsiveness, and search engine optimisation (SEO) requirements.

Step 5: Design And Visual Enhancements

Outline the desired visual improvements, branding elements, colour schemes, and overall design direction. Providing branding assets in ready to publish formats saves a lot of time! Having a document on hand for your web developer including HEX colours, fonts etc, essentially a style guide or branding strategy document. Provide examples of designs you like or reference to websites with design components you like will help the development team understand your aesthetic preferences.

Step 6: Content Strategy

The content strategy is one of the most overlooked components of a website build or enhancement. When evaluating each page of your site and determining what the updates will be, write draft content for each section or page. This will help in the design/layout of the section/page as the amount of content has a significant impact on the design/layout. Content can always be updated later. If writing is not your strong suit, ask your developer about provision of SEO ready copywriting which includes your target keywords and is written with your goals in mind. Providing tone of voice and key messaging guidelines will help the copywriter nail the content to resonate with your target audience.

Step 7: Timeline And Budget

Be clear and realistic about the timeline and budget of the project. Timeline will be agreed to with the developer as they will have a better idea of how long the project will take and may have other projects on the go which impacts delivery. When you submit a clear brief this will be the basis of how a quote is provided by your developer. For a new build, your developer will prepare a SOW (scope of works) which outlines the projects technical, design, content, testing and delivery milestones which your developer follows to the letter. This information also helps the development team in planning and managing resources effectively.

Step 8: Review And Feedback Process

This is vital! A new build can be build on a development site and not be live till finalised and approved. Updating a site and adding functionality requires either putting the site into maintenance mode whilst changes are bing made, or duplicating the page and making all changes and testing, sharing for approval and then overwrite the existing page. Either way, determining how to review and provide feedback ensures a smooth process. Using project management software is ideal where there is room for file uploads, a review & feedback process where sign-off is provided to escalade the task to the next level in the project journey. This allows developers to establish milestones, provide guidelines for feedback, and designate responsibilities to the development team AND the client.

What Can Go Wrong When There’s No Brief Or The Content Is Drip-Fed To Your Designer Or Developer?

Miscommunication & Misinterpretation

Without a comprehensive project brief, there’s always a risk of miscommunication and misinterpretation of requirements. Remember what I said earlier about not being mind-readers? Drip-feeding content or instructions to the designer or developer leads to fragmented information, which may be clear in your mind as they were your initial thoughts that you are familiar with. However, this makes it difficult for your developer to grasp the big picture. This can result in a mismatch between what you expect and what is delivered. This can lead to frustration and ill-feelings between you and the developer.

Messy Workflow

Drip-feeding content and instructions disrupts the workflow of designers and developers. Especially if they didn’t build your site and aren’t aware of the details the original developer had about the design and build process. Chopping and changing and constantly backtracking, reworking, or make significant changes to accommodate new information that was not previously communicated. No one is happy in this situation and the developer ultimately takes the flack.

Lack Of Focus And Direction

When content and instructions are not provided all together or in a structured way, designers and developers may struggle to prioritise tasks effectively. They may spend excessive time on less critical elements or overlook essential aspects, leading to a subpar final product.

Increased Revisions

Without a project brief and in the absence of clear instructions multiple rounds of iterations and revisions happen often. You may realise that the initial deliverables do not align with your expectations, resulting in a prolonged and frustrating development process. This can strain the client-developer relationship and potentially increase project costs.

Budget And Timeline Overruns

Drip-feeding content and instructions can significantly impact project timelines and budgets. Imagine you are given the task of cooking a 3 course meal but the recipe is only given to you one step at a time and not always in the correct order. The ideal process is to have all the ingredients, utensils needed and the recipe in front of you so you can review, absorb, understand and then design the order in which you tackle each stage of the cook. Seeing the big picture is important!

Quality Compromises

Without a comprehensive brief, designers and developers may have to make assumptions or guesswork to fill in the gaps (and sometimes guess wrong). This can result in a final product that does not meet the your expectations or align with your brand image. The lack of clarity may also lead to functional or usability issues, which could have a negative impact on user experience.

By providing a clear vision and direction, you can enable your designers and developers to deliver exceptional results that align with your business objectives.

Be kind to your developer.

What’s New & Thought Provoking?

Keep up to date with what’s happening in digital marketing & get in touch to learn what we can do to help you achieve your business goals.

Interested in expanding your knowledge? Read this interesting blog post, about affordable website design.

I'll start with #notallemployers as there are some great ones out there, however.........

In the cutthroat world of marketing, aspiring professionals often find themselves on the receiving end of an insidious practice that has become all too common: employers advertising marketing roles and then demanding applicants to develop strategies and plans using the company's brand as part of the interview process.

This unethical and downright dishonest approach not only devalues the skills and time of talented marketers, but it perpetuates a cycle of exploitation that needs to be urgently addressed and dealt with.

Theft by another name

Imagine pouring hours of creativity, research, and expertise into a marketing assignment that was one of many hoops you have to jump through to make it through sometimes three rounds of interviews, only to be met with radio silence from the company once it's submitted. And to add insult to injury, many of these companies shamelessly use the ideas and work created by the hopeful applicants without giving them proper compensation or even a simple acknowledgment. It's outright thievery and needs to be exposed and eradicated from the industry.

Where's the damn respect?

This predatory practice reveals a fundamental lack of respect for marketing professionals and their craft. By soliciting unpaid work under the guise of a job application, companies are effectively exploiting the desperation and passion of talented individuals who are eager to prove their worth. It's a one-sided game, where the employer holds all the power, leaving the applicant powerless and vulnerable to this blatant exploitation. And...... you're too scared to make a fuss as they allow you to believe that you still might have a chance, and you don't want to be seen as 'difficult'.

It grinds my gears that this practice undermines the very nature of fair competition and creativity within the marketing field. The brilliance and innovative thinking that marketers bring to the table should be recognised and rewarded, not pilfered without remorse. How do they sleep at night?

It's the duty of employers & recruiters to foster an environment that values talent, encourages originality, and compensates individuals fairly for their contributions. But, this issue extends beyond individual employers and speaks to a broader systemic problem within the industry. There is a dire need for an education campaign to raise awareness about this unethical behaviour and its damaging consequences. Marketing professionals must be equipped with the knowledge and tools to identify exploitative practices and protect themselves from falling into these traps.

If you love my work, pay me!

More so, regulatory measures are necessary to establish guidelines that protect the rights of job applicants. Just as employees are entitled to fair wages for their work, prospective employees should be compensated for any assignments that are requested during the hiring process. The burden of proof should lie with employers to demonstrate a genuine intent to hire and not simply extract free labour from unsuspecting candidates. And another thing, companies should adopt transparent and ethical interviewing practices. They should communicate their expectations clearly, provide realistic timelines, and, above all, treat applicants with the respect they deserve.

Transparency and accountability must be at the forefront of recruitment processes to ensure fairness and integrity.

Exploitation - "the action or fact of treating someone unfairly in order to benefit from their work"

The exploitation of marketing professionals during the interview process is not only unjust, but it also erodes trust and tarnishes the reputation of companies that engage in such practices. To foster a thriving and ethical marketing industry, it is crucial for organisations and industry associations to come together and address this issue head-on.

This rubbish wouldn't fly if it were an ethnic, first nation or disabled minority group, so why is it overlooked when it's the marketing applicant getting screwed over?

As consumers, we rely on marketing to shape our perceptions and guide our decisions. Therefore, it is imperative that we demand accountability from the very industry that seeks to influence us. We must support initiatives that raise awareness, demand fair treatment, and advocate for regulations that safeguard the rights and dignity of marketing professionals. It is high time we unmask the unethical charade that plagues the marketing job market.

Let's build a future where talent is celebrated, creativity is nurtured, and exploitation is relegated to the grubby annals of history. Our collective voice can usher in a new era of integrity and respect in the marketing industry. Who's with me?

In the meantime, I have no qualms about naming and shaming the perpetrators of this shameless behaviour.

If you'd like to work with an ethical freelance marketer, drop me a line or visit my digital marketing website.

Cheers,

Donna

Here’s a tip/hack (call it what you will) that is very helpful information to help you reach your local audience.

Are you looking to improve your business Google Business Profile (GBP) ranking and drive more traffic to your business? I’ve discovered a powerful strategy that can help you achieve just that — using ‘Direction Requests’!

Google researchers found a clear correlation between driving directions and the number of reviews, indicating that driving directions can be an excellent indicator for ranking places and listing sentiment. By leveraging this information, you can potentially boost your GBP ranking and attract more customers.

Google uses proximity as a crucial factor in providing relevant and useful search results to users. By considering the geolocation of the user (cause you know they know where we all are, all the time!) and the business location, Google presents you as a viable choice for their search request. This also works if you are an SAB (service area business).

For example, if a user searches for “coffee shops near me,” Google will prioritise results for coffee shops that are located close to the user’s current location. There’s a few other steps in that algorithm like the quality of your profile (has your profile been optimised to list your products or services to provide further credibility for your listing?) Do the products/services on your profile match what’s on your website? Do you have other directory listings and does the information on them match your GBP?

The Symbiotic Relationship between your GBP and your Website

A Google Business Profile and a business website share a symbiotic relationship, working in harmony to boost credibility and visibility for your brand. This duo ensures that your online presence is consistent, informative, and easily discoverable by search users.

The key to this synergy lies in the reflection of content between the two platforms. Services listed on your Google Business Profile must also be prominently featured on your website, with each service having its own dedicated page. This not only strengthens the credibility of your listing but also makes it easier for Google to present your business as a direct match to search queries.

By aligning your Google Business Profile with your website, you create a better user experience that guides potential customers from discovery to conversion. This interconnectedness also signals to Google that your business is legitimate and trustworthy, which can lead to improved search rankings and increased visibility.

In essence, a well-maintained Google Business Profile and a comprehensive business website work hand-in-hand to amplify your online presence. By ensuring that your services are accurately represented on both platforms, you can harness the power of this symbiotic relationship to drive growth and success for your business.

Here are five strategies to increase your driving direction requests

1. Leverage Mobile Interactions

With the growing popularity of mobile devices, make sure to engage with your customers through their preferred channels, such as WhatsApp and SMS. Mobile Google searches provide more information than desktop searches, so take advantage of this by providing driving direction links to your location.

2. Send a Directions Link via Email

Add your directions link to your email signature.

3. Add Directions Link on All Your CTAs

Include driving request direction links on all your CTAs, whether on your Facebook page or website, to make it easier for your audience to find you and boost traffic from relevant local IP addresses.

4. Gain Directions from Popular City Pages

Create driving directions from prominent spots in your local area and embed them in your city pages. This will not only boost engagement metrics but also provide valuable data for your end users.

5. Add a Directions link or button to your website pages.

In short, make it easy for customers to find you!

By utilising Google Maps and these strategies, you can significantly impact your business’s success and improve your GBP ranking.

If you need assistance implementing these strategies or have any questions, feel free to reach out to Donna at Manage My Marketing.

My personal perspective

Being neurodivergent is basically having a brain that runs on Android when 70% of other brains are on IOS and think theirs is obviously better [insert eye roll]. ND has really hit the mainstream spotlight recently, and the awareness and reactions of neurotypicals (NT) highlight how being the majority or (cough) ‘normal’ until now has got their panties in a bunch. NDs were calculated to be around 25% of the world population (just the diagnosed). BUT that was before female children and adult women began identifying as ADHD, ASD, Tourettes, BiPolar, Dysgraphia and Dyspraxia etc. Given that the research and diagnosis over the past 50 years were done on white boys, the recognition and acceptance that females could also be ND is not just a fad, or attention seeking from watching too much TikTok.

The increase in diagnoses of female children and adult women is just levelling the playing field!

I’m curious to see what the % split is in 5-10 years. Perhaps it will be closer to 50/50. No more ‘normal’, just different operating systems that all have their pros and cons.

I, for one, embrace the AI technology that can assist and support the coming generations of NDs. Maybe it’s because I’m an ND, but OMG their are some incredible ND brains out there thinking up extraordinary out of the box concepts. Do they really need to be adept at party small talks and office politics as well? Waste of our brains if you ask me.

NDs need awareness and acceptance more than to be ‘fixed’

The facts

Neurodivergent individuals, such as those with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), often face unique challenges in their daily lives. These challenges can range from difficulties in social interactions to struggles with executive functioning and organisation. However, recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology have the potential to significantly improve the lives of neurodivergent individuals by providing tailored support and assistance. Here, I’ll explore how AI can assist those with ADHD and autism, empowering them to thrive in their personal and professional lives and not grow up to be made to feel less than!

Even a non-AI technology of a set of noise cancelling headphones could mean to the difference between failing educationally and creating a cure for narcissism! ;)

AI-Assisted Learning and Education

One of the most promising applications of AI for neurodivergent individuals is in the realm of education. Traditional classroom settings can be overwhelming and challenging for those with ADHD and autism, as they often struggle with focus, organisation, social interactions and the overstimulating environment. AI-powered educational tools can provide personalised learning experiences tailored to each individual’s unique needs and strengths.

AI-driven tutoring systems can analyse a student’s learning patterns and adapt the curriculum to their specific needs. This can help students with ADHD maintain focus and engagement while also providing a structured learning environment that supports their executive functioning. Similarly, AI-powered social skills training programs can help individuals with autism improve their communication and social interaction abilities by providing real-time feedback and guidance.

AI for Executive Functioning and Organisation

Executive functioning, which includes skills such as planning, organisation, and time management, is often a challenge for neurodivergent individuals. AI-powered tools can provide much-needed support in this area, helping individuals with ADHD and autism stay on track and manage their daily tasks more effectively.

For instance, AI-driven personal assistant apps can help users create and maintain schedules, set reminders, and prioritise tasks. These tools can also analyse a user’s habits and preferences to provide personalised suggestions and strategies for improving time management and organisation. This level of support can be invaluable for neurodivergent individuals, enabling them to better manage their daily lives and achieve their goals.

The best low-tech solution to executive dysfunction is body doubling — having another person in your space either in person, via video link, or on the phone is like magic. BD is successfully being utilised for anything from, getting your washing done to studying for exams.

AI for Emotional Regulation and Mental Health Support

Emotional regulation and mental health are critical aspects of overall well-being, and neurodivergent individuals often face unique challenges in these areas. AI-powered mental health tools can provide personalised support and guidance, helping individuals with ADHD and autism better understand and manage their emotions.

For example, AI-driven emotion recognition technology can analyse facial expressions, vocal tones, and body language to provide real-time feedback on a user’s emotional state. This can help individuals with autism develop greater self-awareness and improve their emotional regulation skills. Additionally, AI-powered chatbots can provide on-demand mental health support, offering personalised coping strategies and resources for managing stress, anxiety, and other emotional challenges.

AI for Career Support and Job Matching

Finding and maintaining employment can be a significant challenge for neurodivergent individuals, as traditional job search and hiring processes may not adequately accommodate their unique needs and strengths. AI-powered job matching platforms can help bridge this gap by analysing a user’s skills, interests, and preferences to identify suitable job opportunities.

These platforms can also provide personalised support throughout the job search process, such as AI-driven interview coaching and resume optimisation. By leveraging AI technology, neurodivergent individuals can more effectively navigate the job market and find fulfilling employment opportunities that align with their strengths and abilities.

Historically, the recruitment practice has been designed to find the person who interviews the best, not the best for the job. Interview environments can be a nightmare for NDs, lights, noise, window glare, temperature, and interviewers firing questions. You may tick every box and still not get the job because they thought you struggled with communication and answering qiestions within a predetermined X seconds.

AI technology programs that help NDs

When young Max (not his real name), a brilliant neurodivergent, struggled to express his thoughts, his parents feared his potential would remain untapped. Then, they discovered an AI-powered communication tool designed to bridge the gap. As Max began to use the AI, his extraordinary mind blossomed. He could now share his complex ideas effortlessly, and his creativity soared. Soon, Max was solving intricate math problems and creating stunning art, leaving everyone in awe. The AI had unlocked the door to Max’s hidden genius, proving that with the right support, neurodivergents can truly showcase the extraordinary extent of their mind’s capabilities.

Technological advancements have developed a number of programs:

1. Brain Power: A wearable system that uses Google Glass to help children with autism improve their social skills and self-regulation.

A practical learning tool that crosses the education and social spheres.

2. CogniFit: A brain training program designed to improve cognitive abilities, including attention, memory, and coordination, for individuals with ADHD, dyslexia, and other neurodivergent conditions.

This also helps you to understand your brain and accept yourself more, and that’s a very good thing

3. Proloquo2Go: A communication app that uses AI to help individuals with autism, cerebral palsy, and other speech impairments express themselves through customisable symbols and text-to-speech technology.

This tech is brilliant. It proves there’s nothing wrong with their thought process, just the mechanism to communicate it.

4. Quill: An AI-powered writing assistant that helps individuals with dyslexia and other learning disabilities improve their writing skills by providing real-time feedback and suggestions.

This, combined with talk to text function, allows users to gain confidence in their writing ability and not feel bad because they can’t spell.

5. Revibe Connect: A wearable device that uses AI to provide gentle vibration reminders for individuals with ADHD, helping them stay focused and on-task.

Perfect for when you are downhearted rabbit hole on a task you enjoy and forgot about the boring but necessary task.

Conclusion

The potential of AI to assist and empower neurodivergent individuals is vast, exciting, and continues to grow as technology advances. From personalised education and executive functioning support to emotional regulation and career assistance, AI has the potential to significantly improve the lives of ND individuals, in particular, those with ADHD and autism.

By embracing these innovative tools and resources, we can help create a more inclusive and supportive world for neurodivergent individuals, enabling them to not just thrive but exceed expectations in all aspects of their lives.

And gain the respect of society as a whole.

About Donna Blackwood

medium.com/@donnablackwood

Donna is a digital marketing specialist at Manage My Marketing. Read her blog posts to get the latest tips and tricks on SEO, content marketing, website design, marketing coaching, neurodivergent business coaching and more.

Engage Donna to write:

• Blogs
• SEO content writing
• Website content
• Product descriptions
• Social media posts

Why AI Avatar Apps Are Unethical (And What We Can Do About It)

2022 Will Be Remembered As The Year Of AI.

It’s the year that The Economist ran a cover image generated by one of the AI avatar apps. The year that Jason Allen’s AI artwork won his category in the Colorado State Fair. And it’s the year that ChatGPT lit up the internet with a strange mixture of astonishment, fear, and wonder.

This blog post will consider one of the AI phenomena to sweep the globe: AI-generated avatars. AI apps like Lensa give users a unique artistic portrait, based on their input of selfies, with results so startling the images have gone viral.

AI-generated avatars are remarkable, and show one more way that AI tools are useful for anyone in need of creative work. But they come with some serious ethical and legal problems that have serious consequences for artists. The success of AI apps relies on artists training the app - without being asked. So how can the situation be put right?

The Companies Offering AI Applications

By the end of 2022, there was a whole range of AI applications for image creation.

Here’s some of the key players:

Stable Diffusion is the technological building blocks behind a lot of the other apps. On their website, users input textual prompts (both positive and negative) to generate images.

To access the Midjourney bot, users submit text prompts to the app’s discord server. This is likely to become more accessible in the future.

AI PIcasso Dream Art studio is based on Stable Diffusion. This app can take a text prompt, adapt a user-inputted drawing, or even fill in missing areas of an image.

Lensa AI’s “magic avatar” add-on is one of the most prominent Avatar-specific tools. Free for a trial but paid for by the month or year. Users upload multiple selfies, and then have a choice of avatars delivered.

The full Dall-E service offers a host of image services. Dall-E can take text prompts, intelligently manipulate generated images, and respond to user-submitted images.

The website of Craiyon (previously Dall-E mini) is another free online generation tool, with a very simple interface. It can handle different styles, but has no capacity for sophistications and variations.

Out of these options, Lensa stands out by allowing user images as prompts: this is a sophisticated innovation that Lensa does especially well.

All of these apps offer amazing opportunities - but also show their limitations quite quickly. Stylistically, they might impersonate Van Gogh or Kahlo quite well: but struggle with Egon Schiele, Cy Twombly, or Sofonisba Anguissola.

Other web-based applications can showcase the sheer power of AI image generation in slightly different ways.. For example, This Person Does Not Exist randomly produces fictional photo-realistic portraits, while Artflow helps people animate avatars.

Why Would Someone Want To Use AI Avatars, Anyway?

There’s always a buzz around new technology. But generating AI avatars has many potential use-cases.

Profile pictures are a crucial element of anyone’s online identity.

Every freelancer knows that their profile picture for LinkedIn, Upwork, or Twitter is as important as the skills they bring to the table. That’s why plenty of workers’ pay for headshots. A stand-out profile pic can pay for itself if it helps to bring in clients.

Could AI Avatar Apps Do Something Similar?

We tried one app out to see what it could do. We gave it 10 photo headshots - and you can see the results below. Let’s face it - they’re amazing. A little creepy, perhaps, but incredible impersonations of painted portraiture.

One AI app calls image generation “the designer's new best friend”.. And you can see how AI could be a good friend to anyone looking for an impressive social media profile.

For a very small price (AUD$9.95 in our case), we got good-enough results that might have cost hundreds of dollars for an artist. In marketing, especially, users aren’t looking for highly innovative work.

Sadly, this isn’t a win-win situation. To understand why, we need to take a look at how these apps do their things.

How Do AI Avatar Art Platforms Work?

For users, AI image generation seems like some serious form of witchcraft.

But their working process is simple enough.

Before getting to users, AI apps “learn” all about artistic styles. They use a process called Deep Learning to get to know about painting and drawing like every artist you’ve heard of (and many you haven’t).

The Deep Learning process is effective because it takes in vast amounts of data.

The publicly-available LAION image datasets are some of the most important drivers. And LAION-5B, for example, includes nearly 6 billion images - a number so huge, it’s impossible to comprehend.

To get some sense of the scale, Andy Baio and Simon Willison built a data browser that covers some 12 million of these images. It’s a huge number of images, but still, only a tiny fraction of a percent of the images used to train major AI algorithms.

But AI Image Generation Doesn’t Work For Everyone

It’s no mystery, then: just some incredible leaps forward in computing capacity. But these innovations leave an important group of people behind: all the artists who helped train the AI.

Many images on the internet are now in the public domain. And pioneers of deep learning made sure that they only used legally legitimate images. When the Obvious collective created their “Edmond de Belamy” portrait in 2018, they only used 15,000 images hosted by WikiArt.

By contrast, when software “learns” from billions of images, the developers just aren’t thinking about the implications for the image creators. Although the LAION datasets (and others) are completely legitimate, they effectively launder artists’ original work for money-making companies.

To put it simply, AI apps steal copyrighted images to turn a profit - and that’s causing a lot of pain for the artists who feed the machines. The Australian artist Kim Leutwyler explains - “They are calling it a new original work but some artists are having their exact style replicated exactly in brush strokes, colour, composition – techniques that take years and years to refine.”

There are other problems with AI images. Users report that some apps produce highly sexualized outputs, lightened skin tones, and pictures that don’t even look like them. But if artists aren’t properly compensated for their trouble, AI image generation simply doesn’t have a future.

How To Make AI Work For Artists

After all the fuss of AI avatar apps, it’s hard to imagine Stable Diffusion or Lensa rolling back their services. But there are many ways that profitable companies could recompense artists. Before the industry moves forward, we need to have a serious conversation about how it’s going to work for everyone.

Here are four ways we might improve things for artists: improved copyright, the choice of opting out, royalty payments, and different approaches to AI training.

Copyright Regulation

AI-produced images can’t be copyrighted in the way that human-made art can be. And commercial users of images will be excited to have a type of image available without the complications of intellectual property rights.

But as one artist puts it, AI products are “falsely copyright-free solutions”. These images only appear to be “free”. As such, copyright laws need more precision and nuance for modern digital usage.

These new images raise many tough questions. Who is responsible for sustaining copyright?- the “AI artist” inputting the prompts; the developer of the paid-for app; the bots trawling the internet for appropriate content; the end user who receives the product?

Until these issues are decided, it’s just not fair to use an AI app that hasn’t paid the vast squad of artists who helped do the training.

Help Artists To Opt-Out

The current range of popular apps have already done their “learning” on whatever image datasets. But the data they use can change in the future.

The HaveIBeenTrained database, for example, enables artists to see whether their images were previously used for AI training. The website is created by the Spawning collective, which work closely with LAION to remove any images by artists from future AI training.

The scope is large.

Spawning plans to partner with further organizations in order to make HaveIBeenTrained “once only opt-out tool that applies to every dataset used to train generative AI Art tools.”

Opting out is hardly ideal. But it provides some protections for creatives who want to safeguard their work.

Return Royalties To Artists

In the world of Web 2.0, social media users have gotten used to handing over their words, images, and data in exchange for free access to online services. But as interactive services have become embedded in the digital landscape, platforms have recognized the importance of paying creators.

Algorithm developers have created sophisticated methods of enabling AI to make new images out of existing pictures. Their next step should be to calculate how to monetize each feature of an image.

For every search, the AI app would need to pay into a fund for the creator associated with that image. In the current model, artists would need to “opt-in” to make their claim. And artists would undoubtedly be keen to receive some compensation for their work.

AI image generation is unlikely to prove a major money-spinner for the majority of working artists. But this is beyond the point - a 2022 CNN report suggested that some artists would be happy just to get a token acknowledgment for their input.

Only Train The AI Generators From Public Domain Content

The final option is more drastic. Ai avatar apps could take a step back, and completely reconsider their approach.

As we’ve described above, amazing tools can still be created with small datasets. Those tools just won’t have the comprehensive coverage of more than a billion images. AI image generators are unlikely to independently choose this course of action. But really, it’s not so ridiculous.

Developers limiting the scope of their AI training could actually produce more effective tools - with comprehensive coverage of a time period, style of drawing, or choice of subject. Would developers choose this route after the viral performance of Lensa? It’s unlikely, but limiting their horizons could still lead to innovative tools.

Conclusion

AI tools are always controversial. But avatar AI applications demonstrate the legal, ethical, and artistic questions that still don’t have good answers.

This post hasn’t been another hand-wringing piece about AI tools taking over jobs. We’ll always need artists. And if AI tools can lend a hand to their processes, that’s no bad thing.

Yet as the dust settles on the latest viral trend, we need to think about the damage these applications can be causing. Until those problems are solved, there might not be any ethical way of using AI applications.

About Donna Blackwood

Donna is a digital marketing specialist at Manage My Marketing. Read her blog posts to get the latest tips and tricks on SEO, content marketing, website design, marketing coaching and more.

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