Finally, a warning label for fake people.

Facebook is now making brands disclose when an ad uses AI-generated "synthetic performers." And good and here's why I think AI in advertising keeps losing to the one thing it's trying to replace.

By Tymel Young, Owner and Creative Director

Try running an ad to a New York audience now. The person on screen isn't a person at all. You have to say so out loud in the ad .. Try getting creative with that one.

Passing back in December, first in the country. As of June 9th, it's finally law. No more fake humans in your commercial without putting a label on it

We knew something was going to happen and usually it's all talk but once I heard I did a little shimmy in my chair and no I'm not anti-AI - I'll get there. This was more of a "someone finally said it and did it" kind of shimmy. If she came out of a prompt, you have to admit that to the exact people you were hoping wouldn't notice.

The audience could always tell and you knew it.

People can tell. We always could. I believe it was twenty years ago that The Polar Express spent a fortune making a photoreal human and everyone walked out saying the kids looked dead behind the eyes. It was haunting and I still think about it. The Uncanny Valley isn't a glitch in the tech. It's us. Some old animal part of our brain sees a face that's almost right and goes, "No, that's not it."

And no matter how better renders get, it's still not fixing it. We all just scroll past the AI slop ad and we realize something is off before we even can say, "Wait what." Obviously there's the telling things like:

The skin is too smooth. The hand is doing things hands don't. Eyes on you, but nobody's home. You don't stop. You don't stare and we sure are not buying it. We just feel a cheaper version of the brand and keep going.

Call it the synthetic discount. You save on the line items and pay for it in the only thing that counts: belief and trust in your brand

A synthetic performer saves you a little money and spends the one thing that was working. That a person made this. For a person.

I run an agency. I know what budgets do.

Allow me to argue the other side as well because I live on it.

But we're a boutique. We've got them too. Our clients have them as well and they're getting tighter and looser. When a tool promises a national-looking spot for the price of a prompt, I get it. I get why a tired marketing team hits that generate button.

I've been in that room too. Somebody pulls up the AI version. The number drops by a zero and we all kind of exhale. Half relief, half a thing nobody wants to say out loud.

And I'm not here to lecture from a clean perch. I run this math every single week and I watched "cheap" turn into the most expensive thing on the board over and over because it made something nobody remembers, nobody trusted, nobody felt inspired.

AI has a place. This isn't it.

This is where the pure anti-AI crowd kind of bells on me.

I use it all the time. We use it all the time here at Raised Media. It transcribes our five to six-hour long interview sessions so an editor isn't scrubbing three days of festival footage by hand from one line. It'll dig through mountains of clips for "the moment the founder laughs" and hand it back in seconds. It eats the slow boring parts of post and gives us the hours back. WE LOVE IT! It makes real people faster at making real things. But we call it what it is: machine learning.

Machine learning or AI in advertising was never the problem. AI pretending to be someone is. One speeds the artist up, the other deletes them and hopes you won't miss their warmth and creativity. You'll miss the warmth and so will your customers.

Pay people. That's the strategy that has always worked.

So what's the move if "generate it" was the plan?

Hire people, pay them. You want people to pay attention. Pay the ones who know how to earn attention. You want them to spend money on what you make. Spend it on humans who make it worth watching. It's not a charity. It's the oldest play there is. Somebody told somebody a story around the fire. It worked and it's worked ever since.

Stop treating the artist as the cost. It's the artist that is the reason why it works. Cutting them out doesn't trim the budget. It deletes the entire product.

Fifty states, please!

New York won first, come on, 49 more. Now a label is not going to fix everything. It won't make a bad ad good. It just makes it honest and honesty is all we're looking for and honest has a way of pricing things right. This is the start of the Synthetic Everything era ending, I believe that's the best news for the people who make things they have had in a while. Same real-versus-rendered fight we got into over in everyone planted the same flag, now with a law behind it.

Put a real person in your ad. Made by real ones. It's the only version anybody believes. And now, at least in New York, it's the only version you don't have to warn people about. Here's what we mean by real.

Pay people. It's not a cost. It's the point.

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Raised Media Co. is a New York video production and commercial photography agency built for brands.