{"id":475197,"date":"2026-06-13T09:39:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-13T09:39:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/475197\/"},"modified":"2026-06-13T09:39:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-13T09:39:09","slug":"why-everyone-from-your-local-restaurant-to-the-school-fair-is-using-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/475197\/","title":{"rendered":"Why everyone from your local restaurant to the school fair is using AI"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If you&#8217;ve been anywhere near social media lately, you&#8217;ll have probably seen it.<\/p>\n<p>By Susan Edmonds of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rnz.co.nz\/news\/business\/598109\/why-everyone-from-your-local-restaurants-to-the-school-fair-is-using-the-same-ads\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">RNZ<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Advertising that all looks a bit the same. The same sort of font, with the same sort of layout, lots of text and generic images.<\/p>\n<p>The ads are produced by generative AI platforms and are being used to advertise everything from a new business opening to a local school fair.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s as easy to create as giving ChatGPT, or other generative AI tools, the request to &#8220;make an ad&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>ChatGPT processes about two-and-a-half billion requests a day globally, and it&#8217;s been estimated about 15 million of those come from New Zealand.<\/p>\n<p>One New Zealand business owner, whom RNZ has agreed not to identify, said she had used it to make an advertisement recently.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I didn&#8217;t really know what I was doing but I got there.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>She said she opted for AI because she didn&#8217;t have to worry about getting the right lighting or product placement. &#8220;I just kept adapting it until it looked like what I wanted.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>So is it a threat to traditional advertising agencies?<\/p>\n<p>Vaughn Davis, creative director of advertisement and communication agency The Goat Farm said he received a request from a pro bono client this week sending something they had put together with AI to see if it could be finessed.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;What we&#8217;re mostly seeing is organisations that wouldn&#8217;t normally work with an agency using AI tools to generate posters, social posts and so on. There&#8217;s probably no harm in that &#8211; and if your local bowls club puts out a poster that looks 90% identical to one from a badminton club in Turkmenistan and everyone&#8217;s happy, go for your life.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;If ad agencies use the same tools to generate images that look like everyone else&#8217;s, then we&#8217;re not doing our job. We&#8217;re here to help clients stand out, show customers why they&#8217;re different and better, and convince people to take the next step. You don&#8217;t do that by delivering the machine-built average of every other ad that&#8217;s ever been made.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Katherine Jensen, a professional teaching fellow in the University of Auckland&#8217;s marketing department, said it was now extremely obvious when people were using generative AI in their advertising.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It does all look very similar and I think with so much of it around, it almost heightens the need for genuine human creativity. It&#8217;s something that&#8217;s going to stand out about a brand if it&#8217;s not the same AI generated slop that everyone else is using.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>She said there was an increasing backlash towards it. &#8220;People are really getting AI fatigue already and I think it comes across as being quite inauthentic. It raises questions around trust that people have in brands, how relatable a brand is, if there&#8217;s nothing to differentiate it, nothing that&#8217;s really unique about it, I think people are so overwhelmed with messages they&#8217;ll just pass by and it even has a sort of repellent effect for an increasing number of people.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>She said she was having discussions with students in her digital marketing course about it.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;There&#8217;s a real undercurrent of strong dislike for AI content. I appreciate that in some contexts it&#8217;s necessary, you know, brands are working in a very competitive marketplace and they need to be able to produce large volumes of content just to keep up with the competition, but I think there&#8217;s absolutely still a place for quality, original, human-generated content and I think it makes the good stuff stand out perhaps even more now.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you&#8217;ve been anywhere near social media lately, you&#8217;ll have probably seen it. By Susan Edmonds of RNZ&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":475198,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,138,1073,111,139,69,145],"class_list":["post-475197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-business","tag-media","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=475197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475197\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/475198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=475197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=475197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=475197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}