Before I jump right into my rant, I want to provide some background to an issue I’ve seen balloon over the past couple years. 

When image generators started gaining in popularity, I saw a huge divide in the design community, with the majority of designers disagreeing with the practice. Personally, I don’t like to use generative ai in my work. Setting aside the fact it is stealing from hard working artists, there’s a massive issue with quality recognition. The people who are championing using ai in their work, aren’t professional designers. They haven’t seen how things can go wrong, and how the user experiences their work. 

If you’ve ever worked in print production or design, you’ll be able to guess where I’m going right away. Most gen ai users don’t know how to create artwork that is high enough quality for print, leading to pixilation and poor quality deliverables. So, after getting chewed out for dropping the ball on quality one too many times, the marketing director or project manager will send the art to a freelancer to improve the quality. 

So, you’ve got a freelancer, most likely on the junior or newer end of experience, accepting a small budget freelance job to just vectorize some artwork. But because the price is so low, they need to do a bunch of these types of projects in order to make any significant profit freelancing. So, corners are cut, and the dreaded “image trace” tool is used to save on time. 

Don’t get me wrong, I love illustrator’s image trace tool. There are a ton of practical applications for it. Image tracing ai generated artwork is not one of them. Any designer worth their salt is able to identify image traced artwork a mile away. It’s not organic, there are floating articles and random shapes that make no design sense, colors don’t fit right. Besides the visual indicators, if you pull this artwork into illustrator you’ll find a disturbing lack of layers; it’s like a puzzle piece, not a true intentionally designed illustration. 

Now, this might seem like a very specific situation, and you might be thinking it won’t apply to you. Well, unfortunately, this issue is actually a huge problem in the design community for unexpected reasons. 

As I mentioned earlier, I don’t really like to use gen ai photos in my designs. Stock sites understand that reluctance, so most of them put a handy way to filter out generative ai assets, so I will, by default, have that setting turned on to filter out any ai images. What I started noticing, however, was that even for vector artwork, I was seeing art that had that gen ai feel. True designers know that look; weird shading, inconsistent or floating pieces, illogical design choices. At first, I thought maybe I was accidentally resetting the filter settings, but that wasn’t the case. 

Designers that make a living on selling stock assets have not only started throwing gen ai photos into the marketplace, but are getting around the ai tag by image tracing the artwork and passing it off as a vector illustration. This is not ok, for a massive number of reasons, many of which I have already explained. There’s technical concerns with the quality of these images, composition issues with the way it was generated, moral issues with artists’ work being stolen without their permission, not to mention designers who don’t want to use ai having to jump through hoops to find decent stock assets. 

So, if you’re a marketer that needs a specific illustration made then please, pay a little more to have a professional vector artist build you something unique. If you’re an artist, please, for the love of everything decent in this world, STOP IMAGE TRACING AI ART.