Stop using AI images if you want me to buy that new product you're selling...

Remember the first time you saw that unholy video of Will Smith eating spaghetti in 2023? If you aren't familiar, a video was produced using AI that simulated the actor eating spaghetti, and it was frankly, terrifying. His hands morphed into the plate, the food morphed into his face, the whole thing was a mess. In fact, it was so horror inducing that it's now used as a benchmark in the AI community to help determine how realistic a generative video is to the average human viewer. Skip forward to 2025 and AI has made great strides, but still misses the mark when it comes to replicating reality (if you know what to look for).

In the last year, I've seen a lot of consumer products companies shift to AI generated imagery and video on their sites and I need to talk about why that can and should be a warning flag for more of us. As a salon owner and educator who has also spent time on film sets, I tend to pay a lot of attention to how natural hair looks on camera in both printed and digital format. In the past year I've started to see these uncanny images make their way onto the pages of sellers within the natural hair and beauty space. I first noticed something off when I visited the page of a brand I purchase from to show one of their products to the client in my chair. We were greeted by what at first appeared to be a dynamic video of a person washing their hair. You could see wet curly hair and the subject's hands. Something looked wrong to me, but we were on mobile (and I was in the middle of a haircut) so I figured I was being too picky. Nope, because within seconds the hands in the video started to morph into the curls...which were also somehow changing their pattern and texture in real time? Nothing about the video made sense, and my client even said "whoa, wait what's going on? Is this some weird AI video?" Indeed, fam. That it was.

Since then, I see more and more AI stock images being used especially on product websites and sales pages. And let's not get it twisted, the entire beauty industry has a long history of using misleading imagery to confuse consumers into buying products that simply can't deliver on their stated promises. For years I've worked with companies in different industries to help them re-target their products, marketing and messaging to more closely align with the consumers that they're trying to reach. For example, a lot of beauty brands don't bother to have images of consumers with curly, tight curly, or coily hair using their products in a realistic way. We could talk for days about WHY that happens, but that's for another post. In my experience, this situation hasn't arisen because there aren't talented stylists and models who could be brought in to complete these projects. In many cases, it's because it's cheaper and faster to generate an unrealistic or sub-par visual as a "placeholder." It's also because these brands oftentimes don't have the subject matter expertise to know what a convincing visual would look like when closely examined.

To my understanding, AI models have a hard time replicating hair for some of the same reasons they have a hard time replicating hands. They're both complex and exist in 3D. AI is also trained using existing data (in this case photos and videos), and in some cases the AI has far less examples of curly hair that it's scanning to learn from.

The real tea here is that in my experience, a lot of us are used to getting lied to about what healthy hair even looks like. So, when brands use AI generated visuals I believe they're counting on the fact that we don't have a lot of realistic touchpoints to show how our hair looks in different settings.

I wish brands were more willing to understand that there's a cost to using images that are clearly AI generated, it chips away at the credibility of your brand. If you have a strong product, it should be no struggle to get visuals of that product working. This isn't specific to the beauty industry, but it's very pronounced given our over-reliance on visuals to sell products and ideas. As a consumer, if I visit your product page and you haven't done the due diligence to get some concrete evidence that this stuff works, I immediately lose a degree of trust in everything you're saying.

A fast fix for this would be for businesses to start simply investing in better existing stock imagery. In this day and age, there are entire databases dedicated to producing stock images that reflect a wide range of humans. On a larger scale, this can be fixed by hiring capable creative directors to help manage organizations that have the skills to produce convincing and realistic visual imagery.

What do you think when a company tries to sell you something using AI generated visuals? Does it make you trust their claims?

Stay vigilant ya'll, keep your eyes open!

*Illustration by Nicholas Konrad / The New Yorker link