Author: Jamillah Knowles

The use of AI images is not just an issue for editorial purposes. Marketing, advertising and other forms of communication may also want or need to illustrate work with images to attract readers or to present particular points. Martin Bryant is the founder of tech communications agency Big Revolution and has spent time in his career as an editor and tech writer. 

“AI falls into that same category as things like cyber security where there are no really good images because a lot of it happens in code,” he says. “We see it in outcomes but we don’t see the actual process so illustration falls back on lazy stereotypes. It’s a similar case with cyber security, you’ll see the criminal with the swag bag and face mask stooped over a keyboard and with AI there’s the red-eyed Terminator robot or it’s really cheesy robots that look like sixties sci-fi.”

The influence of sci-fi images in AI is strong and one that can make reporters and editors uncomfortable with their visal options. “ “Whenever I have tried to illustrate AI I’ve always felt like I am short changing people because it ends up being stock images or unnecessarily dystopian and that does a disservice to AI. It doesn’t represent AI as it is now. If you’re talking about the future of AI, it might be dystopian, but it might not be and that’s entirely in our hands as a species how we want AI to influence our lives,” Martin says. “If you are writing about killer robots then maybe a Terminator might be OK to use but if you’re talking about the latest innovation from DeepMind then it’s just going to distort the public understand of AI either to inflate their expectations of what is possible today or it makes them fearful for the future.” 

I should be open here about how I know Martin. We worked together for the online tech publication The Next Web where he was my managing editor and I was UK editor some years ago. We are both very familiar with the pressures of getting fast-moving tech news out online, to be competitive with other outlets and of course to break news stories. The speed at which we work in news has an impact on the choices we can make.

“If it’s news you need to get out quickly, then you just need to get it out fast and you are bound to go for something you have used in the past so it’s ready in the CMS (Content management system – the ‘back end’ of a website where text and images are added.),” Martin says. “You might find some robots or in a stock image library there will be cliches and you just have to go with something that makes some sense to readers. It’s not ideal but you hope that people will read the story and not be too influenced by the image – but a piece always needs an image.”

That’s an interesting point that Martin is making. In order to reach a readership, lots of publications rely on social media to distribute news. It was crowded when we worked together and it sometimes feels even more packed today. Think about the news outlets you follow on Twitter or Facebook, then add to this your friends, contacts and interesting people you like to follow and the amount of output they create with links to news they are reading and want to comment upon. It means we are bombarded with all sorts of images whenever we start scrolling and to stand out in this crowd, you’re going to need something really eye-catching to make someone slow down and read. 

“If it’s a more considered feature piece then there’s maybe more scope for a variety of images, like pictures of the people involved, CEOs, researchers and business leaders,” Martin says. “You might be able to get images commissioned or you can think about the content of the piece to get product pictures, this works for topics like driverless cars. But there is still time pressure and even with a feature, unless you are a well-resourced newsroom with a decent budget, you are likely to be cutting corners on images.” 

Marketing exciting AI

It’s not just the news that is hungry for images of AI. Marketing, advertising and other communications are also battling for our attention and finding the right image to pull in readers, clicks or getting people to use a product is important. Important, but is it always accurate? Martin works with and has covered news of countless startup companies, some of which use AI as a core component of their business proposition. 

“They need to think about potential outcomes when they are communicating,” he says “Say there is a breakthrough in deep neural AI or something it’s going to be interesting to academics and engineers, the average person is not going to get that because a lot of it requires an understanding of how this technology works and so you often need to push startups to think about what it could do, what they are happy with saying is a positive outcome.” 

This matches the thinking of many discussions I have had about art and the representation of AI. In order to engage with people, it can be easier to show them different topics of use and influence from agriculture to medical care or dating. These topics are far more familiar to a wider audience than a schematic for an adversarial network. But claiming an outcome can also be a thorny issue for some company leaders.

“A lot of startup founders from an academic background in AI tend to be cautious about being too prescriptive about how their technology could be used because often if they have not fully productised their work in an offering to a specific market,” Martin explains. “They need to really think about optimistic outcomes about how their tech can make the world better but not oversell it. We’re not saying it’s going to bring about world peace, but if they really think of examples of how the AI can help people in their everyday lives this will help people engage with making the leap from a tech breakthrough they don’t understand to really getting why it’s useful.” 

Overstating AI

AI now appears to be everywhere. It’s a term that has broken out from academia, through engineering and into business, advertising and mainstream media. This is great, it can mean more funding, more research, progress and ethical monitoring and attention. But when tech gets buzzy, there’s a risk that it will be overstated and misconstrued. 

“There’s definitely a sense of wanting to play up AI,” Martin says. “There’s a sense that companies have to say ‘look at our AI!’ when actually that might be overselling what is basic technology behind the scenes. Even if it’s more developed than that, they have to be careful. I think focusing on outcomes rather than technologies is always the best approach. So instead of saying ‘our amazing, groundbreaking AI technology does this’ – focusing on what outcomes you can deliver that no one else can because of that technology is far more important. 

As we have both worked in tech for so long, the buzzword buzzkill is a familiar situation and one that can end up with less excitement and more of an eyeroll. Martin shared some past examples we could learn from, “It’s so hilarious now,” he says. “A few years ago everything had to have a location element, it was the hot new thing and now the idea of an app knowing your location and doing something relevant to it is nothing. But for a while it was the hottest thing. 

“Gamification was a buzzword too. Now gamification is a feature in lots and lots of apps, Duolingo is a great example but it’s subtly used in other areas  but for a while startups would pitch themselves saying ‘we are the gamified version of X’.”

But the overuse of language and their accompanying images is far from over and it’s not just AI that suffers. “Blockchain keeps rearing its head,” Martin points out. “It’s Web3 now, slightly further along the line but the problem with Web3 and AI is that there’s a lot of serious and thoughtful work happening but people go ahead with ‘the blockchain version of X or web3 version of Y’ and because it’s not ready yet or it’s far too complicated for the mainstream, it ends up disillusioning people. I think you see this a bit with AI too but Web3 is the prime example at the moment and it’s been there in various forms for a long time now.” 

To avoid bad visuals and buzzword bingo in the reporting of AI, it’s clear through Martin’s experience that outcomes are a key way of connecting with readers. AI can be a tricky one to wrap your head around if you’re not working in tech, but it’s not that hard when it’s clearly explained.”It really helps people understand what AI is doing for them today rather than thinking of it as something mysterious or a black box of tricks,” Martin says. “That box of tricks can make you sound more competitive but you can’t lie to people about it and you need to focus on outcomes that help people understand clearly what you can do. You’ll not only help people’s understanding of your product but also the general public’s knowledge of   what AI can really do for them.”

Visually describing AI technologies is not just about reaching out to the general public, it also means getting things marketing and technical communication right. Brian Runciman is the Head of Content – British Computer Society (BCS) The Chartered Institute of IT. His audience is not unfamiliar with complex ideas, so what are the expectations for accompanying images? 

Brian’s work covers the membership magazine for BCS as well as a publicly available website full of news, reports and insights from members. The BCS membership is highly skilled, technically minded and well read – so the content on site and in the magazine needs to be appealing and engaging.  

“We view our audience as the educated layperson,” Brian says. “There’s a base level of knowledge you can assume. You probably don’t have to explain what machine learning or adversarial networks are conceptually and we don’t go into tremendous depth because we have academic journals that do this.” 

Of course writing for a technical audience also means Brian and his colleagues will get smart feedback when something doesn’t quite fit expectations. “With a membership of over 60 thousand, there are some that are very engaged with how published material is presented and quite rightly,” Brian says. “Bad imagery affects the perception of what something really is.”

So what are the rules that Brian and his writers follow? As with many publications there is a house style that they try to keep to and this includes the use of photography and natural imagery. This is common among news publications that choose this over illustration, graphics or highly manipulated images. In some cases this is used to encourage a sense of trust in the readership that images are accurate and have not been changed. This also tends to mean the use of stock images. 

“Stock libraries need to do better,” Brian observes. “When you’re working quickly and stuff needs to be published, there’s not a lot of time to make image choices and searching stock libraries for natural imagery can mean you end up with a toy robot to represent things that are more abstract.”

“Terminators still come up as a visual shorthand,” he says. “But AI and automation designers are often just working to make someone’s use of a website a little bit slicker or easier. If you use a phone or a website to interact with an automated process it does what it is supposed to do and you don’t really notice it – it’s invisible and you don’t want to see it. The other issue is that when you present AI as a robot people think it is embodied. Obviously, there is a crossover but in process automation, there is no crossover, it’s just code, like so much else is.”

Tone things down and make them relatable 

Brian’s decades-long career in publishing means he has some go-to methods for working out the best way to represent an article. “I try to find some other aspect of the piece to focus on,” he says. “So in a piece about weather modelling, we could try and show a modelling algorithm but the other word in the headline is weather and an image of this is something we can all relate to.” 

Brian’s work also means that he has observed trends in the use of images. “A decade or so ago it was more important to show tech,” he says. “In a time when that was easily represented by gadgets and products this was easier than trying to describe technologies like AI. Today we publish in times when people are at the heart of tech stories and those people need to look happy.”

Pictures of people are a good way to show the impact of AI and its target users, but it also raises other questions about diversity – especially if the images are predominantly of middle aged white men. “It’s not necessary,” says Runciman. “We have a lot of head shots of our members that are very diverse. We have people from minorities, researchers who are not white or middle aged – of which there are loads. When people say they can’t find diverse people for a panel I find it ridiculous, there are so many people out there to work with. So we tend to focus on the person who is working on a technology and not just the AI itself.”

The use of images is something that Brian sees every day for work, so what would be on his wish list when it comes to better images of AI? “No cartoon characters and minimal colour usage – something subtle,” he muses. “Skeletal representations of things – line representations of networks, rendered in subtle and fewer colours.” This nods at the cliches of blue and strange bright lights that you can find in a simple search for AI images, but as Brian points out, there are subtler ways of depicting a network and images for publishing that can still be attractive without being an eyesore.