Petflix? Hisney+? We Asked AI to Make Some Graphics

There’s a lot of hullabaloo out there about how AI is coming for human jobs, and one of the more recent announcements was that Lionsgate has made a deal with AI research firm Runway for an “assistive creative tool for filmmakers.” This indeed has major implications for Hollywood and the creative world at large, and the job-elimination fears shouldn’t be discounted. But, as we discovered, the tech leaves a lot to be desired, at least when it comes to publicly-available AI tools.

If you've read a few of our posts here at The Measure, you've probably noticed that our usual format is all about delivering quick and clean stats along with an easy-to-understand visual. Could AI simplify our jobs even more, and make that graphic for us? The answer is a resounding LOL nope. 

I asked ChatGPT's Dall-E to make a graphic using MX8 Labs data around viewer ad recall across various streaming platforms (stay tuned for that post later this week!), with a bar chart and branded color theme. It wasn’t able to interact with an uploaded spreadsheet, so I tried both a screenshot of the data and typing the data directly into the chat. In both cases, the results were overcrowded, confusing images riddled with the wrong stats, spelling errors and ...creative... interpretations of streamers' names. 

I tried again using different language and prompts, and was provided with this (marginally neater) iteration, but it still didn’t even get the percents correct:

I also fed it Inscape's weekly TV program rankings, and was rewarded with a random NHL-meets-NFL logo plus a lot of unintelligible crap and again, the wrong data.

To be fair, I only spent about an hour messing around, and perhaps with more investment and creative phrasing/instructions it could’ve come up with something halfway acceptable. But that would negate the entire point of making my job faster and easier, since it takes far less time to whip up a graphic myself. And the fact that I gave it data via text and it still couldn’t get the numbers right proves that — at least for now — AI is no substitute for actual human eyes. I mean, just ask ChatGPT how many “Rs” are in “strawberry.”