By now most of our clients and prospects know my stance when it comes to AI generated anything: content, strategies, branding. They suck, if I can put it mildly.
AI generated content has caused a lot of pain in the past months, as Google are doing their fall cleaning and deindexing millions of slop pages. Some of these websites are handed manual penalties, in one of the biggest purges in SEO history.
You can read my musings on this exact topic: Medical copywriting tips to survive Google algorithm updates.
All our clients, who have applied scientific SEO strategies, and not AI slop, are sailing through these algorithm updates, but I get called almost weekly to perform SEO audits on websites that have been wiped out. 90% of the time the sub-par content is the main culprit.
Knowing how bad AI is for “strategizing” and writing, I took it one step further and thought I’d test it for graphic design, mainly logos. Besides content writers, designers have also taken a huge hit in the past 2 years, since now potential clients think they can easily replace experts with AI.
We already know what’s happening in copywriting (thank you Google), but brand identity has always been an “expense” many companies just cannot find useful. I mean people understand how important a good logo is, but when you send them an offer for a custom design, most prospects almost faint.
So, I started with 1 prompt for the 3 big “intelligences”, let’s see how amazing The Medically would look based on their iterations.
Custom Logo Design
We have rebranded The Medically in 2017 with this original design, so we’re not really looking to change it, but it’s a good “control group” for my experiment. Of course I’m biased, but in my opinion it’s a good example of a mature design I’m not ashamed to showcase.
It’s easy to understand what we do. A few months ago I asked the LLMs what the icon “tells them”, they agreed it’s a medically related business and it deals with analytics and stats.
Right on the money, as medical marketing is mainly stats and my work here is to increase them 🙂
Now that we have our design, let’s see if Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini can do better.
AI Generated Logos
My initial prompt:
create a logo for a medical marketing company
I don’t say “please and thank you“, we’ve done enough work in these past 3 years to understand AI is NOT a person, hence it doesn’t need us to communicate “with” it.
It’s true I can barely keep myself from berating it, when it goes so awfully wrong (as you’ll see in the next examples), but I’m getting better at understanding it’s a Predictive Language Model, not an Intelligent thing. If it doesn’t think, then it doesn’t know when it’s wrong or even care.
ChatGPT
I am logged into the account, so apparently it took our company’s logo.
It’s a generic design, with the same cross we’ve seen a gazillion times already. An upwards arrow, which shows growth. The font is somewhat similar to ours (which means that, with a bit of luck, if you generate your logo with ChatGPT, chances are you’ll infringe on someone’s trade mark). Oh, well …
Kerning is off, there’s no logic to it, we even have a “tagline” which I’m sure 5,673 other companies have. […] that works. Cool, bro’.
We move now to Claude, who’s considered to be the smartest of them all.
Claude
You don’t have to be an expert branding consultant to understand this is pure garbage, it has absolutely no merit as a logo. You cannot scale down (to have it as a website logo), it has no beginning and no end.
From all my tests (which you’ll see further down), Claude, the ever-praised smart amazing extra-super-outstanding AI model is giving me the worst designs possible. If I got my dog druk and let it play with a graphic tablet, we’d get something better.
Yet, it proceeds to give me a long explanation on why its garbage design is amazing.
Gemini
Didn’t know we’re talking “The Medically”, it’s cool, I never mentioned at the start of our experiment. It’s in green, fine by me, upwards arrow (again), the ubiquitous cross and some leaves. It’s true our main office is in the forrests in North NJ, it probably knows something 🙂
Let’s give them another chance to make it better; second prompt:
The company is called The Medically. Give me 3 more options.
ChatGPT
Claude
Come on, Claude, really? I didn’t screenshot the explanation of its genius, we already wasted too much server space with this junk.
Gemini
I’m having such a WTH moment, when I see what Gemini concocted.
One prompt ago I mentioned we need the logo for a “medical marketing company”. Right?
So we now have 3 completly BS taglines, that are as related to my niche as these AI generated logos to proper brand indentity: “modern healthcare solutions” (we do NOT provide healthcare services), “compassionate care for everyone” (again, we don’t ..) and “innovating the future of medicine“. Yeah, sure.
This was just a funny exercise, which took me 2 minutes, just to show you the “quality” of AI designs. Conclusion? You can have your medical logo look like a turd or hire a HUMAN logo designer to a proper job.
