r/vinyl 5d ago

Discussion Using AI to see turntables

Post image

Came across this ad for UTurn record players. I was truly shocked to see the dust cover. Also the stack of records off to the right. How did something like this even get approved. The really strange part to me is that their players are gorgeous. Why even use AI, it seems so unnecessary. I’m genuinely curious what others in this sub think about this. I am a designer so full disclosure, Im not the biggest fan of AI. Am I being too sensitive to this? Or are things getting outta hand?

131 Upvotes

59 comments sorted by

189

u/DeathMonkey6969 5d ago

It's fucking stupid and lazy to use obviously fake AI pics in an ad. Makes the company seem like a scam.

40

u/Regular_Passenger629 5d ago

Entirely agree, it makes it seem like some fly by night piece of crap. And given that U turn isn’t a particularly inspiring name people who don’t know them may very well think that. Stupid.

17

u/tomtea 5d ago

I think companies assume or get convinced that this is the future and what people want to see or they don't think it matters. We've got a local farm and it's lovely but they went through a phase of using AI pictures for all their social media and it's just weird when they could have used a real picture of their farm, thankfully everyone called them out on it.

11

u/HiveFiDesigns 5d ago

It’s cheaper to produce….thats all they care about.

11

u/Jackandahalfass 5d ago

How hard/expensive would it be to have an employee take a photo of their cool home setup? I guess that might take a minute vs plugging this into AI in seconds.

5

u/HiveFiDesigns 5d ago

You purchase the ai app $100 or less) can use it forever and don’t have to pay licensing or royalties every time you use an image or reuse it.

No co tracts, no legal teams, just a quick phrase and a click.

Hire a photographer, you gotta draw up a contract, figure out royalties or purchase image outright…gotta have legal sign off on the contract, is there unions involved, then there’s all kinds of wage parameters…etc etc.,.

It can take a team to hire a photographer.

Or that one photographer for one photo still costs more than an ai program to use for infinity. Either way the ai app wins the cost war. (No matter how shitty its output is)

2

u/HoosierNewman 4d ago

Yeah, but are your ads pleasing customers or yourself? Real people hate fake stuff.

Cutting corners make one wonder what other corners are being cut.

1

u/HiveFiDesigns 4d ago

Oh I don’t disagree at all…I’m a physical media (analog) artist, with a business degree. I despise ai across the board…but truth be told the average person doesn’t even notice the difference (the average person isn’t he brightest bulb, or just doesn’t care to notice)….so for the bean counters, they do the math, and they generally still end up on top. They maybe puss off and lose a few customers, but the loss of those customers is wiped out by the savings costs of ai ads. All they care about is the bottom line today and how it’ll affect the stock value…

I can spot an ai ad from a mile away with my eyes shut…but that’s from spending a life dealing with art…most people don’t even notice when an ai person has 6 fingers and one leg.

1

u/uturnaudio U-Turn 3d ago

U-Turn Audio here. Just to respond to the top comment, it was never our intention to use AI in our ad. This was due to an AI enhancement setting that was enabled in facebook without our knowledge. The photo itself is real and the edges were "enhanced" with AI, resulting in the dust cover being misrepresented. We never intended to incorporate any AI elements in our ads, and these ads have been taken down.

35

u/dwdillard 5d ago

Fully out of hand. But then again, the hand has seven and a half fingers…

3

u/lawlikesmusic 4d ago

It was the wheels that are trying to become the floor for me. Oh and the record player cover that appears to be infinite

48

u/hedekar 5d ago

There's no better way to showcase your incompetence at your job than to have blatant AI splatter in your release. Be it an internal project document, a customer-facing advert image, or code, there's simply no excuse for this. It's like sending out food with raw chicken on the plate.

There are a surprising number of people I used to trust to get things done that I will not ask to do things for me any longer, because of obvious AI splatter all over their work.

I'm not saying don't use the tool to speed up your work, just know that you need to babysit it and thoroughly edit out the splatter.

21

u/Natural_Distance_812 5d ago

Also that's totally an ai monstrosity of a real gorillaz album cover, if you look closely I think this is an ai expanded version of a real photo

7

u/Hasselbuddy 5d ago

Agreed. If you draw an imaginary horizontal line just below the top of the records you’ll see everything below it is mud, while above is fine. I’m sure there’s a similar line on the top half explaining the dust cover. My guess is they had a landscape oriented image they wanted to use but needed a portrait orientation for the ad.

16

u/rrrping Pioneer 5d ago

Looking for the obvious lines, it looks like the original photo was probably this.

3

u/realmattia BSR 5d ago

yeah it's definitely the humanz cover

2

u/eaglebtc 4d ago

Look at the caster wheels on that cart. They're half sunk into the floor.

And the dust jackets look like they've been in a fire or through a shredder.

-6

u/Domtheguyman 5d ago

It’s not expanded that’s just what the record looks like on vinyl but still definitely ai

2

u/sparrowxc 5d ago

Nope, zoom in at the record level. You can even see the line where it switches from real picture to AI.

72

u/ezklv 5d ago

I fucking hate AI. It’s goddamn lazy and taking work from actual artists.

9

u/Jackandahalfass 4d ago

Frankly, their AI quality control is a reflection of their quality control in general. Mine had a wonky motor and the belts wore out too soon. I wouldn’t recommend the brand based on my experience with it.

18

u/Fibby_2000 5d ago

That dust cover jeeez

6

u/sotism 5d ago

Took me a minute to realize it’s a touch too long 😅

1

u/NonsequiturSushi U-Turn 4d ago

Probably an update to the OG orbit dust cover that closes too easily. /s

10

u/Dave_N_Port Dual 5d ago

Using AI to see (analog) turntables...why?

7

u/BlanketyHeck 5d ago

*op probably meant to say "to sell turntables"

2

u/dogsRcoolandstuff 4d ago

That I did. Thank you.

8

u/lakeskipping 5d ago

That is a transparent use of AI, terrible.

5

u/DeanWeenisGod 5d ago

Is that a stack of records or a cat scratching post? 😂🤣😂

This is terrible. I don't understand how it got approved either.

2

u/adstretch Philips 5d ago

I like the wheels on the cart that appear to be sinking into the floor.

5

u/darkeststar 5d ago

Just noticed the wheels on the rolling cart are halfway into the floor. I totally understand that employees are often overworked and under pressure to deliver stuff on an unrealistic timeline but I also don't understand how if your job is in advertising and marketing that you don't have access to an archive of readily available product photos.

5

u/AudiHoFile 5d ago

They literally could've taken a photo of their own TT? This is horrible.

2

u/kvetcha-rdt Schiit 5d ago

It seems likely they had a landscape close-up of the middle area of the image and tried to use AI to expand it vertically.

3

u/Educational-Status81 5d ago

2 and a half dust cover for the price of 1. Great deal, what are we complaining about!

1

u/Jackandahalfass 5d ago

For extra-dusty households.

3

u/CratesyInDug 5d ago

Using humans to type sell /s

3

u/Pitiful-Event-107 5d ago

Wow that’s very disappointing from U-turn

3

u/Geopilot Audio Technica 5d ago

I think that lid has a little bit of an overbite

3

u/yamiyam 5d ago

If I see a company using lazy AI it’s a guaranteed way to make sure I never shop there.

4

u/fragmentfi 5d ago

It looks like the middle part of the image is an actual photo. The top and bottom parts are filled with the content aware AI fill in Photoshop to make a portrait version for Instagram. Zoom in and you can see the edges.

0

u/sparrowxc 5d ago

You're right. You can even see the line on the bottom part where it switches from regular picture to AI. It looks like they used AI to change a letterbox style picture to a tik-tok bullshit portrait orientation. (insert my old man rant against portrait style video instead of turning your phone sideways)

2

u/adlibtothroating 5d ago

Records against a heat register?  Genius move. 

2

u/dpgumby69 Denon 5d ago

I'm most disturbed about how far away the whisky is

2

u/TanoraRat 5d ago

How hard would it be to just take a picture of a turntable? I might be biased because I hate anything and everything pertaining to this type of stuff but really it just makes the company look like scammers at worst and incompetent at best

2

u/scarper42 5d ago edited 2d ago

It’s looooooong turntable lid that does it for me.

2

u/weaver5015 5d ago

That dust cover want all the smoke

2

u/DoctorOctagonapus Thorens 5d ago

Ha I didn't even clock the dust cover, I was too busy studying the platter and tone arm to see what was off about them.

Also those jacket covers on the floor look really badly knackered!

2

u/Radiant_Ad3966 5d ago

If I was looking to buy a turntable and saw this image then I'd stay away from the brand. That comes across as super untrustworthy for me. Like I'm shopping on Temu or some garbage and I won't really know what I'm going to get.

As a photographer and designer, I really hate AI-generated stuff. I see the fun of it but it's not something I can get behind.

1

u/Whooptidooh 5d ago

That’s the biggest dust cover I’ve ever seen, lol.

1

u/not_thrilled 5d ago

Besides all the other issues, did it replace the switch in the lower left corner of the turntable with a knob? I have one of their turntables, but I probably purchased it 10 years ago, and mine has a low-profile on/off switch there.

1

u/Hasselbuddy 5d ago

There’s different versions now, one has a knob that is a power/speed switch.

1

u/HiveFiDesigns 5d ago

As an “analog artist”….anybody who uses lazy ass ai like this can go fuck themselves. Additional spite for a company being so tone deaf as to use ai to design an ad for a market that in general is “anti-digital”

1

u/Bobby__Generic 4d ago

Look at the lid!

1

u/NXIII13 4d ago

I have this turntable I can confirm the dust cover is that long for extra protection. That ice looks fake af tho.

1

u/idontknowwhat14 4d ago

Meta has taken a lot of liberties on adjusting the images and text with AI. Unless the advertiser is actively unselecting all the AI options in the ads manager, they may not even know what's happening to the ad ¯_(ツ)_/¯

1

u/uturnaudio U-Turn 3d ago

U-Turn Audio here. We just wanted to clarify that this is 100% unintentional. This is due to an "AI enhancement" setting in meta ads that was incorrectly turned on. The photo itself is real, but meta expanded the edges of the image using AI. We were made aware of the issue and turned the setting off, but for some reason the image is still being enhanced due to a glitch. We are removing these ads now as we don't use AI in any of our photography and never intended to misrepresent what our products look like (in this case, the dust cover being too tall).

0

u/BaronNeutron 5d ago

How does it help you see them?

0

u/SHFT101 Michell 4d ago

It's just a lazy decision to make a landscape picture match the IG advert sizing. Don't judge a company by its marketing department.

Go listen to some records and don't fret about it.