Artificial intelligence is in the news constantly these days, and it seemingly will touch every aspect of life. That includes reprographics. A webinar on the uses of AI in reprographics on April 25 touched on three categories of applications: design, printing and marketing.
This article includes slides from the webinar and comments from the presenter, IRgA Managing Director Ed Avis. To watch a recording of the webinar, click here to log into the Member Portal, then click on the Recorded Webinars tab on the left.
Application 1: Design
This first category is really the biggest category that I think reprographic shops are using and are going to use AI for. A lot of repro shops don't want to compete with their design clients. However, with AI, some of this stuff becomes so easy that you might elect to start providing some elementary design for your clients when it makes sense. Creating art using an AI driven program is probably the most obvious thing to do. And you can see right here, using the AI function of 123RF.com, I typed in “woman using a large format printer to print a map of Chicago,” and this is the image that emerged. It's weird, printers don't print up into the ceiling like this one does, but as you can see the AI figured it out, “Okay, yeah, here's a large format printer, here's a woman, here's a map of Chicago, let's put these pieces together.” And it did this literally in seconds. So you could imagine that with a little practice, you could really get this part of an AI tool working very well.
Those same tools or a similar set of tools can be used to really enhance the quality of the art that your clients bring to you. This falls into four categories. There's background removal, there's multiple versioning, there's image cleanup, and then there's upscaling, which I think really is the number one possible thing for a reprographic shop to use this software for.
I typed into that AI tool that I use “woman ordering blueprint at a counter” and within seconds three versions pop up. It's fascinating. Now, I wanted to include this photo too because if you look at the woman in the main image there, that kind of reveals some of the weird things that can happen. If you look closely, you can see she appears to have extra fingers on her right hand, which is weird and gross. Obviously that could be fixed with a little easy manipulation. But multiple versioning is something that I think you might find very useful in your work. You can imagine if a client says, I need such and such a project, and you provide three options like this, which are somewhat different, but still all on topic, you're going to make that client happy much more quickly than if you have to go back to a designer every time to create a new version.
In the old days, if you put in an image in your RIP that wasn't the right resolution, a good RIP would try to upscale it, but it would probably just reproduce the pixels and kind of fill in the blanks with more pixels of exactly the same type. It was filling in the blanks with a rough guess as to what would've been there. With AI, what it's actually doing is reaching back into a deep well of knowledge of having analyzed millions and millions of photos to make a much more accurate prediction of what the next pixel would've been if that image had had a higher resolution. So this photo of this yellow bird gives you that example. The bottom half was the original photo, and it's grainy. You can see clearly the resolution wasn't good enough. The top half is after applying the AI upscaling function. The AI looked at the original image, reached back into its knowledge and said, okay, the next pixel to this one based on my analysis is this pixel. And as you can see, it's fantastic. It looks like you started with a high resolution image.
Application 2: Printing
And then the next category, and obviously this is a huge category for IRgA members, is how to use AI to help with printing. And these five functions are really, I think the best ways. These are the ones I've identified. Number one touches really is connected back to the design aspect, and that's enhanced print quality. Again, using these super high tech sophisticated technologies, AI can help you by optimizing the resolution, the color, balance, everything that might be wrong with a file. The AI will notice if there's a problem on your print much more quickly than if you're looking at it with a naked eye. Obviously that can help you with waste reduction and making sure prints are good.
...Next is personalization. Now using that kind of variable data stuff you've already done a million times, I'm sure, especially if you have any kind of a direct mail service in your business, and that's important. But AI driven personalization is different and it's more personal. What it's doing is looking at the data from demographics and looking at the characteristics of people who might be interested in a particular product and then applying some subtle changes to the marketing copy based on that. So instead of just saying the person's name like variable data does, or the name and the address on a printed piece, instead, it might change the offer or it might say, “Okay, we recognize that this individual is a senior citizen, they're going to be more interested in this product of ours than that product,” or something like that. So it's a very in-depth type of personalization.
.... Then predictive maintenance, AI can do that. Current maintenance schedules obviously are very effective. Your car has a maintenance schedule, your printers do already, but using predictive maintenance means that the AI is taking into account how many prints have gone, how much ink has been used, how much time has passed, what the quality of the prints has been, what the atmosphere is, is there a lot of humidity in the room? It can take into account dozens of factors beyond what your current maintenance schedule is relying on, which is probably time and clicks.
Application 3: Marketing
The most popular AI tool that is being used in marketing nowadays beyond the design is to help write marketing copy. ChatGPT is the main product in that regard, and it is really astounding. Here is an example on the screen. You can see I entered that prompt. You can see it says you up at the top write a history of reprographics in the United States. I mean, that's an arcane topic really. It's not like chat GPT could find something easy. It's way different than typing that into Google. ChatGPT immediately dives into the internet, finds every possible reference, and then spills out this copy. And I only took a picture of the first page here, but it kept going and going and going, and this literally was in seconds. You can see it comes up with a reasonably accurate history written pretty well, and it's interesting, and that was all done automatically.So for marketing copy, you can imagine if you type in something like advantages of a digital color printing for sign making, wow, you can get some nice copy immediately.
This article is just an excerpt of the webinar. To watch a recording of the entire webinar, click here to log into the Member Portal, then click on the Recorded Webinars tab on the left.