I received a message from Kaisu Tolvanen, the Head of Communications and Marketing at the City of Vantaa, who was an old acquaintance of mine. She had seen my AI-generated illustrations on social media and approached me with a very interesting project proposal.

The idea of the project was to create election advertising for the City of Vantaa in a really distinctive way, and above all, to use AI in the process. The images would stand out from the crowd, and the quirks of AI would also be visible in the images. The campaign’s aim was to increase voter turnout and raise awareness of the opportunities for influence and involvement in elections.

The plan was to illustrate four fictional stereotypical characters. The hope was that Vantaa residents would vote for genuine individuals who championed important issues for them in Parliament.

The characters were defined as Farmer-Bertil, Stuckup-Janne, Pensioner-Selma Korhonen, and HipHop-Jessica D, each of whom represented very different places and values both externally and internally.

AI is a tremendously useful tool for creating these types of characters. However, the first AI-generated images were too realistic, so we ended up “degrading” them so that no one would believe that these characters were real people. Bertil grew large donkey ears, Janne had a couple of extra eyes, Selma peeled off into quite a lizard, and Jessica D’s number of fingers and head size went under image processing.

Overall, this campaign was one of the funniest projects I have ever been involved in. The amount of laughter we had when I began generating the characters with AI was the same on the client’s side.

This project also illustrates the possibilities of AI for illustrating the real and unreal. The tools are always chosen based on the specifications to achieve the best possible results.

Thanks to Kaisu and other communications professionals at the City of Vantaa for allowing me to be part of this highly distinctive campaign!

“We wanted our campaign to make people look at our message again. We believe that after a quick glance, people will return to the image to see what they saw. AI has been widely discussed and debated recently. Some fear its arrival, while others anticipate the possibilities it will bring. With our campaign, we wanted to demonstrate that AI has its place, but in parliament, we hope to see genuine people making decisions about our common issues.”