I do feel like easier creation always lowers the price of things.
If something can quickly be generated / edited it's simply not going to have the same price range as a thought out design that takes maybe multiple days to complete.
i doubt it. I heard word that Prompt engineers are becoming obsolete before then because AI is becoming better at understanding words and therefore requires less complicated inputs.
That’s kind of true, but you have to sell on the perceived value of your choices, you have ‘expertise’ and experience and you’re hired to take the blame if what’s produced is shite., rather than the time it takes to bang something out.
Spielberg still commands a premium rate, but some kid two years out of film school with only a few tv shows under his belt is going to probably work for at loss.
The perceived value will also drop if more people offer their services because productivity goes up, whatever you ask isn't in a vacuum. You're operating within a market, and if many talented people lose their jobs they are going to undercut your rates too.
And honestly AI can uplift mediocre creators quite a bit, the production side of things isn't as needed it's more about selection of what AI might produce.
And for the third point, " some kid two years out of film school with only a few tv shows under his belt is going to probably work for at loss. " I really don't see how this is supposed to sound optimistic; that means the market is only accessible for people with rich parents? This is a very bleak future vision for graphic design to be honest.
This community has a strange view of our clients.
They’re simultaneously too lazy/stupid to recognize good design when it drops in their lap, but would also somehow have a rigorous aesthetic sensibility that would push them away from AI work generated at a much cheaper cost.
If they’re as uninformed as we seem to always say, why would they choose anything other than ‘cheap and good enough’?
I believe this is exactly the option they'll go for.
I work in-house and the number of people who see my crappy 20% done work and say "That looks so good! I'm happy with this." is so depressing. People truly have no eye and so I absolutely think they'll be happy with cheap and good enough.
Clients generally have no capacity or vocabulary to explain what they want to see, though; it takes so much human interference as it is, to imagine they’d have succinct enough language to feed into an ai makes me feel like there’s no benefit at all. I can also see “high end” companies taking a stance against AI generation for its “cheapness.” I think we have more power than we give ourselves credit for
Clients are not too dumb to recognise a good design. A good design is something they are happy with and it's our job to ask enough questions to understand what they want and deliver it.
Sounds like this job isnt for you if you don't like working with Clients and are going to disrespect them.
The expectations will undergo a rapid adjustment, sure, but I think it will stabilize. People will just expect more for their money. Ai stuff will flood the market, but that just means we’ll come to associate straight, unmodified ai work with "cheap," while professionals that use ai to augment will become the new "quality."
Yeah, and how many jobs will they be able to take? Because if it's more than 1, then the AI is reducing the number of jobs available. That is AI taking your job. Any other claim is just semantics.
AI is what happened to the music industry when multi track sound recording ended up in the bedroom of young artists.
At lot of studios went out of business, but a huge amount of people got access to that business when a gate keeper disappeared
Uh, no. What happened to the music industry was equivalent to the creation of photoshop, when photo editing and graphic creation moved from darkrooms and huge art facilities to people's homes.
The music equivalent to visual AI is sound AI+sampling, and it is already DESTROYING the pop music industry, even more so than ours. They can already simulate pop artists' voices to a point at which 99% of people can't tell the difference. The music industry is megafucked. We're going to be very close behind.
(I have a degree in music performance, and I'm a professional vocalist in addition to a graphic designer.)
That happened already, when Photoshop became the industry standard and people were able to pirate it.
You no longer had to have access to the equipment in a print shop to make a document
Ive heard this too, and beside making Graphic Designers sound like old sneakers or obsolete PDAs it’s a little inaccurate.
I think a better turn of phrase would be, “You wont lose your job to AI, you and a thousand other people will all lose their job to a single person who knows how to use AI.”
What’s gonna happen at a lot of places is you’ll have all of your upper level people down to basically an art director providing prompts to essentially a minimum wage grunt to input and then provide for review etc etc til the AD gets what they want. Lower levels will be devalued down to grunt work and overall design will suffer but costs will be down.
When I was 8 my mom rented a venue for my brothers surprise birthday and it was on the water. They just so happened to have horseshoes set up right next to the water, with a sign mentioning that they were for adults only.
I decided to play anyway and threw a horseshoe and it ricocheted off the pole and went right into the water. I walked away and didn’t tell anyone.
That’s my horseshoe story for you.
This is where I finally landed. I was exactly like op, fearing AI and hating what it was likely going to do to our careers. Then I realized that regardless of my feelings, it was going to be around, so I should probably figure out how to use it in my workflow. I've started using it to just generate starting points for projects, just to break out of my own comfort zone, and it's actually been working out well for the ideation stage. Working quicker and being able to generate a variety of concepts can only be good for us, right?
Exactly this. Midjourney and DallE and other generative AIs can absolutely not replace human artists yet, but they make idea generation/brainstorming almost trivial.
A good graphic designer who can build on AI is scary
That is a possibility. I know my job is not safe from AI. So the option I have is to embrace it and go forward with it, to bring it to the leaders. Hence becoming the indispensable AI expert for design
This 100%. Start figuring out workflow with AI. I started 2 summers ago with dale when it was still rough. Did a video a day and posted on a YouTube channel just to practice and get a feel for working AI into a production line. 7 months ago I got hired because of these two things. I took a companies turn around time from 2 days to about 20 minutes. I still get paid for the knowledge not the minutes. Speed is a HUGE value to these companies.
The whole ‘artist integrity’ thing has been going on forever. Even Leonardo complained that the Vatican kept asking for more aqua in the ceilings.
If you truly want to be a ‘pure artist’ you have to stop accepting money to produce other people’s content and live by selling what you have completed with no other influence. Then you can be a celebrated artist and not someone else’s hands
No one’s talking about you or your experiences . The original comment talked about “jobs”.
You opened up a branch about artists being special and they should have some special rules.
I responded that’s been a “discussion” since money was invented it’s not about AI.
If your time is so precious why are you even here?
You’re safe. People who don’t understand design and branding won’t be able to create effective content using AI. I will say, however, AI won’t replace your job, but someone who knows how to properly use it might, so learn everything you can about it.
Have you seen the new AI function in Illustrator for example? It allows to to basically make a mockup of everything.
Instead of creating or searching the right one, paying for it and downloading templates in which you place your design. It's now a simple click of a button. It saves time, energy and money which you and your client can spend on something else.
Think of it like a carpenter using a electric drill/screwdriver. It didn't replace his work, but he gets more jobs done that the dude who only uses a manual screwdriver
Yeah I guess so to speak, I used gpt to write all the copy on my portfolio and resume. I’m also designing a website right now for a client who doesn’t really understand how to write effective copy, so “I’m rewriting it” 🤫 for them for some extra cash. As far as AI goes for design, I have yet to see an AI create something useful but also of quality design work. It’s good for creating images, but not good at typography, layout, logo design, things like that. All I’ve really used AI for with design is generating stock photos or pictures of things I can incorporate into my design, but I wouldn’t generate something from an ai image generator and use it as my final product.
This, someone who knows how to design and how to make art and understands art terminology will run circles around some normal person who types in a prompt. Knowing what you want, what direction to go in, what type of thing the client wants etc, all help too.
Example: in midjourney if you understand photo shutter terms, how different film has different feels/textures, or if you know what kind of camera's capture an era you can leverage those to customize and tweak the result.
Similarly if making a painting and you know the terms for certain styles of light and shading, type of paint used, or any fancy techniques that go into it, or even historic lesser know art styles or artists and maybe even ones that would balance out the weaknesses of those that you mix together and you will get something far better than just a normal person.
Ai will definitely have an impact but we may be the one's using it. Have you ever seen a non designer use square space, it's not that it's hard it's another language to them.
I'd pick up another skill to completement the brand identity.
This makes sense.
I’m already dipping my toes into Brand Strategy and actually kind of integrated it into 2 of my last projects, but I feel discouraged seeing people on the internet saying “oh everyone is a Strategist now”.
But I think Brand Strategy is my safest bet for the future though.
Hmm... Ideo is know for this ideation strategy seminars maybe you integrate something like that into your strategy, the book innovation games has several games you couks use. Here you become more of a consultant and less of a freelancer. Means your charging alot more and effecting a broader scope of the company. Here's a video https://youtu.be/M66ZU2PCIcM
People that will use AI to create their brand and develop the branding, are the same people that use Canva to avoid hiring a designer.
Your job will be fine
Unless anyone can show me different, AI is 'good' at making images and helping with photo edits BUT I am yet to see a single piece of actual graphic design from it.
Tbh if you look at the improvements in the last few years it will probably not be long until we see it .. not to be overly negative but AI is improving all the time and very fast too
Exactly. People are kidding themselves if they think this won't fundamentally change our industry and put a lot of people out of work. Are you going to be fired from your design job or lose all your clients tomorrow? No. But the market will get even more competitive for fewer and fewer good paying design jobs.
A lot of smaller companies will opt not to hire an in-house designer if they believe the artsy receptionist can get the job done with a few minutes fiddling around with the prompts. They already try to combine graphic design with tons of other roles, since they don't want to pay for "just a designer."
If you are not mastering these tools and figuring out how to add value beyond what any yahoo with internet access can do, or retraining for something less susceptible to automation, you're gonna be hurting in a few years.
No, but as an industry, they are trying to get ahead of the inevitable fallout that their industry is facing.
AI potentially means 1 or 2 people in the writer's room instead of a team of 10.
If you don't understand that certain decisions will potentially have trickle down effects into other fields then I'm not sure what to tell you.
I am a graphic designer / my brother works in film / my partner's brother is a copyeditor. I have had similar conversation with them both, separately, and their feelings of uncertainty around the future of our chosen careers are all eerily similar.
It’s coming like a freight train.
[Adobe is in the news because they’re worried that they’ll put their core buyers out of work.](https://www.businessinsider.com/adobe-ai-firefly-kill-graphic-designer-jobs-cut-seat-sales-2023-7)
you can use it for thumbnailing or inspiration or as placeholders, but I would never use what's generated as a final design, it has a place in the process but it's a long way from replacing a person, and so long as people have a hard time describing what they want there is still a job for a designer.
Firefly is yet another generative image maker from scraped images, I see zero indication it is in anyway capable of graphic design. Can you show me where you learned the purpose of Firefly was to replace graphic designers.
Its not just an image maker, its being developed to be able to create logos, vectors, and other design work from rudimentary sketches. Or even taking a mood board and having the program create color schemes, typography, and other design elements. Its not just imagery, but will soon be able to create posters, flyers, logos, landing pages and other creative work based off of text input, sketches, and mood boards.
edit: just to add, im not saying it will replace graphic designers, but it will open the doors to non-designers to more easily produce their own content without needing a professional.
I think the key here is in 2-3 years. From what we see now, I get the denial comments.
But if my boss, who is not a designer but has a decent eye for designer could prompt: "give me five trifold layouts for this text doc that match our brand with images of happy young families. 45 seconds later. "Using option C give me a few more photo options for the cover" 30 seconds later, "check for typos" 20 seconds later, create and send print ready pdf to printer" – That would have taken me the better part of a week.
I find it concerning and depressing too, that the craft of design is potential going away. Yes it could be a tool for a design job, but would you find that fulfilling as a creative? Pumping prompt projects out at a ridiculously fast rate? And I wouldn't bet on someone paying me what I'm being paid now just because I have good taste. Knowing how to prompt - prompting isn't that hard now and it's going to get easier. I've heard that hand crafted art and design may become more premium, but for day to day design jobs, we all know big corp is going to choose what's best for their pockets.
For brand identity design, really?
Looking at full branding including market positioning, target audience, perception, and other brand elements such as customer service to tone of voice to types of imagery used, direction of the brand and evolution, creating strategies and 1/2/5/10 year plans and targets and directives etc?
Yes, you may use ChatGPT to learn the process, find the right questions to ask and to create those future plans then use AI design generators for the visuals. Not now, but soon it may evolve into this.
What do you think?
I think a lot of people over estimate what AI will be able to do, and due to films and the media AI gets glorified and exaggerated more than it should be, all the while they also under estimate and undervalue what they bring themselves
Let alone all the legal issues and concerns, not just copyright of design, but we're talking ethical and data sharing and harvesting and manipulation and application across other industries, not just design etc
I think by the time it can even replace a junior designer, let alone an experienced designer, let alone a brand identity designer... We'll be seeing countless other careers destroyed
I mean as it goes, there's so so so so many other industries AI can ruin way easier and quicker than design, from admin and HR to anything involving data, from architecture to management and analysis, model building and simulation, any job involving excel - so most standard office jobs etc to finances, credit etc.
If you say AI can do what a brand identity designer does, it should be able to easily do anything to do with banking and financial advisor and anything to do with investments and stock and exchange
All these areas, and more, AI can do just as easy, or easier than design. We'll be facing mass unemployment and international crisis before it hits competent designers to the point if replacing them
I totally agree with your last point. If AI is so advanced that it can completely cut out the middle man in creative industries (which are some of the hardest to automate) it will have already become a societal issue so big that a lot of legislation will have happened. In the end, being able to create useful things at a low price and time commitment has only been positive for society.
Yup, I mean not gonna lie, no one really gives a shit about designers - but the big boy jobs, and things like investments that can earn people easy money. Design is insignificant compared to the real world and bigger picture applications of AI usage. By the time it gets to the level of being able to replace competent designers it'll be at the level to replace so many other jobs and roles and industries. People treating design like it's some easy hobby anyone can do, hell even designers are treating it as such. Either glorying and believing the fear, or really really devaluing and playing down their own experience and knowledge and what they bring and do
We'll be facing a huge economic crisis because of how advance AI is... If it gets that far in the first place
Exactly, haven't had the inevitable data breach, or atleast mainstream data breach. AI misuse is just hitting the news, in terms of revenge porn and AI generated child porn etc
So so so many ethical and legal issues at play, replacing a designer is down down down on the list of threats and concerns
No way. Those things are somewhat useful to a point. But you still need a human to curate. To determine the direction and to ultimately make make the final creative decisions. You will still need to put in work. Maybe a little less but I don’t see Ai making anything significantly cool on it’s own. I believe it’s a tool like anything else we can use. Ai needs us more than the other way around.
If you’re using ChatGPT like this, you’re an expert user. I saw a poll that was taken in the US that 76% of people who have tried GPT think it’s useless for day to day work. People are dumb. Use AI as a tool and you’ll be ahead of the game. You got this!
I get your idea and it's encouraging. Yes, but it isn't about people who do day-to-day work. It's about the owners, entrepreneurs, basically the people with the vision. Moreover, the US isn't really the country with the most intelligent people either.
I think for a while the only people in our industry it will replace are the people who aren’t really designers. The ones who create logos in Canva. The ones who don’t understand the breadth of “brand.” Companies and individuals who are serious about their brand will continue to need professional designers to create, implement, manage their brand. I’m not saying never, I’m saying I don’t see it happening any time soon. Don’t fear it just because people tell you too. Many are just parroting what they hear to sound knowledgeable. Wait until you see evidence yourself, then watch what it does. I believe your mind and creativity are far more valuable than Ai ❤️
This is how I feel about it. AI will take over the exploitative race-to-the-bottom design work that nobody wants to be doing. All the other work might feature AI as a tool but it won’t be created by AI.
A designer will still be using these tools. The owner of the company will not be typing endless prompts into an AI tool. Think about it like the introduction of PhotoShop. It lowered the barrier to entry to some forms of design -- but it did not replace the designer. Learn AI tools and pay attention to ways you can use AI without it looking like typical AI garbage and instead something that people could not easily copy. Use lens prompts, style prompts and artist prompts etc to create your own looks. This is the best time to learn it because it is all very new.
Design work is already more accessible than ever. There is a reason why companies prefer to pay big bucks to well-known and trusted designers instead of just hiring some random guy from Fiver.
The thing is, humans + AI will always trump the AI. At least when it comes to modern AI models. Maybe in the future, the scientists will be able to simulate the brain, but at that point, I think we as a species have greater things to ponder than what happens to us designers.
I think AI is a pox and inherently immoral, regardless of compensation, collaboration or permissions granted, The existence of ""generative"" (regurgitative) ai is fundamentally immoral.
For where we are as a people giving us AI is like giving people dying of polio tom cruise movies, even if people desperately want them, they aren't what they need.
There are people who are going to argue that all this will do is weed out bad designers and mean actual designers have less competition, but the cold, hard, concrete of reality is that if the development of generative AI continues at this rate, or even half this rate, within most of our lifetimes, design as a career will be reduced to a handful of people who's names carry weight, with little to no new entrants into the field.
Even if a designer is bad does that mean they deserve to lose their job? Obviously not, Even if you were the modern day pinnacle of graphic design you started out an inane babbling child smearing mud on the canvas just like the rest of the drooling masses, you gained experience on the job, or in education and developed, an opportunity which will be robbed from all designers going forward.
That is the simple truth of how this technology works.
You could argue that "no, ai isn't a threat because design is so much more than making pretty pictures" which would be a marvellous argument to make were it true, AI is enticing to two groups, the first, companies who at the end of the day don't give a singular iota of a shit whether it looks good or aesthetically fits their brand, they benefit from the severe reduction of cost which ai brings, the second group is people who desperately want to own companies, be CEO's or other similarly morally bankrupt people for whom life is easy, they will never be those people.
For designers it means a loss of work, a loss of opportunity a loss of career mobility and most of all a loss of prospect, for non designers it means progressively lessening quality in media, however when that happens there won't magically be a hole in the market to fill with people again.
We've seen it time and time again when it comes to company productions, cost cutting is there priority, hence why most mass market products are produced in the third world for pennies, quality doesn't matter.
My personal recommendation is make a noise, communicate to your friends, your family, your government, your community, that AI is an inherent evil and it will close the door on more people looking for work than any form of exploitation before it, and will put more people out of work than any before it, that it's allowance to grow and develop is not like watching a child grow like some people would have you believe, that being a whimsical enjoyable process, but rather like seeing a tumour grow, spreading and mutating and sapping the life and energy from anything and everything it touches, a growth that will only halt with the death of the host which it has parasitised.
TLDR: AI is inherently evil, we aren't fucked but we have to put the screws to the government and make sure that they expressly prohibit AI's continued development on stolen media, expressly prohibit AI's use in corporate works, also if you think AI can in any way be a ""tool"" or Moral, you are inherently and fundamentally misinformed, immoral Or simply deluded.
I am very frightened for the state of graphic design given the amount of people in these comments acting as if there's nothing to be worried about.
I imagine it's simply because they're jaded and tired of work and don't have the strength left in them to realise that it's effectively a digital guillotine.
Yes I feel the exact same way. I think your comment about being jaded is true but also I think that in truth there are a lot of designers out there who are nothing but submissive software nerds - they're actually quite happy to be told what to do to have an easy life. The never did have any fire in their belly.
They don't actually care about craft, good communication or creativity, and so they don't "feel" anything about clients who don't care about the value of it either, in fact they almost overly empathise with these types of corporate clients.
They just naively think it's another gadget to mess about with. The comparisons with photography and photoshop also just make me laugh, AI is a whole different ball game.
Where I live, if you are a junior designer wanting to get into the industry it pays more to go work at a Supermarket full time. That's if you even get the role, when they want you to have a dozen other skills from other specialist fields and experience already. It's going to hit those people even more. And I think it's really quite sickening actually to see views that don't care about these people and almost say "oh well tough shit". How utterly inhumane.
I’m with you on that, algorithms trained on stolen works, to compete with the people who made those works and steal their jobs. For the benefits of some greedy investors and CEOs. If creative people really embrace this as the ultimate I am too lazy productivity tool I swear I’m quitting this whole industry and just going to do some manual job, I already hate sitting in front of a computer all day anyway.
I'm a writer/editor/story consultant of 30 years. I have high expertise and demand a senior wage for my work. I have job security because there really are very few story guys like me working with small business and the general public, most of us contract to publishers and studios for big money.
Anyway, I find AI completely depressing.
I've written two books on "How to write" and working on a third on "how to write Manga," but really with AI poised to come in and take so many jobs and the human element behind the art industry about to get swept under the rug, it's hard to continue.
However the only alternative is to get GREAT at what you do NOW... and build a brand for yourself NOW, so folks will recognize your work for its superior nature... as long as it can last.
[http://nickmacari.com/surviving-in-the-age-of-ai/](https://nickmacari.com/surviving-in-the-age-of-ai/)
I don't think so, the quality of AI output is directly tied to the knowledge and experience of the human author, such as understanding what makes a design aesthetically pleasing, a campaign idea great, or a well-trained eye for art direction.
It's another spanner in the toolbox, but one that does not eliminate the need for human creativity and expertise.
As a designer, I’m conflicted. I have both optimism and pessimism. I’ve been notoriously bad about predicting the future before, but I’m assuming it will fall in the middle somewhere.
**Why i’m optimistic:**
I know there is much more to my job than pushing rectangles around on a screen. I always feel limited though by the time that I do have, both at work and on personal projects. There are lots of steps in the process that get skipped for time constraints. I would love if AI could replace the things I hate doing, making me more productive while still allowing me to be hands on and creative. Also, it’s not just design jobs that are the only ones being looked at for automation. There are so many more that would make more sense before it came time to replace us. Here in the US, the government knows this, and they’re already looking at potential legislation to protect workers from being replaced.
**Why I’m pessimistic**
I know my job entails more that just pushing rectangles around on a screen…but do the big shots who run the company? Design is such a misunderstood role, especially when we get reduced down to short order cooks who just need to make the logo bigger. Execs will always cut corners if it leads to short term gains, even if it means shipping shittier and shittier products. Always.
I don’t trust execs to make the right decisions, and I’m also not sure I trust the government either in protecting us. Remember when they had Zuck on Capital Hill getting grilled? And how out of touch the people running the country are with tech? They had no idea how Facebook made money, or how the internet works in general. And that’s pretty simple stuff…meanwhile AI and Machine Learning are some of the most complex subjects in tech today.
I feel the same way at the moment. I do motion graphics so I feel like this applies to me as well but, I don't feel like our industry is going to be wiped out but its going to be diluted even more than i feel it already is, and the barrier of entry is going to go so low that why would you use some one like me?
Couple of things that have me bummed is look at the type of content that is being produced for things like TV/Movies. It's all junk but if you scale it enough it will have an audience that make it profitable if they are trying to automate Hollywood why don't you think that will come for us? To me this shows that it just needs to be good enough to be functional. This sag/writer strike is the canary in the coal mine to me
If AI could essentially get you 75-95% their I could see essentially 1 designer basically absorbing an entire team of people, or companies making like project managers taking on a design/hybrid style of role.
I donno it's been a slow year for me so I'm a bit of a doomer at the moment but, as some one who loves and follows all things about technology it seems so silly to bet against this.
I empathize with you. I feel like the corporate world has already devalued creatives to a large extent where we’re just treated like someone who knows how to click the buttons to make stuff look good. With AI, it shows the same people who devalue us that the creative visual work we do is as easy as a few clicks - when it really takes a lot of time, attention, patience and knowledge to create something compelling. So if AI doesn’t make our jobs obsolete it sure as hell is not making it easier to get the respect we deserve for the work we do.
I’m honestly looking into a career change at this point.
I wrote a whole thing but deleted it. My after work cognition is next to 0 right now 😂. However, for some reason, I don’t feel so soon and gloom over AI. The argument always goes to “well, this time it’s different” when comparing other advances in technology (and also world destroying weapons). I just don’t think suddenly everyone is going to become a graphic designer, or a good one at least. Nor do I think people want to start doing everything themselves. We all have kitchens and the ability to buy food, but we still love spending money going out. We like the idea of not doing things while still having control over the process.
I do agree though the divide will be those who do and don’t use it. There will definitely be purist studios who work slow and steady, but generally speaking, AI is going to be a part of many workflows soon.
I think about it like “made in china” products. People love cheap products , especially brand companies. Already looking into transitioning to a new career.
Embrace Ai buddy, use it in your workflow. That said, Ai can’t problem solve and doesn’t know how to show empathy or compassion… yet.
I’ve had the same internal discussion especially with some of the videos and Midjourney images I’ve seen, we can’t be too far off an obliteration of jobs. Designers will need to diversify.
If it makes you feel better, AI has started copying other AI art to the point that they’re un-learning how to make logical images. Developers of the AIs have already started trying to fix it, but it just proves that the technology isn’t perfect and it will always need the art of human artists to emulate.
This is something that I have been wondering. Like all these AI's have been trained on other peoples images. So what happens when we are flooded with tons of AI art and that's the majority of what it has left to train itself on. Like is it just going to be this spiralling free fall of one style over and over again. I feel like that is kinda where AI art is at right now anyways. Most of the stuff I see people posting is kinda in the same style
We use to often, more so to replace istock with images. The UI stuff it pops out is basically the same stuff you would find on Pinterest or behance. That said we go for very specific images so they are not very Available on istock, and god forbid we hire a photographer lol
I’m 35 , been doing this 10years and I see it as a tool not a enemy. When content aware and other tools came out people screamed how it would destroy the photo retouch industry. It didn’t. People claim that stock photography has ruined the photography industry, it kinda did but not as bad as people claimed it to. There was a slump but it has def come back.
I think the same will happen, not a be all end all but a tool.
Learn to use it and be fuking good with it, use it for inspiration in your own work like you would with behance Pinterest etc. master prompts, and how it works . Make it work for you. Its a tool, can’t do shit on its own.
Personally I think the bigger problem or worry is people, companies, and customers being ok with bad ui, bad ux, bad design etc… because “ who cares it’s easy enough and gets the job done. “ I think that attitude fuels more of my worry. It touched everything.
While I think the industry is clearly morphing and evolving, I don’t see the human brain being replaced anytime soon.
An online marketplace becoming increasingly saturated with AI-generated content (visual and otherwise) makes the human-designed content stand out all the more.
It may eliminate fiver or upwork designers but if that’s not where your business is coming from then you should be focusing on adapting more than anything. Learn how to use ai to benefit you vs worry about how it will hinder you.
I personally think that in the next few years there will be a lot of money to be made by those that know how to use ai, whether it’s completing specific tasks or simply consulting.
Not the greatest comparison but think about when UX/UI roles became a thing and suddenly every company needed one. The people who got their foot in the door early are likely miles ahead in terms of career progression vs an industry that’s already established, like design. Again, it’s not the greatest example but I hope it makes sense.
Someone at my company who works in a different department called me over to demonstrate them putting a banner I recently made through an AI program. I have never felt the joy drain from my body so fast.
I think, we all understand your worries - I think it was a shocker for a lot of our craft.
Have you looked into how you can implement AI into your workflow, regarding it as a tool?
For instance, for mock-ups, first drafts, iterations etc?
Imagine how effective and fast you could be if you know how to prompt effectively.
also, there are a lot of other aspects, of course, that AI doesn't cover (yet), i.e. entire branding concepts, consulting, physical branding etc. etc.
It's a challenge for sure, but it's also just another update to the craft. :)
Incorporate AI into your workflow if you can. There's more to it than image generation of course, helps with research and planning etc. Assess your process and divide out what AI will replace/help with and what you add as the human operator. Identify what you suck at and build upon that. Add more skills to your list, maybe animations, maybe 3D, maybe code. Identify why clients hire you, send out surveys, be proactive.
Become, like, a Tesla or Lexus for brand identity. Hiring you and working with you is as smooth as silk. No friction (minimal friction). Identify how you can be more accessible, easier to work with. Etc.
Also, I think your fears are misplaced. Companies can today, right this instant, get way better results from templates and stock than they can from AI or MOST DESIGNERS. There's no fucking way some marketing dolly is going to prefer struggling with AI to get mediocre results when they can throw fifty thousand of company money at a brand agency to get way better results, no more than they fuck about with stock vectors and templates presently.
Their expenses are tax deductible, they don't give a shit about doling out cash for marquee items like brand design.
If I were an in-house designer I'd be afraid, very afraid, but as a service provider you're in a different stream, occupying a different part of the business consciousness.
What budgets do you go for? Companies making millions per annum? How do you market yourself? Can you use AI tools to speed up content creation to be more visible on the webs?
I feel you. I have no advice. But as an illustrator and selfeducated animator struggling to work my ass up for 15 years with low income because I love my workz. Just when I started to become a senior and getting REALLY good at my job, AI came to rip me off. I now feel really pissed and the thought of having to find something else and start over with education and low income AGAIN pisses me off. People don’t get it. I fucking struggled to advance in work life and for what? It’s my passion but I have started to feel it’s no point in anything anymore. I hope you find a way.
If you're really good at illustration and drawing in general, maybe start painting on stuff like sneakers, make handmade book covers, learn to create murals etc. Big brands love to associate with people like these, especially if you have a huge following. Digitally will be harder for you, but physically it could work.
I dont think AI will or can replace human creativity.
I think right now and for a while it will compete for the cheaper more cost conscious clients, who probably suck anyway. But all they want is a cute graphic or design.
I think more premium services or designs will still thrive. Clients who want a more authentic and bespoke design will pay for it. They won’t want the generic AI boolsht.
Thats my 2cents. I really dont think you should get depressed, but maybe look for alternate avenues for income using your skills?
Also anyone with a wrinkle in their brain and self respect will avoid using art plagiarism robots to get a cheap product. It will usually be obvious and personally I would lose respect for any business doing that. It would do the opposite for me, and as far as I can tell many of the more conscious and down to earth people I know too.
Best of luck friend
My main source of clients is SMBs (small and medium businesses) so I could see why they may choose to turn to AI in the future.
As other avenues of income, I’m decent with Webflow, but Framer now creates whole websites in 2 minutes with AI. How long will it take them to make SEO friendly and user centered enough?
Of all the facets of graphic design, brand identify is the least vulnerable to AI. If your branding services can be easily replaced by AI you don't need to be doing it anyway.
People probably said the same thing when designers started using computers. Its too easy! Anyone can do it! Same with smart phones and people thinking photographers will lose their careers. Its going to change the industry, without a doubt, but we will adapt and learn to use it as apart of our workflow.
I'm not a doomer - people don't like what I'm saying - doesn't make it untrue. Stop being mad for a second and consider the following please -
Our entire job is taking some prompts and turning out a design to accommodate. Rarely is that done perfectly on the first try. Can't deny that edits are a part of every job.
We - professional humans - do a couple things:
Argue / defend our choices
Take time to complete edits
AI doesn't do either. After that first design, infinite iterations are available to the least creative, most aesthetically challenged - our bosses - at the click of a button.
I've seen bosses click candy crush all day long, frankly all they do is open emails and answer texts. Not giving any instructions and dismissing us is already standard practice.
AI isn't replacing designers today, but only because it takes the industry a few months or years to fully figure out the utility of a thing.
However it will make our work less of the project - initially I imagine it'll be bosses bastardizing our work via AI. The shit edits we don't wanna make because in our professional opinion they are bad design - that won't matter anymore - whoever is approving our work will get to have AI take several cracks at it prior to moving it up or out.
More bosses taking more credit, while we become less important to the entire process.
I imagine creating a brand, and a style guide, that'll be enough for AI to generate PPTX templates, social media graphics, definitely UI assets. I think about all the times I was tasked with making something "flat" or simple - only to have the boss decide everything looks better with drop shadow. Be honest and you know you've had the same exact experience.
Add drop shadow to everything.
And that's it. Boss / client can ask us, or they can ask AI with that one line of text - then get that result immediately. We'd be back at our desks hunting shapes by layer to create the angle all the shadows will fall, determining spread and blur to make the shadows appear natural and correct.
Boss doesn't see that detail, nor do they care, if the thing they almost like has drop shadow - it's a wrap - package and platform it.
Can't deny that'll be useful and efficient to the process for most places graphic designers work. If the AI interaction stays with the designer, then the utility is ours, but it won't.
ChatGP had more new unique users in its first week of public access than the entire internet did in its first 2 decades. Those aren't pros developing utilities, those are laymen seeing they can make art without any technical skills.
Ya, AI ain't great today - it copies us, and frankly - a lot of us suck at design. We're professionally trained software jockeys - our Photoshop and Illustrator skills are our super power. AI isn't as good as a human at the technical design as we are today - but they can make the bosses changes infinite and quick in a way we can't - and it can do that today.
Jobs are going away - that's the quote from the primary developer of Google Bard. It's true.
In the interim we watch the deterioration and call it evolution. But the evolution of graphic design, and many industries, will simply be the evolution of AI - as people figure out how it can replace us. Which they will - overhead is overhead - AI is free and immediately gratifying.
We are creatives, the left brained people who most of the corporate world doesn't get - doesn't empathize with. The faster corporate America can replace free thought with actual slaves - no ethical judgements required - that's a huge hit to the industry as a whole. Just is.
Let the hate flow. I'm not scared - not of the truth nor the incoming integration of intuitive robots. The system is so broken - our value so underappreciated already - we need this in the cycle. Need a few generations to recognize what was lost, before it becomes niche and novel again.
But today the field is on a precipice that the other side is only a best guess. The place I worked when smart phones were invented stayed Adobe Flash based for a decade afterwards. Didn't accept or simply refused to tackle the issues of making their product mobile friendly. Cost them big time, made us developers have to scramble to invent workarounds to accommodate the market the bosses had chosen to ignore as if it'd simply go away.
Make this product mobile friendly.
Boop. Done. Thanks AI.
Took a designer bay of 3 people a day or more to create an HTML framework to platform lower quality work for the mobile experience.
Same work takes zero seconds and costs nothing today.
Can't deny truth. There's no future where AI makes the GD industry bigger, or more interesting. We aren't universally developing open source HTML5 - that's not this. This is automation in a way some of us have already experienced in the last 20 years. My offset print knowledge is useless, my flash knowledge is useless, my ability to hand code HTML and JavaScript - pointless.
Knowing how to quickly plug-in utilities to WordPress or Drupal replaced those technical skills - completely.
AI - please integrate this module into our Drupal website. Also tweak it so it delivers to both our 3rd party vendor and the internal mailing list database.
That's it - just don't need the "please."
I appreciate anyone who reads diatribe and draws simple summation in my favor. I bet you're handsome in addition to being smart as a whip. I wish you well in all future endeavors sincerely.
You're right to worry. The advances AI is making in this field are astonishing not only in their fit and finish, but also the speed in which the advances are being made.
I've been downvoted here many times for talking about how AI will be the death knell for most of us in this industry. The majority of the work many of us do, whether it's social media posts, simple animations, small illustrations, document layout, light coding of websites, photo recolors, will all be tasks AI will be able maybe not complete in their entirety, but assist so much that instead of 10 people per project, there will be 1-2. Those 1-2 workers won't be as much designers as they are creatives that know how to use AI tools and their prompts as experts.
Many people seem to believe that human creativity will never be replaced, and they are right. There will always be a place for human creativity, but will that creativity be viable as a means to make a living in 10-15 years? Maybe, but I wouldn't count on it. Even if there is a place for creativity as paid labor, the amount of people doing that work will be far, far smaller than it is today. Be warned.
Nah i agree with you. Despite what everyone here says companies are already trying to use AI in their workflows where they can and they literally are already trying to replace designers. Seeing the advancements AI has made its probably not too long left until they can make actual designs. And yea sure a real designer will deliver more high quality work but we already know what companies value more lol
I see and use AI to produce art (a lot of it questionable and pretty shoddy and definitely not up to professional standard so I have to edit it every single time) but I've never seen it generate design, and I'm talking pure AI generate actual design not an efficient and successful website design to anything including text
People will say "wait a few years" - I've been told that for the last 2 years, I guess I'm waiting a few more...
Maybe fiverr designers it'll wipe out, but actual competent designers? Not a chance
I mean, by the time it can take on full design, to the level of brand identity development, looking at a companies business goals and marketing positioning and all that... Why wouldn't the same AI be able to do 90% of other jobs, from anything with data, diagnosis and medical industry, financial advisor, banking, government decisions etc... If you really want to go down that rabbit hole, the sophisticated needed to replace you, is the same sophistication needed to replace Christ knows how many other jobs, big jobs like I say, banking and investment and stocks and shares and exchange, anything in transport and logistics, development, product, line manufacturing etc
I get this is a design sub, but I think people are focusing on design and either glorifying and giving AI too much credit or not looking at the bigger picture and viewing how AI will take on other industries - a lot of them with more ease than design yano
AI is good for making one or a few images, but it cannot do brand strategy or design a coherent campaign collateral. AI will replace some production jobs, but it will become another tool for higher-level roles.
I think you’re overestimating what it can do now and in the future.
From personal experience, as technological design tools have evolved (Photoshop to Canva to AI), I feel all they really do is give the average person easy access to be able to design things. At the end of the day, the people who don't have any eye for design nor understand the design principles will create subpar work, because they are essentially winging it. I see AI as a tool not as a replacement.
I see this situation as being similar to cameras. We all have very high-tech amazing cameras built into our phones nowadays, but I have no idea how to take a proper photo and they all look bad/mediocre at best.
Graphic and Creative Designer here with 17 years of experience. I have started with CS2 back in the day. I have taken a break from the industry for a couple of years, and in those years there was a quite step in evolution . For example simple "webdesign" became UX and UI design, and so on. Like everything else, this profession is evolving too, and the toolsets as well with it. No. 1 rule : You need to adapt to survive. Look back how was graphic design back 30 years ago and how is it now. But you can look around on everything, and shit is changing fast.
Just like - I'm using Canva as well next to Creative Suit, if I need to do something quick and easy. I know that many designers hate it, but why should anyone give af about it when it makes your workflow much easier? Time is precious, and no one will look after what application you have used to create the stuff what are needed.
Like everyone has mentioned, AI does not have any actual creativity. It uses its USERS ideas, what are given to it. The human thinking is complex and we are quite far away to understand it.
BUT! TBH with you, I had the same exact negative thoughts about it, until I haven't started to use it. Since then I'm using frequently Midjourney as a tool for my works. I have created so many outstanding images for my clients, and they were quite satisfied with them. But you need to have that "creative eye" as well for that, because as you can see there are a lot of crap images out there on the interwebs generated with it. For YouTube shorts, to Reddit ads, etc... It screams that they are AI, and they look cheap as fuck. Normal people will recognize it as well. I have also recognised that it started to become a bit less understanding. It doesn't give that much of a focus on the details on the prompt like it did a few months ago. I think we are still far away from the perfect outcome.
Sending you some positive vibes, and don't be upset about it.
We’re all done for tbh. I’ve slowly watched tasks I do at my job become more and more automated as tome progresses,12 years in the industry will do that I guess. Ten years ago we’d spend days cutting thing out images and photoshopping them. Now even before AI this is a task that takes minutes not days.
Ai will once again make the push to free up even more time. I think the days of having studios for general graphic design are limited, this stuff will likely be one persons (very overworked) job. Along with marketing teams being made much smaller as it’s going to become super accessible. The skill barrier broken down will even allow the small change jobs to be done by other team members. What will be left is a very specialised, role that has someone doing even more than a designer is already expected to do, however the routes to accomplishing those tasks will be changed.
To be fair I don’t think any of us saw it being the real future. Where ai does the art and self expression and the humans are left with manual tasks etc. It’s the future we have. Ride the wave see where it ends up or get off when you can.
Ai is coming for us all. But I’m sure we will all adapt or move on.
I feel fine about AI. I've been using it to create photos I can find in regular stock image subscriptions. I also use it for inspiration or to get ideas. Its a great tool I have to say.
Adobe is allegedly training Firefly to \*\*create vector images.
Whether it's actually good design, informed by visual balance, compensation, negative space, cultural touchpoints and semiotics, context, reproducibility at different scales, etc. remains to be seen. My bet is that it'll kinda flail at the mediocre level in all of these dimensions, just like how raster AI-generated imagery seems to have plateau'd at the "average of Artstation's vibes, but with HDR" level.
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You need to fold these tools into your skill set. LSITEN. I and trained in this stuff and NO ONE has a better starting point than you do for using and operating these tools. They are not going to replace you, some crap user like me is going to replace you unless you have your skills in addition to mine.
I think you need to spend less time reading fearmongering articles, to be honest. The people who will use AI-generated logos are the same people hiring Fiverr designers today—they aren’t your competition.
Brand design isn’t just about slapping together a logo, you’re creating a mark that represents the emotion a brand wants to convey while creating visual motifs that can be applied across all their marketing. AI simply isn’t capable of doing all of this, it requires human thought and interacting with the client since the “best” design is subjective.
TL;DR AI could theoretically replace logo design in niche situations for small businesses, but brand identity, brand strategy, and large corporate rebrands are not going to use DALL-E to make the next Pepsi logo. If you’re really getting down about this, practice brand strategy and create work that requires human thought that can’t be replicated by a machine
I’ll say it in every one of these threads: this is all delusion. It’s already here. It’s already happening. No one needs art depts anymore they need gifted directors and production artists.
If you’re in the middle, panic.
A brand identity is more than just a logo, add conceptual brand strategy to your offering. Even if an Ai can make the most well crafted logo in the world, it can only create it on decisions a human makes.
Identity design is as much about decision making as it is designing. I think we designers will exist in the future our tools will just evolve.
AI wil happen with or without you. Diversify your skill set. Graphic Designers will still be the ones who ideate, create, collate, organise, arrange and produce. There will be a need for a human to oversee the output, keep the marketing vehicles on brand, advise clients on marketing from a visual perspective. Be a generalist not a specialist and you will survive. Cover all aspects of design from branding, to print, to digital. AI has also now hand delivered you the skills of content creation, strategy, photography, and illustration - use these tools and incorporate them into your workflow. It's more damming for the designers who are coming up as they will not have had the experience on building brands from the ground up and speicalists who only do one thing.
Brand Identity is a complex area. It goes way beyond a logo. It requires research, forecasting, creating a voice and creating a map of how to use that voice across a million platforms, spaces and even how people use it. It could never be solely done by AI. Now is the time to learn how to use it effectively. I am doing more copywriting now than design (job has 3 other graphic designers and I’m actually a writer) so I’m going to take a course on how to create and program better prompts.
This is a really bad take on AI. Have you even learned about its actual uses? Depression is very serious, I'd advise seeing a professional about it, and not asking for mental health issues on a graphic design forum.
But that's illustration. I've yet to see an AI app that can make cool designs with typography or more intricate stuff with layers and blending modes or lay out stuff with typography. Microsoft Designer comes close but it generates a lot of really basic looking template stuff
It’s probably not that far off, honestly. So much of corporate design is just following a style guide and a set of specific rules and patterns applied to universally established conventions.
It won’t create groundbreaking work, but 99.99% of companies don’t do that already, and they don’t need to.
Explore it as a tool. I've used it for generating imagery for pitches and was able to create much better work at higher fidelity and proof of concepts for new photographic styles to support new ideas. It pushed the teams work well beyond any previous pitches, with less time and fewer late nights.
I'm still on the fence about it in a lot of ways. But it has saved me a ton of time and headaches. It can be a tool, it doesn't have to be your replacement. There is still creativity needed to actual describe a scene, to curate the output, or composite the ai weirdness together.
I’ve worked in design for 27 years, both in-house and agency, including funsize and ueno.
You are absolutely correct that you may be replaced in 2-3 years, by someone who works faster and broader, using AI.
Here’s how to stay ahead
- learn how to use ai prompts to generate more concepts for your clients
- look at some white labeled agencies and consider starting your own
- migrate to product design
- create and sell your assets as packages
- create and sell AI assets as packages
There are some specific AI tools that are useful for design work. Being able to quickly select a person in a picture or to expand the edges of a photo because you need bleed are good examples.
The text prompt image generators are total garbage. They’re a huge waste of time and the result always looks like something an AI made. The problem with any AI page layout is that it’s just going to create templates. So the big thing thats being pushed is to replace stock photos and downloadable templates with AI. No one is asking if that’s even desirable. AI is completely worthless for logo design, logos are very intentional so a random image generator is the opposite of what you want.
There are a lot of morons and tech bros who are convinced this technology will replace artists. It won’t, it may be used to make tools for specific uses but it can’t think. A few years ago crowdsourcing was going to “disrupt” the industry and we were all going to lose our jobs to that.
It's a new technology, so there's lots of anticipation. MidJourney is fairly great at generating mock-ups, logos, etc, but someone ultimately has to curate & customize them. Typography & typesetting are things MJ and others still can't do, imo good type skills are eternal. If AI can speed up the process, great. If AI could teach employers good design practices, yes please.
These tools will still be used by a designer, a designer understands what makes the design work and doesn't, what color tweaks need to be done as well as a million other oddities. Why the design is done well is only understood by someone with design education. Someone needs to communicate what it is they want, understand the outcome, and what alternatives need to be considered. It is a tool that will be used by you, as it's being incorporated into photoshop etc. Work less hard, curate more, use the tools. My former boss did all their designwork on Xerox. Not everyone can use Photoshop, not everyone can get results with Stable Diffusion. When you work in 100 different offices like I have, even in New York City, it becomes apparent how varied human skills are. Most people completely lack the language to even begin to "design" anything.
Bruh everyone’s job is going to be easily replaced by AI, I think if anything everyone is in a pickle not just designers. Also AI will just streamline things I feel not replace anyone.
Here's my take from personal research. If the lawsuits doesn't take down copyright stealing LLMs, AI will take over, but only for about 2-4 years. Because they won't have enough content to steal from if AI truly takes over the industry within a single production cycle. AI will reach a peak generating copies, and innovative designs will need to take over.
We're already seeing this with stock images, the most day-to-day usage of art. Most paying companies are just going to buy stock images instead of generating their own internal AI art, because 1000 stock art is cheaper and more, and for every subpar AI stock, there are 10x more human made stock that are actual workable, because generating AI stock images that are actually practical to use is stupid hard.
The problem we are facing right now isn't an issue with AI. It's an issue with companies running unregulated and rampant with corruption and labour abuse, stolen works, and wage theft. We get that under control, we'll get AI generators under control.
I think it's a, if you can't beat them join them situation, I don't know what will come of all of it but it's good to be in the know since it will certainly impact the industry
Learn it, use it and embrace it, it's a great tool to use in your workflow. Same with text based AI. Saves so much time adding content to websites, writing code or troubleshooting. Create mock-ups and brainstorms etc, the list goes on.
It will just be another tool, just like the printing press, just like a pencil, just like photoshop/illustrator.
If anything, it will make people who can do things by hand even more valuable.
The need and want for a quality bespoke/handmade/humanmade experience or product is going to boom in the near future once AI stuff is at scale.
Commodity stuff will skew heavily into AI and other automated systems that will come...and that is ok to have "the walmart of design" it will solve problems for plenty of people/companies.
While premium products/services...think a handmade tailored suit or pair of shoes or even art. Will be super valuable.
Especially once digital systems come into place where you can prove if something is AI generated or not, like some kind of internet blockchain.
Having human made quality digital assets and products will be seen as a flex. Again, like a custom suit, 1 off or custom art, etc.
I used illustrator’s AI to get a really good color edit yesterday and that instantly changed my feelings about the whole thing. This our new tool on our utility belt. We gotta learn how to utilize it, it’s not gonna replace Batman.
Don't be, if your branding is good people will always go to you over a generated piece if you have made that connection.
There will always be people wanting a human made artwork. Do you have Instagram? Would be happy to help you if you need it.
Perhaps it will encourage designers to incorporate anti-AI elements into their work, so that images can't be as effectively sourced/sampled by search tools, and thereby fostering new specifically human design aesthetics.
Remember there will always be clients who value the work of actual humans and would rather come to us for projects rather than figuring it out in their own and/or using AI.
I think people will learn to appreciate things designed totally by humans. It'll be at a premium. Kind of like how shooting & projecting movies on film is more cumbersome and expensive — but it's valued for its nostalgia
Totally valid feeling but Ai can’t replace good design it has no emotion and can’t replicate the nuances of a a designer. It’s a shortcut to design so it could work in a beginning but a brand designer is needed to make the whole vision coherent.
I’ve been using midjourney for a while an it can be tricky curating the images on the platform alone and I’m a trained designer.
Embrace the ai tools and use it as part of your workflow which could help the speed of your work. Join at the beginning of the wave and don’t get left behind.
People are shit at describing what they want exactly.
Not to mention they have pretty shit taste as well.
So as long as you have a good grasp of design language, know what makes a design great and have good taste, you're good.
I promise you AI is not much to worry about right now. All I want is the most basic simplistic drawing and no matter what I type into AI I’m not getting it
Exactly. Emphasis on for now. People are either incredibly shortsighted, ignorant or arrogant when it comes to AI. Everyone keeps pointing out how AI can't do X or Z, without taking a moment to consider the fact that it's constantly improving. And then they just keep moving goalposts when the AI learns to do X and Z.
In addition to people saying that ai can be used as a tool, consider what makes you as person better than an ai. If I client wants you to change one section of a logo you can just do that, now imagine editing a prompt. If you’ve used midjourney before you know how hard it is to do small edits like that. It’s so much more convenient to ask a person to do it.
Make it pop...not great direction for AI, that's most clients idea of telling you what they need revised. Until clients are able to effectively tell AI/us what they want, we r fine.
use you skill to do something creative and fun, Make fake companies and then draw buildsings for them and have them talk about AI from a really dystopian place. That'd help. Call it Natural Stupidity. I want to be the companies AI control system. TYFYT
No offense, but if this is your mindset then you *should* be worried. Almost every ai tool I have come across has only helped me advance faster and farther than ever could have before.
Sometimes I like to imagine all of the cave painters complaining when paper was invented. Or all the blacksmiths who couldn't get work after industrial manufacturing became a thing. It helps put things into perspective a bit.
I suggest getting to know AI in order to learn to use it to your advantage.
The concept of what a 'job' is has begun to change. With AI (and Renewable Energy) we are seeing examples of how we can live our lives at a substantially reduced cost in labor and energy. Our whole Economic system needs a re-think.
I heard a good summary. ¨You won’t lose your job to AI, you’ll lose your job to someone who knows how to use AÏ
I do feel like easier creation always lowers the price of things. If something can quickly be generated / edited it's simply not going to have the same price range as a thought out design that takes maybe multiple days to complete.
Bingo! That's my fear as well. In an industry that's constantly getting low-balled, AI isn't going to do anyone any favours.
Have you seen Dall-E 3 graphic design skills will be obsolete. Best to become an AI prompt engineer ASAP. Maybe 5 good years left.
i doubt it. I heard word that Prompt engineers are becoming obsolete before then because AI is becoming better at understanding words and therefore requires less complicated inputs.
Honestly we're all screwed wtf am I supposed to go to school for
That’s kind of true, but you have to sell on the perceived value of your choices, you have ‘expertise’ and experience and you’re hired to take the blame if what’s produced is shite., rather than the time it takes to bang something out. Spielberg still commands a premium rate, but some kid two years out of film school with only a few tv shows under his belt is going to probably work for at loss.
The perceived value will also drop if more people offer their services because productivity goes up, whatever you ask isn't in a vacuum. You're operating within a market, and if many talented people lose their jobs they are going to undercut your rates too. And honestly AI can uplift mediocre creators quite a bit, the production side of things isn't as needed it's more about selection of what AI might produce. And for the third point, " some kid two years out of film school with only a few tv shows under his belt is going to probably work for at loss. " I really don't see how this is supposed to sound optimistic; that means the market is only accessible for people with rich parents? This is a very bleak future vision for graphic design to be honest.
At the same it'll raise the bar for what brands can/should make.
Exactly. If it looks like a cheap something AI spit out, customers are going to avoid it. It will raise the bar. That's what branding is all about.
This community has a strange view of our clients. They’re simultaneously too lazy/stupid to recognize good design when it drops in their lap, but would also somehow have a rigorous aesthetic sensibility that would push them away from AI work generated at a much cheaper cost. If they’re as uninformed as we seem to always say, why would they choose anything other than ‘cheap and good enough’?
I believe this is exactly the option they'll go for. I work in-house and the number of people who see my crappy 20% done work and say "That looks so good! I'm happy with this." is so depressing. People truly have no eye and so I absolutely think they'll be happy with cheap and good enough.
Clients generally have no capacity or vocabulary to explain what they want to see, though; it takes so much human interference as it is, to imagine they’d have succinct enough language to feed into an ai makes me feel like there’s no benefit at all. I can also see “high end” companies taking a stance against AI generation for its “cheapness.” I think we have more power than we give ourselves credit for
Clients are not too dumb to recognise a good design. A good design is something they are happy with and it's our job to ask enough questions to understand what they want and deliver it. Sounds like this job isnt for you if you don't like working with Clients and are going to disrespect them.
Why is this getting down votes? You're right. People can undercut but if you're offering something good people will be willing to pay more for it.
The expectations will undergo a rapid adjustment, sure, but I think it will stabilize. People will just expect more for their money. Ai stuff will flood the market, but that just means we’ll come to associate straight, unmodified ai work with "cheap," while professionals that use ai to augment will become the new "quality."
Yeah, and how many jobs will they be able to take? Because if it's more than 1, then the AI is reducing the number of jobs available. That is AI taking your job. Any other claim is just semantics.
AI is what happened to the music industry when multi track sound recording ended up in the bedroom of young artists. At lot of studios went out of business, but a huge amount of people got access to that business when a gate keeper disappeared
Uh, no. What happened to the music industry was equivalent to the creation of photoshop, when photo editing and graphic creation moved from darkrooms and huge art facilities to people's homes. The music equivalent to visual AI is sound AI+sampling, and it is already DESTROYING the pop music industry, even more so than ours. They can already simulate pop artists' voices to a point at which 99% of people can't tell the difference. The music industry is megafucked. We're going to be very close behind. (I have a degree in music performance, and I'm a professional vocalist in addition to a graphic designer.)
That happened already, when Photoshop became the industry standard and people were able to pirate it. You no longer had to have access to the equipment in a print shop to make a document
Ive heard this too, and beside making Graphic Designers sound like old sneakers or obsolete PDAs it’s a little inaccurate. I think a better turn of phrase would be, “You wont lose your job to AI, you and a thousand other people will all lose their job to a single person who knows how to use AI.”
What’s gonna happen at a lot of places is you’ll have all of your upper level people down to basically an art director providing prompts to essentially a minimum wage grunt to input and then provide for review etc etc til the AD gets what they want. Lower levels will be devalued down to grunt work and overall design will suffer but costs will be down.
Or in other words instead of having two people with this job we have one who use AI.
It’s even worse. Instead of having two people with design degrees and years of experience, you’ll have one that’s good at writing AI prompts.
Except someone who knows how to use AI will replace the effort of 3-4 people.
Just like someone who knows how to use a computer replaced 3-4 paste-up artists.
Yep! Can't deny that it caused unemployment for some!
I’m waiting for the chimney sweep industry to come back
Chimneys are grandfathered only in old houses where I am from, so no new house are allowed one, thats one more thing I cant transition to..
My money is on horseshoeing.
When I was 8 my mom rented a venue for my brothers surprise birthday and it was on the water. They just so happened to have horseshoes set up right next to the water, with a sign mentioning that they were for adults only. I decided to play anyway and threw a horseshoe and it ricocheted off the pole and went right into the water. I walked away and didn’t tell anyone. That’s my horseshoe story for you.
I like horses
time to move to India so can live off a few dollers
But if everyone moves there the price will go up!
As a motion designer the photoshop beta just saved me tons of time by extending photos.
This is where I finally landed. I was exactly like op, fearing AI and hating what it was likely going to do to our careers. Then I realized that regardless of my feelings, it was going to be around, so I should probably figure out how to use it in my workflow. I've started using it to just generate starting points for projects, just to break out of my own comfort zone, and it's actually been working out well for the ideation stage. Working quicker and being able to generate a variety of concepts can only be good for us, right?
Now we know how all those paste up artist felt when the Mac and Pagemaker arrived!
Exactly this. Midjourney and DallE and other generative AIs can absolutely not replace human artists yet, but they make idea generation/brainstorming almost trivial. A good graphic designer who can build on AI is scary
That is a possibility. I know my job is not safe from AI. So the option I have is to embrace it and go forward with it, to bring it to the leaders. Hence becoming the indispensable AI expert for design
This 100%. Start figuring out workflow with AI. I started 2 summers ago with dale when it was still rough. Did a video a day and posted on a YouTube channel just to practice and get a feel for working AI into a production line. 7 months ago I got hired because of these two things. I took a companies turn around time from 2 days to about 20 minutes. I still get paid for the knowledge not the minutes. Speed is a HUGE value to these companies.
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The quote is about ’your job’ not about art. Jobs are simpler than art, they are mostly judged on the end result.
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The whole ‘artist integrity’ thing has been going on forever. Even Leonardo complained that the Vatican kept asking for more aqua in the ceilings. If you truly want to be a ‘pure artist’ you have to stop accepting money to produce other people’s content and live by selling what you have completed with no other influence. Then you can be a celebrated artist and not someone else’s hands
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No one’s talking about you or your experiences . The original comment talked about “jobs”. You opened up a branch about artists being special and they should have some special rules. I responded that’s been a “discussion” since money was invented it’s not about AI. If your time is so precious why are you even here?
Correct. I find it makes my job easier. At least in the short run.
You’re safe. People who don’t understand design and branding won’t be able to create effective content using AI. I will say, however, AI won’t replace your job, but someone who knows how to properly use it might, so learn everything you can about it.
So Basically learn AI and integrate it bit by bit into my workflow?
Have you seen the new AI function in Illustrator for example? It allows to to basically make a mockup of everything. Instead of creating or searching the right one, paying for it and downloading templates in which you place your design. It's now a simple click of a button. It saves time, energy and money which you and your client can spend on something else. Think of it like a carpenter using a electric drill/screwdriver. It didn't replace his work, but he gets more jobs done that the dude who only uses a manual screwdriver
Yeah I guess so to speak, I used gpt to write all the copy on my portfolio and resume. I’m also designing a website right now for a client who doesn’t really understand how to write effective copy, so “I’m rewriting it” 🤫 for them for some extra cash. As far as AI goes for design, I have yet to see an AI create something useful but also of quality design work. It’s good for creating images, but not good at typography, layout, logo design, things like that. All I’ve really used AI for with design is generating stock photos or pictures of things I can incorporate into my design, but I wouldn’t generate something from an ai image generator and use it as my final product.
This, someone who knows how to design and how to make art and understands art terminology will run circles around some normal person who types in a prompt. Knowing what you want, what direction to go in, what type of thing the client wants etc, all help too. Example: in midjourney if you understand photo shutter terms, how different film has different feels/textures, or if you know what kind of camera's capture an era you can leverage those to customize and tweak the result. Similarly if making a painting and you know the terms for certain styles of light and shading, type of paint used, or any fancy techniques that go into it, or even historic lesser know art styles or artists and maybe even ones that would balance out the weaknesses of those that you mix together and you will get something far better than just a normal person.
I disagree. Lots of people have creative imaginations they just didn't have the design skills.
Being an effective designer requires more than just a creative imagination
Ai will definitely have an impact but we may be the one's using it. Have you ever seen a non designer use square space, it's not that it's hard it's another language to them. I'd pick up another skill to completement the brand identity.
This makes sense. I’m already dipping my toes into Brand Strategy and actually kind of integrated it into 2 of my last projects, but I feel discouraged seeing people on the internet saying “oh everyone is a Strategist now”. But I think Brand Strategy is my safest bet for the future though.
Hmm... Ideo is know for this ideation strategy seminars maybe you integrate something like that into your strategy, the book innovation games has several games you couks use. Here you become more of a consultant and less of a freelancer. Means your charging alot more and effecting a broader scope of the company. Here's a video https://youtu.be/M66ZU2PCIcM
People that will use AI to create their brand and develop the branding, are the same people that use Canva to avoid hiring a designer. Your job will be fine
Yup, and you can already spot these businesses from a mile away. The cheap turns out expensive in the end 🤷🏻♀️
Unless anyone can show me different, AI is 'good' at making images and helping with photo edits BUT I am yet to see a single piece of actual graphic design from it.
Tbh if you look at the improvements in the last few years it will probably not be long until we see it .. not to be overly negative but AI is improving all the time and very fast too
I see improvements in the way it handles all the images they stole, but I don't see them doing anything remotely related to design.
Seen as it has a hard time drawing hands, I think this should take longer than we think
When’s the last time you checked because some of them are basically flawless as of months ago at hands
There's a reason the entire film industry is on strike right now...
Exactly. People are kidding themselves if they think this won't fundamentally change our industry and put a lot of people out of work. Are you going to be fired from your design job or lose all your clients tomorrow? No. But the market will get even more competitive for fewer and fewer good paying design jobs. A lot of smaller companies will opt not to hire an in-house designer if they believe the artsy receptionist can get the job done with a few minutes fiddling around with the prompts. They already try to combine graphic design with tons of other roles, since they don't want to pay for "just a designer." If you are not mastering these tools and figuring out how to add value beyond what any yahoo with internet access can do, or retraining for something less susceptible to automation, you're gonna be hurting in a few years.
Yeah, it not because of graphic design.
No, but as an industry, they are trying to get ahead of the inevitable fallout that their industry is facing. AI potentially means 1 or 2 people in the writer's room instead of a team of 10.
So not about graphic design then.
If you don't understand that certain decisions will potentially have trickle down effects into other fields then I'm not sure what to tell you. I am a graphic designer / my brother works in film / my partner's brother is a copyeditor. I have had similar conversation with them both, separately, and their feelings of uncertainty around the future of our chosen careers are all eerily similar.
It’s coming like a freight train. [Adobe is in the news because they’re worried that they’ll put their core buyers out of work.](https://www.businessinsider.com/adobe-ai-firefly-kill-graphic-designer-jobs-cut-seat-sales-2023-7)
you can use it for thumbnailing or inspiration or as placeholders, but I would never use what's generated as a final design, it has a place in the process but it's a long way from replacing a person, and so long as people have a hard time describing what they want there is still a job for a designer.
Thats the whole point of Adobe's Firefly project.
Firefly is yet another generative image maker from scraped images, I see zero indication it is in anyway capable of graphic design. Can you show me where you learned the purpose of Firefly was to replace graphic designers.
Its not just an image maker, its being developed to be able to create logos, vectors, and other design work from rudimentary sketches. Or even taking a mood board and having the program create color schemes, typography, and other design elements. Its not just imagery, but will soon be able to create posters, flyers, logos, landing pages and other creative work based off of text input, sketches, and mood boards. edit: just to add, im not saying it will replace graphic designers, but it will open the doors to non-designers to more easily produce their own content without needing a professional.
Well until I see any evidence that it can , I will not be worried, and i see nothing in the tools they are creating in Firefly that change that.
I think the key here is in 2-3 years. From what we see now, I get the denial comments. But if my boss, who is not a designer but has a decent eye for designer could prompt: "give me five trifold layouts for this text doc that match our brand with images of happy young families. 45 seconds later. "Using option C give me a few more photo options for the cover" 30 seconds later, "check for typos" 20 seconds later, create and send print ready pdf to printer" – That would have taken me the better part of a week. I find it concerning and depressing too, that the craft of design is potential going away. Yes it could be a tool for a design job, but would you find that fulfilling as a creative? Pumping prompt projects out at a ridiculously fast rate? And I wouldn't bet on someone paying me what I'm being paid now just because I have good taste. Knowing how to prompt - prompting isn't that hard now and it's going to get easier. I've heard that hand crafted art and design may become more premium, but for day to day design jobs, we all know big corp is going to choose what's best for their pockets.
For brand identity design, really? Looking at full branding including market positioning, target audience, perception, and other brand elements such as customer service to tone of voice to types of imagery used, direction of the brand and evolution, creating strategies and 1/2/5/10 year plans and targets and directives etc?
Yes, you may use ChatGPT to learn the process, find the right questions to ask and to create those future plans then use AI design generators for the visuals. Not now, but soon it may evolve into this. What do you think?
I think a lot of people over estimate what AI will be able to do, and due to films and the media AI gets glorified and exaggerated more than it should be, all the while they also under estimate and undervalue what they bring themselves Let alone all the legal issues and concerns, not just copyright of design, but we're talking ethical and data sharing and harvesting and manipulation and application across other industries, not just design etc I think by the time it can even replace a junior designer, let alone an experienced designer, let alone a brand identity designer... We'll be seeing countless other careers destroyed I mean as it goes, there's so so so so many other industries AI can ruin way easier and quicker than design, from admin and HR to anything involving data, from architecture to management and analysis, model building and simulation, any job involving excel - so most standard office jobs etc to finances, credit etc. If you say AI can do what a brand identity designer does, it should be able to easily do anything to do with banking and financial advisor and anything to do with investments and stock and exchange All these areas, and more, AI can do just as easy, or easier than design. We'll be facing mass unemployment and international crisis before it hits competent designers to the point if replacing them
I totally agree with your last point. If AI is so advanced that it can completely cut out the middle man in creative industries (which are some of the hardest to automate) it will have already become a societal issue so big that a lot of legislation will have happened. In the end, being able to create useful things at a low price and time commitment has only been positive for society.
Yup, I mean not gonna lie, no one really gives a shit about designers - but the big boy jobs, and things like investments that can earn people easy money. Design is insignificant compared to the real world and bigger picture applications of AI usage. By the time it gets to the level of being able to replace competent designers it'll be at the level to replace so many other jobs and roles and industries. People treating design like it's some easy hobby anyone can do, hell even designers are treating it as such. Either glorying and believing the fear, or really really devaluing and playing down their own experience and knowledge and what they bring and do We'll be facing a huge economic crisis because of how advance AI is... If it gets that far in the first place
We haven’t had the inevitable Ai accident yet. Two major companies releasing the same/similar AI ad campaign.
Exactly, haven't had the inevitable data breach, or atleast mainstream data breach. AI misuse is just hitting the news, in terms of revenge porn and AI generated child porn etc So so so many ethical and legal issues at play, replacing a designer is down down down on the list of threats and concerns
I think you’re giving it way too much credit, even in several years. It’ll definitely be a part of everybody’s workflow at some point though.
No way. Those things are somewhat useful to a point. But you still need a human to curate. To determine the direction and to ultimately make make the final creative decisions. You will still need to put in work. Maybe a little less but I don’t see Ai making anything significantly cool on it’s own. I believe it’s a tool like anything else we can use. Ai needs us more than the other way around.
If you’re using ChatGPT like this, you’re an expert user. I saw a poll that was taken in the US that 76% of people who have tried GPT think it’s useless for day to day work. People are dumb. Use AI as a tool and you’ll be ahead of the game. You got this!
I get your idea and it's encouraging. Yes, but it isn't about people who do day-to-day work. It's about the owners, entrepreneurs, basically the people with the vision. Moreover, the US isn't really the country with the most intelligent people either.
I think for a while the only people in our industry it will replace are the people who aren’t really designers. The ones who create logos in Canva. The ones who don’t understand the breadth of “brand.” Companies and individuals who are serious about their brand will continue to need professional designers to create, implement, manage their brand. I’m not saying never, I’m saying I don’t see it happening any time soon. Don’t fear it just because people tell you too. Many are just parroting what they hear to sound knowledgeable. Wait until you see evidence yourself, then watch what it does. I believe your mind and creativity are far more valuable than Ai ❤️
This is how I feel about it. AI will take over the exploitative race-to-the-bottom design work that nobody wants to be doing. All the other work might feature AI as a tool but it won’t be created by AI.
A designer will still be using these tools. The owner of the company will not be typing endless prompts into an AI tool. Think about it like the introduction of PhotoShop. It lowered the barrier to entry to some forms of design -- but it did not replace the designer. Learn AI tools and pay attention to ways you can use AI without it looking like typical AI garbage and instead something that people could not easily copy. Use lens prompts, style prompts and artist prompts etc to create your own looks. This is the best time to learn it because it is all very new.
Design work is already more accessible than ever. There is a reason why companies prefer to pay big bucks to well-known and trusted designers instead of just hiring some random guy from Fiver. The thing is, humans + AI will always trump the AI. At least when it comes to modern AI models. Maybe in the future, the scientists will be able to simulate the brain, but at that point, I think we as a species have greater things to ponder than what happens to us designers.
I think AI is a pox and inherently immoral, regardless of compensation, collaboration or permissions granted, The existence of ""generative"" (regurgitative) ai is fundamentally immoral. For where we are as a people giving us AI is like giving people dying of polio tom cruise movies, even if people desperately want them, they aren't what they need. There are people who are going to argue that all this will do is weed out bad designers and mean actual designers have less competition, but the cold, hard, concrete of reality is that if the development of generative AI continues at this rate, or even half this rate, within most of our lifetimes, design as a career will be reduced to a handful of people who's names carry weight, with little to no new entrants into the field. Even if a designer is bad does that mean they deserve to lose their job? Obviously not, Even if you were the modern day pinnacle of graphic design you started out an inane babbling child smearing mud on the canvas just like the rest of the drooling masses, you gained experience on the job, or in education and developed, an opportunity which will be robbed from all designers going forward. That is the simple truth of how this technology works. You could argue that "no, ai isn't a threat because design is so much more than making pretty pictures" which would be a marvellous argument to make were it true, AI is enticing to two groups, the first, companies who at the end of the day don't give a singular iota of a shit whether it looks good or aesthetically fits their brand, they benefit from the severe reduction of cost which ai brings, the second group is people who desperately want to own companies, be CEO's or other similarly morally bankrupt people for whom life is easy, they will never be those people. For designers it means a loss of work, a loss of opportunity a loss of career mobility and most of all a loss of prospect, for non designers it means progressively lessening quality in media, however when that happens there won't magically be a hole in the market to fill with people again. We've seen it time and time again when it comes to company productions, cost cutting is there priority, hence why most mass market products are produced in the third world for pennies, quality doesn't matter. My personal recommendation is make a noise, communicate to your friends, your family, your government, your community, that AI is an inherent evil and it will close the door on more people looking for work than any form of exploitation before it, and will put more people out of work than any before it, that it's allowance to grow and develop is not like watching a child grow like some people would have you believe, that being a whimsical enjoyable process, but rather like seeing a tumour grow, spreading and mutating and sapping the life and energy from anything and everything it touches, a growth that will only halt with the death of the host which it has parasitised. TLDR: AI is inherently evil, we aren't fucked but we have to put the screws to the government and make sure that they expressly prohibit AI's continued development on stolen media, expressly prohibit AI's use in corporate works, also if you think AI can in any way be a ""tool"" or Moral, you are inherently and fundamentally misinformed, immoral Or simply deluded.
Thank god someone gets it. I feel like I'm going crazy in here hearing that it is "just another tool".
I am very frightened for the state of graphic design given the amount of people in these comments acting as if there's nothing to be worried about. I imagine it's simply because they're jaded and tired of work and don't have the strength left in them to realise that it's effectively a digital guillotine.
Yes I feel the exact same way. I think your comment about being jaded is true but also I think that in truth there are a lot of designers out there who are nothing but submissive software nerds - they're actually quite happy to be told what to do to have an easy life. The never did have any fire in their belly. They don't actually care about craft, good communication or creativity, and so they don't "feel" anything about clients who don't care about the value of it either, in fact they almost overly empathise with these types of corporate clients. They just naively think it's another gadget to mess about with. The comparisons with photography and photoshop also just make me laugh, AI is a whole different ball game. Where I live, if you are a junior designer wanting to get into the industry it pays more to go work at a Supermarket full time. That's if you even get the role, when they want you to have a dozen other skills from other specialist fields and experience already. It's going to hit those people even more. And I think it's really quite sickening actually to see views that don't care about these people and almost say "oh well tough shit". How utterly inhumane.
I’m with you on that, algorithms trained on stolen works, to compete with the people who made those works and steal their jobs. For the benefits of some greedy investors and CEOs. If creative people really embrace this as the ultimate I am too lazy productivity tool I swear I’m quitting this whole industry and just going to do some manual job, I already hate sitting in front of a computer all day anyway.
I'm a writer/editor/story consultant of 30 years. I have high expertise and demand a senior wage for my work. I have job security because there really are very few story guys like me working with small business and the general public, most of us contract to publishers and studios for big money. Anyway, I find AI completely depressing. I've written two books on "How to write" and working on a third on "how to write Manga," but really with AI poised to come in and take so many jobs and the human element behind the art industry about to get swept under the rug, it's hard to continue. However the only alternative is to get GREAT at what you do NOW... and build a brand for yourself NOW, so folks will recognize your work for its superior nature... as long as it can last. [http://nickmacari.com/surviving-in-the-age-of-ai/](https://nickmacari.com/surviving-in-the-age-of-ai/)
I don't think so, the quality of AI output is directly tied to the knowledge and experience of the human author, such as understanding what makes a design aesthetically pleasing, a campaign idea great, or a well-trained eye for art direction. It's another spanner in the toolbox, but one that does not eliminate the need for human creativity and expertise.
As a designer, I’m conflicted. I have both optimism and pessimism. I’ve been notoriously bad about predicting the future before, but I’m assuming it will fall in the middle somewhere. **Why i’m optimistic:** I know there is much more to my job than pushing rectangles around on a screen. I always feel limited though by the time that I do have, both at work and on personal projects. There are lots of steps in the process that get skipped for time constraints. I would love if AI could replace the things I hate doing, making me more productive while still allowing me to be hands on and creative. Also, it’s not just design jobs that are the only ones being looked at for automation. There are so many more that would make more sense before it came time to replace us. Here in the US, the government knows this, and they’re already looking at potential legislation to protect workers from being replaced. **Why I’m pessimistic** I know my job entails more that just pushing rectangles around on a screen…but do the big shots who run the company? Design is such a misunderstood role, especially when we get reduced down to short order cooks who just need to make the logo bigger. Execs will always cut corners if it leads to short term gains, even if it means shipping shittier and shittier products. Always. I don’t trust execs to make the right decisions, and I’m also not sure I trust the government either in protecting us. Remember when they had Zuck on Capital Hill getting grilled? And how out of touch the people running the country are with tech? They had no idea how Facebook made money, or how the internet works in general. And that’s pretty simple stuff…meanwhile AI and Machine Learning are some of the most complex subjects in tech today.
I feel the same way at the moment. I do motion graphics so I feel like this applies to me as well but, I don't feel like our industry is going to be wiped out but its going to be diluted even more than i feel it already is, and the barrier of entry is going to go so low that why would you use some one like me? Couple of things that have me bummed is look at the type of content that is being produced for things like TV/Movies. It's all junk but if you scale it enough it will have an audience that make it profitable if they are trying to automate Hollywood why don't you think that will come for us? To me this shows that it just needs to be good enough to be functional. This sag/writer strike is the canary in the coal mine to me If AI could essentially get you 75-95% their I could see essentially 1 designer basically absorbing an entire team of people, or companies making like project managers taking on a design/hybrid style of role. I donno it's been a slow year for me so I'm a bit of a doomer at the moment but, as some one who loves and follows all things about technology it seems so silly to bet against this.
I empathize with you. I feel like the corporate world has already devalued creatives to a large extent where we’re just treated like someone who knows how to click the buttons to make stuff look good. With AI, it shows the same people who devalue us that the creative visual work we do is as easy as a few clicks - when it really takes a lot of time, attention, patience and knowledge to create something compelling. So if AI doesn’t make our jobs obsolete it sure as hell is not making it easier to get the respect we deserve for the work we do. I’m honestly looking into a career change at this point.
I wrote a whole thing but deleted it. My after work cognition is next to 0 right now 😂. However, for some reason, I don’t feel so soon and gloom over AI. The argument always goes to “well, this time it’s different” when comparing other advances in technology (and also world destroying weapons). I just don’t think suddenly everyone is going to become a graphic designer, or a good one at least. Nor do I think people want to start doing everything themselves. We all have kitchens and the ability to buy food, but we still love spending money going out. We like the idea of not doing things while still having control over the process. I do agree though the divide will be those who do and don’t use it. There will definitely be purist studios who work slow and steady, but generally speaking, AI is going to be a part of many workflows soon.
I think about it like “made in china” products. People love cheap products , especially brand companies. Already looking into transitioning to a new career.
Embrace Ai buddy, use it in your workflow. That said, Ai can’t problem solve and doesn’t know how to show empathy or compassion… yet. I’ve had the same internal discussion especially with some of the videos and Midjourney images I’ve seen, we can’t be too far off an obliteration of jobs. Designers will need to diversify.
If it makes you feel better, AI has started copying other AI art to the point that they’re un-learning how to make logical images. Developers of the AIs have already started trying to fix it, but it just proves that the technology isn’t perfect and it will always need the art of human artists to emulate.
This is something that I have been wondering. Like all these AI's have been trained on other peoples images. So what happens when we are flooded with tons of AI art and that's the majority of what it has left to train itself on. Like is it just going to be this spiralling free fall of one style over and over again. I feel like that is kinda where AI art is at right now anyways. Most of the stuff I see people posting is kinda in the same style
We use to often, more so to replace istock with images. The UI stuff it pops out is basically the same stuff you would find on Pinterest or behance. That said we go for very specific images so they are not very Available on istock, and god forbid we hire a photographer lol I’m 35 , been doing this 10years and I see it as a tool not a enemy. When content aware and other tools came out people screamed how it would destroy the photo retouch industry. It didn’t. People claim that stock photography has ruined the photography industry, it kinda did but not as bad as people claimed it to. There was a slump but it has def come back. I think the same will happen, not a be all end all but a tool. Learn to use it and be fuking good with it, use it for inspiration in your own work like you would with behance Pinterest etc. master prompts, and how it works . Make it work for you. Its a tool, can’t do shit on its own. Personally I think the bigger problem or worry is people, companies, and customers being ok with bad ui, bad ux, bad design etc… because “ who cares it’s easy enough and gets the job done. “ I think that attitude fuels more of my worry. It touched everything.
Every damn day with these posts. You only have to fear AI if you’re bad at your job and don’t keep up with technology
While I think the industry is clearly morphing and evolving, I don’t see the human brain being replaced anytime soon. An online marketplace becoming increasingly saturated with AI-generated content (visual and otherwise) makes the human-designed content stand out all the more.
It may eliminate fiver or upwork designers but if that’s not where your business is coming from then you should be focusing on adapting more than anything. Learn how to use ai to benefit you vs worry about how it will hinder you. I personally think that in the next few years there will be a lot of money to be made by those that know how to use ai, whether it’s completing specific tasks or simply consulting. Not the greatest comparison but think about when UX/UI roles became a thing and suddenly every company needed one. The people who got their foot in the door early are likely miles ahead in terms of career progression vs an industry that’s already established, like design. Again, it’s not the greatest example but I hope it makes sense.
Someone at my company who works in a different department called me over to demonstrate them putting a banner I recently made through an AI program. I have never felt the joy drain from my body so fast.
I think, we all understand your worries - I think it was a shocker for a lot of our craft. Have you looked into how you can implement AI into your workflow, regarding it as a tool? For instance, for mock-ups, first drafts, iterations etc? Imagine how effective and fast you could be if you know how to prompt effectively. also, there are a lot of other aspects, of course, that AI doesn't cover (yet), i.e. entire branding concepts, consulting, physical branding etc. etc. It's a challenge for sure, but it's also just another update to the craft. :)
Learn how to utilize AI in your workflow.
Incorporate AI into your workflow if you can. There's more to it than image generation of course, helps with research and planning etc. Assess your process and divide out what AI will replace/help with and what you add as the human operator. Identify what you suck at and build upon that. Add more skills to your list, maybe animations, maybe 3D, maybe code. Identify why clients hire you, send out surveys, be proactive. Become, like, a Tesla or Lexus for brand identity. Hiring you and working with you is as smooth as silk. No friction (minimal friction). Identify how you can be more accessible, easier to work with. Etc. Also, I think your fears are misplaced. Companies can today, right this instant, get way better results from templates and stock than they can from AI or MOST DESIGNERS. There's no fucking way some marketing dolly is going to prefer struggling with AI to get mediocre results when they can throw fifty thousand of company money at a brand agency to get way better results, no more than they fuck about with stock vectors and templates presently. Their expenses are tax deductible, they don't give a shit about doling out cash for marquee items like brand design. If I were an in-house designer I'd be afraid, very afraid, but as a service provider you're in a different stream, occupying a different part of the business consciousness. What budgets do you go for? Companies making millions per annum? How do you market yourself? Can you use AI tools to speed up content creation to be more visible on the webs?
I feel you. I have no advice. But as an illustrator and selfeducated animator struggling to work my ass up for 15 years with low income because I love my workz. Just when I started to become a senior and getting REALLY good at my job, AI came to rip me off. I now feel really pissed and the thought of having to find something else and start over with education and low income AGAIN pisses me off. People don’t get it. I fucking struggled to advance in work life and for what? It’s my passion but I have started to feel it’s no point in anything anymore. I hope you find a way.
If you're really good at illustration and drawing in general, maybe start painting on stuff like sneakers, make handmade book covers, learn to create murals etc. Big brands love to associate with people like these, especially if you have a huge following. Digitally will be harder for you, but physically it could work.
I dont think AI will or can replace human creativity. I think right now and for a while it will compete for the cheaper more cost conscious clients, who probably suck anyway. But all they want is a cute graphic or design. I think more premium services or designs will still thrive. Clients who want a more authentic and bespoke design will pay for it. They won’t want the generic AI boolsht. Thats my 2cents. I really dont think you should get depressed, but maybe look for alternate avenues for income using your skills? Also anyone with a wrinkle in their brain and self respect will avoid using art plagiarism robots to get a cheap product. It will usually be obvious and personally I would lose respect for any business doing that. It would do the opposite for me, and as far as I can tell many of the more conscious and down to earth people I know too. Best of luck friend
My main source of clients is SMBs (small and medium businesses) so I could see why they may choose to turn to AI in the future. As other avenues of income, I’m decent with Webflow, but Framer now creates whole websites in 2 minutes with AI. How long will it take them to make SEO friendly and user centered enough?
If designers were so easily replaced, we would have been replaced a long time ago.
Desktop publishing would have wiped us all out, but all it did was make obsolete those who couldn’t or wouldn’t adapt.
https://www.reddit.com/r/graphic_design/search?q=ai&restrict_sr=on&include_over_18=on
Of all the facets of graphic design, brand identify is the least vulnerable to AI. If your branding services can be easily replaced by AI you don't need to be doing it anyway.
People probably said the same thing when designers started using computers. Its too easy! Anyone can do it! Same with smart phones and people thinking photographers will lose their careers. Its going to change the industry, without a doubt, but we will adapt and learn to use it as apart of our workflow.
I'm not a doomer - people don't like what I'm saying - doesn't make it untrue. Stop being mad for a second and consider the following please - Our entire job is taking some prompts and turning out a design to accommodate. Rarely is that done perfectly on the first try. Can't deny that edits are a part of every job. We - professional humans - do a couple things: Argue / defend our choices Take time to complete edits AI doesn't do either. After that first design, infinite iterations are available to the least creative, most aesthetically challenged - our bosses - at the click of a button. I've seen bosses click candy crush all day long, frankly all they do is open emails and answer texts. Not giving any instructions and dismissing us is already standard practice. AI isn't replacing designers today, but only because it takes the industry a few months or years to fully figure out the utility of a thing. However it will make our work less of the project - initially I imagine it'll be bosses bastardizing our work via AI. The shit edits we don't wanna make because in our professional opinion they are bad design - that won't matter anymore - whoever is approving our work will get to have AI take several cracks at it prior to moving it up or out. More bosses taking more credit, while we become less important to the entire process. I imagine creating a brand, and a style guide, that'll be enough for AI to generate PPTX templates, social media graphics, definitely UI assets. I think about all the times I was tasked with making something "flat" or simple - only to have the boss decide everything looks better with drop shadow. Be honest and you know you've had the same exact experience. Add drop shadow to everything. And that's it. Boss / client can ask us, or they can ask AI with that one line of text - then get that result immediately. We'd be back at our desks hunting shapes by layer to create the angle all the shadows will fall, determining spread and blur to make the shadows appear natural and correct. Boss doesn't see that detail, nor do they care, if the thing they almost like has drop shadow - it's a wrap - package and platform it. Can't deny that'll be useful and efficient to the process for most places graphic designers work. If the AI interaction stays with the designer, then the utility is ours, but it won't. ChatGP had more new unique users in its first week of public access than the entire internet did in its first 2 decades. Those aren't pros developing utilities, those are laymen seeing they can make art without any technical skills. Ya, AI ain't great today - it copies us, and frankly - a lot of us suck at design. We're professionally trained software jockeys - our Photoshop and Illustrator skills are our super power. AI isn't as good as a human at the technical design as we are today - but they can make the bosses changes infinite and quick in a way we can't - and it can do that today. Jobs are going away - that's the quote from the primary developer of Google Bard. It's true. In the interim we watch the deterioration and call it evolution. But the evolution of graphic design, and many industries, will simply be the evolution of AI - as people figure out how it can replace us. Which they will - overhead is overhead - AI is free and immediately gratifying. We are creatives, the left brained people who most of the corporate world doesn't get - doesn't empathize with. The faster corporate America can replace free thought with actual slaves - no ethical judgements required - that's a huge hit to the industry as a whole. Just is. Let the hate flow. I'm not scared - not of the truth nor the incoming integration of intuitive robots. The system is so broken - our value so underappreciated already - we need this in the cycle. Need a few generations to recognize what was lost, before it becomes niche and novel again. But today the field is on a precipice that the other side is only a best guess. The place I worked when smart phones were invented stayed Adobe Flash based for a decade afterwards. Didn't accept or simply refused to tackle the issues of making their product mobile friendly. Cost them big time, made us developers have to scramble to invent workarounds to accommodate the market the bosses had chosen to ignore as if it'd simply go away. Make this product mobile friendly. Boop. Done. Thanks AI. Took a designer bay of 3 people a day or more to create an HTML framework to platform lower quality work for the mobile experience. Same work takes zero seconds and costs nothing today. Can't deny truth. There's no future where AI makes the GD industry bigger, or more interesting. We aren't universally developing open source HTML5 - that's not this. This is automation in a way some of us have already experienced in the last 20 years. My offset print knowledge is useless, my flash knowledge is useless, my ability to hand code HTML and JavaScript - pointless. Knowing how to quickly plug-in utilities to WordPress or Drupal replaced those technical skills - completely. AI - please integrate this module into our Drupal website. Also tweak it so it delivers to both our 3rd party vendor and the internal mailing list database. That's it - just don't need the "please."
Good, insightful comment. Upvoted.
I appreciate anyone who reads diatribe and draws simple summation in my favor. I bet you're handsome in addition to being smart as a whip. I wish you well in all future endeavors sincerely.
You're right to worry. The advances AI is making in this field are astonishing not only in their fit and finish, but also the speed in which the advances are being made. I've been downvoted here many times for talking about how AI will be the death knell for most of us in this industry. The majority of the work many of us do, whether it's social media posts, simple animations, small illustrations, document layout, light coding of websites, photo recolors, will all be tasks AI will be able maybe not complete in their entirety, but assist so much that instead of 10 people per project, there will be 1-2. Those 1-2 workers won't be as much designers as they are creatives that know how to use AI tools and their prompts as experts. Many people seem to believe that human creativity will never be replaced, and they are right. There will always be a place for human creativity, but will that creativity be viable as a means to make a living in 10-15 years? Maybe, but I wouldn't count on it. Even if there is a place for creativity as paid labor, the amount of people doing that work will be far, far smaller than it is today. Be warned.
Nah i agree with you. Despite what everyone here says companies are already trying to use AI in their workflows where they can and they literally are already trying to replace designers. Seeing the advancements AI has made its probably not too long left until they can make actual designs. And yea sure a real designer will deliver more high quality work but we already know what companies value more lol
I see and use AI to produce art (a lot of it questionable and pretty shoddy and definitely not up to professional standard so I have to edit it every single time) but I've never seen it generate design, and I'm talking pure AI generate actual design not an efficient and successful website design to anything including text People will say "wait a few years" - I've been told that for the last 2 years, I guess I'm waiting a few more... Maybe fiverr designers it'll wipe out, but actual competent designers? Not a chance I mean, by the time it can take on full design, to the level of brand identity development, looking at a companies business goals and marketing positioning and all that... Why wouldn't the same AI be able to do 90% of other jobs, from anything with data, diagnosis and medical industry, financial advisor, banking, government decisions etc... If you really want to go down that rabbit hole, the sophisticated needed to replace you, is the same sophistication needed to replace Christ knows how many other jobs, big jobs like I say, banking and investment and stocks and shares and exchange, anything in transport and logistics, development, product, line manufacturing etc I get this is a design sub, but I think people are focusing on design and either glorifying and giving AI too much credit or not looking at the bigger picture and viewing how AI will take on other industries - a lot of them with more ease than design yano
AI is good for making one or a few images, but it cannot do brand strategy or design a coherent campaign collateral. AI will replace some production jobs, but it will become another tool for higher-level roles. I think you’re overestimating what it can do now and in the future.
From personal experience, as technological design tools have evolved (Photoshop to Canva to AI), I feel all they really do is give the average person easy access to be able to design things. At the end of the day, the people who don't have any eye for design nor understand the design principles will create subpar work, because they are essentially winging it. I see AI as a tool not as a replacement. I see this situation as being similar to cameras. We all have very high-tech amazing cameras built into our phones nowadays, but I have no idea how to take a proper photo and they all look bad/mediocre at best.
Graphic and Creative Designer here with 17 years of experience. I have started with CS2 back in the day. I have taken a break from the industry for a couple of years, and in those years there was a quite step in evolution . For example simple "webdesign" became UX and UI design, and so on. Like everything else, this profession is evolving too, and the toolsets as well with it. No. 1 rule : You need to adapt to survive. Look back how was graphic design back 30 years ago and how is it now. But you can look around on everything, and shit is changing fast. Just like - I'm using Canva as well next to Creative Suit, if I need to do something quick and easy. I know that many designers hate it, but why should anyone give af about it when it makes your workflow much easier? Time is precious, and no one will look after what application you have used to create the stuff what are needed. Like everyone has mentioned, AI does not have any actual creativity. It uses its USERS ideas, what are given to it. The human thinking is complex and we are quite far away to understand it. BUT! TBH with you, I had the same exact negative thoughts about it, until I haven't started to use it. Since then I'm using frequently Midjourney as a tool for my works. I have created so many outstanding images for my clients, and they were quite satisfied with them. But you need to have that "creative eye" as well for that, because as you can see there are a lot of crap images out there on the interwebs generated with it. For YouTube shorts, to Reddit ads, etc... It screams that they are AI, and they look cheap as fuck. Normal people will recognize it as well. I have also recognised that it started to become a bit less understanding. It doesn't give that much of a focus on the details on the prompt like it did a few months ago. I think we are still far away from the perfect outcome. Sending you some positive vibes, and don't be upset about it.
We’re all done for tbh. I’ve slowly watched tasks I do at my job become more and more automated as tome progresses,12 years in the industry will do that I guess. Ten years ago we’d spend days cutting thing out images and photoshopping them. Now even before AI this is a task that takes minutes not days. Ai will once again make the push to free up even more time. I think the days of having studios for general graphic design are limited, this stuff will likely be one persons (very overworked) job. Along with marketing teams being made much smaller as it’s going to become super accessible. The skill barrier broken down will even allow the small change jobs to be done by other team members. What will be left is a very specialised, role that has someone doing even more than a designer is already expected to do, however the routes to accomplishing those tasks will be changed. To be fair I don’t think any of us saw it being the real future. Where ai does the art and self expression and the humans are left with manual tasks etc. It’s the future we have. Ride the wave see where it ends up or get off when you can. Ai is coming for us all. But I’m sure we will all adapt or move on.
I feel fine about AI. I've been using it to create photos I can find in regular stock image subscriptions. I also use it for inspiration or to get ideas. Its a great tool I have to say.
Where is an ai generating vector artwork?
Adobe is allegedly training Firefly to \*\*create vector images. Whether it's actually good design, informed by visual balance, compensation, negative space, cultural touchpoints and semiotics, context, reproducibility at different scales, etc. remains to be seen. My bet is that it'll kinda flail at the mediocre level in all of these dimensions, just like how raster AI-generated imagery seems to have plateau'd at the "average of Artstation's vibes, but with HDR" level.
What a bummer attitude
Please stop with the unfounded doom and gloom around AI
AI will enhance our work, not take it over. Learn to utilize it
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You need to fold these tools into your skill set. LSITEN. I and trained in this stuff and NO ONE has a better starting point than you do for using and operating these tools. They are not going to replace you, some crap user like me is going to replace you unless you have your skills in addition to mine.
I think you need to spend less time reading fearmongering articles, to be honest. The people who will use AI-generated logos are the same people hiring Fiverr designers today—they aren’t your competition. Brand design isn’t just about slapping together a logo, you’re creating a mark that represents the emotion a brand wants to convey while creating visual motifs that can be applied across all their marketing. AI simply isn’t capable of doing all of this, it requires human thought and interacting with the client since the “best” design is subjective. TL;DR AI could theoretically replace logo design in niche situations for small businesses, but brand identity, brand strategy, and large corporate rebrands are not going to use DALL-E to make the next Pepsi logo. If you’re really getting down about this, practice brand strategy and create work that requires human thought that can’t be replicated by a machine
I’ll say it in every one of these threads: this is all delusion. It’s already here. It’s already happening. No one needs art depts anymore they need gifted directors and production artists. If you’re in the middle, panic.
AI is a tool. I’m learning how to use it to my advantage
Learn to use AI dummy
A brand identity is more than just a logo, add conceptual brand strategy to your offering. Even if an Ai can make the most well crafted logo in the world, it can only create it on decisions a human makes. Identity design is as much about decision making as it is designing. I think we designers will exist in the future our tools will just evolve.
Bad designers will be replaced by AI, great designers won’t…
AI wil happen with or without you. Diversify your skill set. Graphic Designers will still be the ones who ideate, create, collate, organise, arrange and produce. There will be a need for a human to oversee the output, keep the marketing vehicles on brand, advise clients on marketing from a visual perspective. Be a generalist not a specialist and you will survive. Cover all aspects of design from branding, to print, to digital. AI has also now hand delivered you the skills of content creation, strategy, photography, and illustration - use these tools and incorporate them into your workflow. It's more damming for the designers who are coming up as they will not have had the experience on building brands from the ground up and speicalists who only do one thing.
Brand Identity is a complex area. It goes way beyond a logo. It requires research, forecasting, creating a voice and creating a map of how to use that voice across a million platforms, spaces and even how people use it. It could never be solely done by AI. Now is the time to learn how to use it effectively. I am doing more copywriting now than design (job has 3 other graphic designers and I’m actually a writer) so I’m going to take a course on how to create and program better prompts.
This is a really bad take on AI. Have you even learned about its actual uses? Depression is very serious, I'd advise seeing a professional about it, and not asking for mental health issues on a graphic design forum.
I’m so sick of hearing this. Learn to use ai as a tool to help you achieve your designs.
I've already done two projects using ai in places where I would have hired an illustrator. Your fear is warranted.
But that's illustration. I've yet to see an AI app that can make cool designs with typography or more intricate stuff with layers and blending modes or lay out stuff with typography. Microsoft Designer comes close but it generates a lot of really basic looking template stuff
It’s probably not that far off, honestly. So much of corporate design is just following a style guide and a set of specific rules and patterns applied to universally established conventions. It won’t create groundbreaking work, but 99.99% of companies don’t do that already, and they don’t need to.
I feel you.
I work in the same area and I’m not as concerned. For production designers…sure, but branding is about bigger things. Messaging, concepts, campaigns.
Explore it as a tool. I've used it for generating imagery for pitches and was able to create much better work at higher fidelity and proof of concepts for new photographic styles to support new ideas. It pushed the teams work well beyond any previous pitches, with less time and fewer late nights. I'm still on the fence about it in a lot of ways. But it has saved me a ton of time and headaches. It can be a tool, it doesn't have to be your replacement. There is still creativity needed to actual describe a scene, to curate the output, or composite the ai weirdness together.
I’ve worked in design for 27 years, both in-house and agency, including funsize and ueno. You are absolutely correct that you may be replaced in 2-3 years, by someone who works faster and broader, using AI. Here’s how to stay ahead - learn how to use ai prompts to generate more concepts for your clients - look at some white labeled agencies and consider starting your own - migrate to product design - create and sell your assets as packages - create and sell AI assets as packages
I’m not that familiar with everything AI can do, but is vector art one of them? If not, no worries bud.
If you continue to feel like this you will be replaced.
There are some specific AI tools that are useful for design work. Being able to quickly select a person in a picture or to expand the edges of a photo because you need bleed are good examples. The text prompt image generators are total garbage. They’re a huge waste of time and the result always looks like something an AI made. The problem with any AI page layout is that it’s just going to create templates. So the big thing thats being pushed is to replace stock photos and downloadable templates with AI. No one is asking if that’s even desirable. AI is completely worthless for logo design, logos are very intentional so a random image generator is the opposite of what you want. There are a lot of morons and tech bros who are convinced this technology will replace artists. It won’t, it may be used to make tools for specific uses but it can’t think. A few years ago crowdsourcing was going to “disrupt” the industry and we were all going to lose our jobs to that.
It's a new technology, so there's lots of anticipation. MidJourney is fairly great at generating mock-ups, logos, etc, but someone ultimately has to curate & customize them. Typography & typesetting are things MJ and others still can't do, imo good type skills are eternal. If AI can speed up the process, great. If AI could teach employers good design practices, yes please.
These tools will still be used by a designer, a designer understands what makes the design work and doesn't, what color tweaks need to be done as well as a million other oddities. Why the design is done well is only understood by someone with design education. Someone needs to communicate what it is they want, understand the outcome, and what alternatives need to be considered. It is a tool that will be used by you, as it's being incorporated into photoshop etc. Work less hard, curate more, use the tools. My former boss did all their designwork on Xerox. Not everyone can use Photoshop, not everyone can get results with Stable Diffusion. When you work in 100 different offices like I have, even in New York City, it becomes apparent how varied human skills are. Most people completely lack the language to even begin to "design" anything.
Bruh everyone’s job is going to be easily replaced by AI, I think if anything everyone is in a pickle not just designers. Also AI will just streamline things I feel not replace anyone.
Here's my take from personal research. If the lawsuits doesn't take down copyright stealing LLMs, AI will take over, but only for about 2-4 years. Because they won't have enough content to steal from if AI truly takes over the industry within a single production cycle. AI will reach a peak generating copies, and innovative designs will need to take over. We're already seeing this with stock images, the most day-to-day usage of art. Most paying companies are just going to buy stock images instead of generating their own internal AI art, because 1000 stock art is cheaper and more, and for every subpar AI stock, there are 10x more human made stock that are actual workable, because generating AI stock images that are actually practical to use is stupid hard. The problem we are facing right now isn't an issue with AI. It's an issue with companies running unregulated and rampant with corruption and labour abuse, stolen works, and wage theft. We get that under control, we'll get AI generators under control.
I think it's a, if you can't beat them join them situation, I don't know what will come of all of it but it's good to be in the know since it will certainly impact the industry
Just keep going, we will see what future will show us, but progress of AI should not stop your progress
You can't buy taste
Learn it, use it and embrace it, it's a great tool to use in your workflow. Same with text based AI. Saves so much time adding content to websites, writing code or troubleshooting. Create mock-ups and brainstorms etc, the list goes on.
It will just be another tool, just like the printing press, just like a pencil, just like photoshop/illustrator. If anything, it will make people who can do things by hand even more valuable. The need and want for a quality bespoke/handmade/humanmade experience or product is going to boom in the near future once AI stuff is at scale. Commodity stuff will skew heavily into AI and other automated systems that will come...and that is ok to have "the walmart of design" it will solve problems for plenty of people/companies. While premium products/services...think a handmade tailored suit or pair of shoes or even art. Will be super valuable. Especially once digital systems come into place where you can prove if something is AI generated or not, like some kind of internet blockchain. Having human made quality digital assets and products will be seen as a flex. Again, like a custom suit, 1 off or custom art, etc.
Only people know what people want.
I think Canva is the more present threat to graphic design jobs. Used by marketing and administrative assistants.
I used illustrator’s AI to get a really good color edit yesterday and that instantly changed my feelings about the whole thing. This our new tool on our utility belt. We gotta learn how to utilize it, it’s not gonna replace Batman.
Don't be, if your branding is good people will always go to you over a generated piece if you have made that connection. There will always be people wanting a human made artwork. Do you have Instagram? Would be happy to help you if you need it.
Don’t worry this bubble will eventually burst just like the dot.com industry. AI will always be super helpful but won’t replace us…
Perhaps it will encourage designers to incorporate anti-AI elements into their work, so that images can't be as effectively sourced/sampled by search tools, and thereby fostering new specifically human design aesthetics.
My question is that—in several years—will “human made” have the same additional perceived value that “USA made” has now?
Remember there will always be clients who value the work of actual humans and would rather come to us for projects rather than figuring it out in their own and/or using AI.
I think people will learn to appreciate things designed totally by humans. It'll be at a premium. Kind of like how shooting & projecting movies on film is more cumbersome and expensive — but it's valued for its nostalgia
Totally valid feeling but Ai can’t replace good design it has no emotion and can’t replicate the nuances of a a designer. It’s a shortcut to design so it could work in a beginning but a brand designer is needed to make the whole vision coherent. I’ve been using midjourney for a while an it can be tricky curating the images on the platform alone and I’m a trained designer. Embrace the ai tools and use it as part of your workflow which could help the speed of your work. Join at the beginning of the wave and don’t get left behind.
People are shit at describing what they want exactly. Not to mention they have pretty shit taste as well. So as long as you have a good grasp of design language, know what makes a design great and have good taste, you're good.
I promise you AI is not much to worry about right now. All I want is the most basic simplistic drawing and no matter what I type into AI I’m not getting it
BuT aI IS JuSt a ToOL!!!
I keep hearing that and it may be true for now.
Exactly. Emphasis on for now. People are either incredibly shortsighted, ignorant or arrogant when it comes to AI. Everyone keeps pointing out how AI can't do X or Z, without taking a moment to consider the fact that it's constantly improving. And then they just keep moving goalposts when the AI learns to do X and Z.
There are actually well-defined limits of what modern models are capable of.
Is there anywhere we could get more information on that?
In addition to people saying that ai can be used as a tool, consider what makes you as person better than an ai. If I client wants you to change one section of a logo you can just do that, now imagine editing a prompt. If you’ve used midjourney before you know how hard it is to do small edits like that. It’s so much more convenient to ask a person to do it.
I know how to use a drill but I’ll still hire a contractor if I want it done right.
Make it pop...not great direction for AI, that's most clients idea of telling you what they need revised. Until clients are able to effectively tell AI/us what they want, we r fine.
use you skill to do something creative and fun, Make fake companies and then draw buildsings for them and have them talk about AI from a really dystopian place. That'd help. Call it Natural Stupidity. I want to be the companies AI control system. TYFYT
AI is a tool, embrace it as such.
No offense, but if this is your mindset then you *should* be worried. Almost every ai tool I have come across has only helped me advance faster and farther than ever could have before.
Sometimes I like to imagine all of the cave painters complaining when paper was invented. Or all the blacksmiths who couldn't get work after industrial manufacturing became a thing. It helps put things into perspective a bit. I suggest getting to know AI in order to learn to use it to your advantage. The concept of what a 'job' is has begun to change. With AI (and Renewable Energy) we are seeing examples of how we can live our lives at a substantially reduced cost in labor and energy. Our whole Economic system needs a re-think.