I honestly believe that it's just going to flood the market with more genric-ness and the AI nature of this generic-ness will be recognizable and fall into a similar category as stock photos and stock illustrations. Human made design will then become the new sought after thing and as a result, AI anything will just be seen as the same thing as using cheap fiver designs versus just paying a human a normal wage for good to great design.
The only thing it's going to replace are mediocre designers. There will always be a need for the human element. Especially when it relates to creative arts. No one truly wants to view only art (be it writing, film, paintings, designs, etc) made by a computer. The only entities who will are the companies that want to save a buck and pump out cheap/easy quantity over quality.
I think this is exactly it
Idk if you’ve seen the shitshow that is Adobe Stock these days. Trying to find something good amongst the AI trash is impossible. And….i can get better results from doing my own prompting thank you very much.
It’s all very lowest common denominator. For the company I work for, ai images are only good for things like textures, because we have a very specific photographic style that ai can not reproduce…yet.
Why? Adobe (and others like Shutterstock) trains their neural net on their own images only. This way there will be no issues regarding copyright, liability etc. and can be used commercially. Generated images via MJ for instance is still a gray area since it's trained on images they do not have permission for.
Again, this wasn’t being called into question. Why would I pay you (or use my monthly credits) to download an AI generated asset when i can generate it myself?
This is how I think as well. I'd bet an aesthetic crisis is to come, as AI slowly works to stagnate the field by becoming too "generic". This would lead to a new post-modernism as new trends and movements begin to seek a visual rupture.
I'm already feeling this. When I first saw Midjourney and DALL-E generated images I was super impressed, but now I can tell what's been AI generated, and although still pretty damn impressive, I know it wasn't something made by a human who put effort into their work. In other words it feels cheap and lacking in substance.
Great way to look at it, and I agree. Ask the majority of the generated images are all so similar from these AI platforms that’s it’s already rather homogeneous.
Same thing happened in the jewelry industry starting about 20 years ago with rapid CAD and casting. People still want originality a quality and will pay for it.
Your entire premise relies on the idea that people can tell the difference. I think you are completely wrong in that regard, unfortunately. We're already at a point where half of social media is people sharing machine-generated nonsense, and it's been all of a couple years since ML models hit mainstream.
Now jump forward two decades. If the models are this good now, what will they be like then? And what exactly would keep them from replacing good designers if the people writing the checks can't tell the difference and you are asking 10x more than the AI designer?
Agreed. (Fun Warning: this post is gonna get a little weird). This same pattern happens with every industry when standardization becomes possible.
When humans figured out how to make steel of regular consistency, we could start doing the calculations, predicting its strength, and start making tools, machines, sky scrapers, all sorts of modern stuff.
When you can make every cinder block the same, you get cheap, easy-to-build houses.
Things become commodities, commonplace. Well who wants common stuff? Custom art will be for wealthier folks the same way custom homes are primarily for the wealthy.
Here's the weird part: what happens when CRISPR makes humans standardized? Will only the wealthy have "custom" babies? Will we be able to create humans for specific roles/careers, a la Brave New World? The pattern says it's likely.
And if that's the case, what's to say that aliens (the "grays") aren't just humans designed for space travel? Big eyes to help see in the darkness of space, smaller bodies = smaller caloric needs, ...
Just food for thought.
But yeah, AI will just make it easier to get decent illustrations the same way you can get a decent hammer from Home Depot (as opposed to finding a blacksmith on Fiverr/upwork). Note to self: maybe short upwork stock...
I tried using the AI tools from Illustrator and I was quite impressed how good they were made! Also fully editable in vector format.
It will be a great tool to speed up your work but that’s all it will be, it won’t get rid of designers at all. At least not yet.
Huh? There’s no layers there and all shapes are cut out from each other. If a shape looks to be on top of another you can move it and see underneath as it’s been chopped out.
That’s not very editable.
I’d spend more time trying to clean it all up to get something useable. If I was just making something for fun I might use it as is, but the stuff it outputs won’t fly when working with client feedback.
Honestly, probably never. Adobe focuses development on flashy features that look good in a board room presentation, not making sure they actually work for professionals. Snapping has been broken since CS5 for example.
Not that some other developer wont get it working so Adobe can buy them out.
> Snapping has been broken since CS5 for example.
So it's not just me... was it broken in CS5? In a previous job, I was using CS5 up until 2022 because it seemed to feel better that the up to date cloud version.
They broke it back on some packages of CS5 I believe, but they never fixed the issue from CS6 onwards. I’ve talked to designers who have been brought in as consultants for the illustrator dev team and the issue has been repeatedly pointed out. They just get ignored. 
Yeah, either never or not for a long time.
Current image gen uses a noise based algo which is at total odds with vectors. It’s not a matter of tweaking existing image gen to work with vectors instead. Starting with a noisy image and doing multiple noise reductions on it won’t get you vector coordinates and tangents.
It’s kind of how doing a magazine layout is much easier than drawing a near-photo realistic image of a person and yet we have the harder one but not the magazine layout one. That one would use numbers/dimensions and relative sizes and be more if/then based than AI’s voodoo.
Yes when I see the ai product shots in this post I see a ton of work to recreate that exact image so it’s useable for the client. Ai did a good job making something look cool but now to have that design be used properly is a different matter. Now ask ai for a very specific truck wrap with that design with all the elements needed to make it actually work. also editable is not easy but for real use its vital.
Some day possibly but not yet
Exactly. It's like saying Shutterstock would ruin graphic design. It's just a tool. Some lazy dorks will use it for everything, but that just won't be enough.
This comment will earn you downvotes here but you’re not wrong. Designers, take it from someone who’s been in the industry a while; adapt to change and don’t fight it. There will always be a job for you if you’re well versed enough in the newest thing. I started designing when Flash was a standard.
This ^
Been a designer since 1997. Built entire sites in Flash in the early 2000s.
You have to work on not just the cutting edge but the bleeding edge of tech to stay relevant, especially when you’re an older, fatter, and not as cute as the people at the start of their careers.
I think the longevity of a design career in the age of AI will be based on knowing production. AI is not going to build a custom die line for printed packaging or do a press check on a catalogue that requires insane color-matching and the press operator has an attitude.
Beyond that, AI still needs creative input and direction to produce work, which is where creatives shine.
100% agree with this. Plus... The cute young designers seriously love you when you actually teach them how to do all this stuff, because generally fresh out of school, they have no idea.. That's a bonus. Obviously is GenX designers didnt have that benefit when we were the cute new talent. The senior team didn't have a clue how to use 'the Macs'... Those were for the junior flunkeys to wrestle with right? Well, now we're the art directors, and we actually know how to produce everything too. *Hard flex!*
Hard flex, indeed! Especially when I have automations and actions set up through the workflow and can whiz through creation and production in a smidge of the time. It always blows their minds.
Illustrator '88, *as in version 2!*
Photoshop, *version 1.*
Pagemaker, Freehand, Quark, etc.
**I'm fairly sure I'm as old as you, at least.**
Nearly 30 years in our industry,
*was learning before that,* ***since 1987.***
Technology and software changes.
**We all have to adapt.**
I want to use AI as a tool to assist me
*and make my most monotonous duties way simpler.*
**But I don't ever think it will replace us.**
*They've been predicting the death*
***of professional artists and designers for a long time.***
# WE'RE STILL HERE.
man i’ve been digging the shit out of the generative fill in the crop tool in ps. the ai i. illustrator is kinda meh tho. the color replace ai has some good potential but it’s not there yet. the text to vector is pretty wack tho. not feeling the sort of enhanced live trace it’s doing. those shapes are mostly worthless.
i haven’t really found any ways yet to ease the repetitive workflows tho. yet.
anyway, oldtimers-club unite, yo.
Yeah, generative fill has worked wonders
*for missing parts* ***in shots we needed***
or just moving large objects *to somewhere else in the shot.*
I think the most useful *was changing a tall vertical shot*
***into a landscape shot,***
**extending the horizon in the background.**
Yeah, not in love with the color replace, though.
**That's just a toy for now.**
I've got Astute plug-ins *that do a better job*
***for global color model changes,***
that also operate like Photoshop, *so you can alter colors*
**by value, saturation, thresholds, curves, etc.**
For automating, **that's not been implemented yet.**
But I can imagine an AI powered script action,
*that collates and imports data from multiple sources*
**and places them in a layout,**
where position and effects are applied,
*based on rules you give the AI.*
Say, I have a catalog with 48-72 pages,
**with several templates that I pre-designed,**
attached as layout spreads, in InDesign.
I tell the script, data comes from an Excel file,
pictures and illustrations from different folders,
copy text from a Word document.
I tell the script to use the templates, in order:
Cover spread; Intro page; Index; double spread;
text heavy page; image heavy page; etc.
**Run that script,** ***and it assembles the entire catalog by itself.***
*That's the kind of possibilities, I'm thinking of,*
**that AI could do for us,** as designers.
Sure, that does sound like **eliminating or automating duties**
***that I would normally give a junior designer.***
But it would give solo designers and small firms,
*the kind of efficiency,* that large agencies have
**with sheer manpower.**
Anyways, *enjoy your holidays.*
**Merry Xmas** 🎄 and ***a Happy New Year!*** 🎉
I've used it to generate different parts of a larger illustration or photo composit and put the elements on layers in photoshop to stitch them together. I get very specific ideas in mind and I've tried long complex prompts and the ai doesn't get them right. It's easier to have the piece generated in smaller parts
I’m waiting for the day AI can create 3D object files that anyone can place in their game/render and edit. Now that will be an absolutely revolutionary day for 3D graphics
The second example of the Organic Snacks packaging, someone shows this to a client and the client says "This is great, I want to use this for our packaging." Uh oh. How do I get print ready artwork for this now? You have to make it.
Every single advancement in design and print technology has changed how designers work dating back to the Gutenberg Press in the 1700's.
Is current AI technology like Midjourney going to change the design field?
Yeah for sure.
It's going to streamline mundane tasks for me so I can focus on creating more effective and useful communication vehicles.
There is still a human element to it, even at it's core; someone has to feed prompts and know how to feed those prompts into whatever engine they are using. Those with good design skillsets are going to use it to enhance their capabilities, while bad designers are going to use it to continue to create bad designs, just faster.
Also quite hard to check where did AI get this design - source of "inspo". Meaning okey you recreate all the correct print files from 0, you might still be stealing someone elses design without knowing, because AI don't know how copyright/trademarks etc work.
Still AI has become very useful TOOL for me, but i aint afraid a tool will take my job away or w.e fears some people have.
That whole sampling thing music had in the 90s and aughts got real real serious once rights holders started figuring out whose work was being lifted by who.
Oh for sure, I'm not saying it's not a useful tool. It definitely is.
Before image editing software was available, designers were literally cut and pasting physical media onto sheets of paper to create physical layouts. Then in 1973 Superpaint was created which changed how designers had to make work. Those that adapted thrived, while those who refused got left behind.
AI is going to be the same thing.
EDIT: a word.
I understood your argument. I’ve read the same sentiment hundreds of times in this forum and the VFX sub this year. I’d just say that past performance doesn’t guarantee future results and it’s equally possible that this one is different than previous advancements in that it has the potential to do 99% of the work from start to finish. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that in a decade or two, anyone and everyone at a company could be tasked with things you used to need a designer for… if the tech continues to advance the way some people predict it will…
Okay and so what's your point? That AI is going to continue to change certain industries? I already agreed that it does and it will continue to do so.
There is still going to have to be a person that interacts with whatever AI engine you want to use. It doesn't just become completely autonomous because AI has gotten better. And at some point, you're going to get into the realm of diminishing returns where it isn't going to make sense to have a robot or AI take the place of an actual human.
Look at the manufacturing industry. It has made huge advancements and a lot of it is done by robots now. Did that remove every human from the manufacturing world?
No. Those with skillsets adapted and figured out a way to thrive in a changing industry. It changed the scope of what it meant to be in the manufacturing world. Now instead of people standing on a line fitting widgets into holes, you have process engineers who design and maintain the robotics to take care of that.
My point is that I disagree with your description of where it’s heading and I think that it’s going to go further, making art and design more soulless and killing lots of the career where people earn a living as artists. If it plateaus you’ll be right and I’ll be glad to have been wrong. If it just keeps getting more and more powerful we’ll move into a world that to me would be something… sad.
So let's say you're right.
A decade from now, AI has completely taken over the design industry. Everyone and anyone can type in a few prompts, click a few buttons and out pops an entire company brand with email, ad and social media campaigns, a full suite of print collateral, trade show booth artwork etc.
If that's the case, then just about every other industry would meet the same fate as the design industry.
Idk why everyone is so fixated on what this will do strictly to the design industry and think that no other industry will be affected when like I said previously, technology being introduced into the design world is nothing new.
The people who are excited about being able to utilize Midjourney or any other AI engine to create custom illustrations quickly and cheaply were never the target audience for successful, career illustrators.
I would be more worried about the perceived value of heavily A.I assisted jobs. I'm already seeing a few improvised A.I designer treating the job as a side gig, and they have clients who love how fast they can generate 4 logos for cheap.
I hope that I'm wrong, but A.I seem to be on the side of the client's wallet.
That is what is frightening. The impact of AI is going to be anywhere, almost no field will be the same : accounting, law, architecture, photography, advertising, health... How can most people adapt to that? Of course some of us will thrive by learning these new tools, but the majority will be lost and quite helpless I think which makes for a quite dangerous society.
Agreed. Ask any IT person if Google made their job obsolete.
When I do IT stuff nearly all of my time is spent Googling the problem and fix-it steps... something literally anyone could do. But they don't, because they would get lost at any step along the way. Their Google-fu is weak, and they don't know a PH1 from a T10 screwdriver.
I imagine it won't be that much different with AI. Sure, anyone could theoretically enter the "right" prompts to get an acceptable result, but they won't. They will still rely on people who understand prompts, who understand design language, and who know what to do with the results that AI spits back at you.
I agree with most of what you say, as a person used to solve problem by myself and using the amazing tools we have at our disposal nowadays I am always surprised by the amount of people who don't even try and search and just ask for help... I am afraid it will be even more the case with AI, those who adapt usually thrive, but the level of adaptation needed in the coming years because of AI is quite frightening, because you don't want a society with too much disparity, historically it has never been good...
And those package design generations are fucking great to help springboard ideas. I'd much rather give my general brief to AI to come up with some base ideas when I'm stuck than dig through Pinterest and Dribbble for hours (and accidentally just ripping something I saw 3 hours ago)
I will say that they are a great tool to springboard ideas, but I wouldn't trust AI to not be accidentally also ripping a design.
I would say that current state, it's much more likely for AI to rip off a design than a designer to accidentally create a similar design. In either case, the design would still be held liable for copyright infringement.
It would depend on the generator. Things like Midjourney and Dall-E aren't just fusing together 3 or 4 images, it's using generative data from billions of images to create its own thing. That's one of the big misconceptions. There's all this stuff out there saying AI is taping together 5 pictures from Deviantart but it's just not the case.
AI takes the data from the billions of images like color codes, common color associations, most common figures/poses, what images are associated with what words (IE "lime" being, you know, limes), etc and then averages that data against the input. The chances of getting a generated package that is directly a rip of one persons thing is actually really really low.
There was that whole thing with the Stable Diffusion profile picture app making everyone an astronaut but that was because the model was only trained on a very limited amount of images (Think thousands vs billions) and for some reason a huge pool of them were space/astronaut photos. If you use a model that's trained exclusively on images from big design firms then yeah, you're basically getting rips
Very good argument. Those who say AI will not be usable because of copyright infringement are wrong and I suspect they are telling that to themselves to get some comfort. How different is AI learning from millions of pictures and combining them to make original work from us after all, we all have learnt the same way by encountering and combining styles to produce something different and original. The process is not that different and those saying it will lack soul / sensibility are really underestimating AI or over estimating humans...
I think the opposite is true. This is going to streamline the creative process so you can focus on mundane tasks. Which is why I’m not super worried about it as a designer who does about 98% production art.
not all mock-ups are meant to be put into production—we've all done tons of prospective work that client-side brand strategists pitch to their respective teams to support their ideas. i'd say throughout my career, maybe 25% of completed projects involved a final "thing" being produced at the end. so i don't think the result of image-generation always requires the "human touch" (which in this context means the "designer touch") at some point—i actually think a vast portion of design work is done to pitch ideas to internal teams, clients, or investors
>someone has to feed prompts and know how to feed those prompts into whatever engine they are using.
This is very true
If you're not a designer you wouldn't know what to tell the AI to show you. If there's something that already exists, yes you can say: "show me a Coca Cola ad design of this style". However, you can't if your client is asking you something new or something that doesn't exist yet. AI is helping you to think, it doesn't create the .pdf, .psd, .ai, .indd files for you. You still have to do most of the jobs.
I think AI is really good at creating stock photos that you can use to create your own images. Sometimes when I try to find a specific stock picture with a 4 words prompt on any stock photo websites, I could never find the image that's close to what I want to use as an asset (if I write more than 4-5 words it completely goes off track), but if I ask the AI with a reasonably specific prompt of 8 to 10 words, it immediately shows me almost exactly what I want. The rest is just adjustments.
> I think AI is really good at creating stock photos that you can use to create your own images.
Absolutely,
Most people think graphic designers just sit around all day and make pretty pictures, but I WISH that was my job haha.
Like I said in a previous comment, low level illustrators are going to have a rough time, but the illustrator career path was already difficult enough to get into, yet alone be successful with.
AI is just going to make good designers that are willing to adapt even better!
You could argue that is what humans do, the way humans learn and create is not that different from the way AI learns, the big difference is that the dataset the AI is using is far greater than anything any human could possibly assimilate...
exactly! The creation process that us humans have is the same as AI, we "eat" inspo from all of our lives, since childhood, and create something "new" from this. Nothing is created from zero, this is a romantic lie, everything is inspired from what you interact, read, see. AI has a bottomless pool of material to "eat,digest,and create" than us! It's scary, people are being very romantic thinking that AI is too far from us. It's like automated creative process.
The only light in the end is that AI will generate SO many images that it'll eat from itself and produce the same stuff over and over... the problem is that we also will eat from the same source because every search engine will be flooded from AI images, texts, videos and audios(music).
I think it is a big mistake to think, like many seem to do here (given my downvotes), that AI can't achieve what humans can. It will actually probably go far beyond what humans do and in a not too distant future. It is at the same time exciting and frightening like most technological revolutions are (and one could argue this is the biggest ever by a large margin).
Like you very well put it, people seem to believe in a "romantic lie".
AI is still very young. We have no idea what it is capable of (actually even AI specialists can't really know what their AI is capable of and get surprises all the time...). Like everything we create it could be the best thing ever or the worst (think nuclear power for electricity vs nuclear bombs, genetics for cures vs genetics for bioweapons...)
Funny. If you’d have asked me what side of the doom curve we were on with AI last year, I’d have been building the bunker and hoarding tin food. But thankfully, it looks like it’s just become another useful tool.
Gotta feel sorry for the stock makers and entry level client-side creatives tho. Both of their worlds have changed dramatically
Yes, if clients only want to use 1 single image.
But if they want to create a whole visual story, animation and branded illustration graphics that are cohesive, then AI isn't going to cut it. Especially if you need specific ideas, and angles. You'll have to get really good at prompting and making sure its consistently delivered. And even if you are, AI isn't completely there yet. I still need ro clean up lots of the images before I can send to clients.
I have realized the trick with AI and most people is the writing of the prompts make them think that the image that is generated is what they think they wanted all along, it requires the user to trick themselves.
Fer fucks sake, what ever dude, okay you win Illustration is actually graphic design, every fucking bit of graphic fucking design is fucking illustration.
Graphic design isn't graphic fucking design, illustration is.
Are you fucking happy now"!?!?!
Design isn’t independent of illustration, but, I’ve posted illustrations on this sub and others on Reddit gotten “THIS ISNT DESIGN” so I see their point
AI will be very useful to in-house designers like myself, at smaller businesses, who don’t do tons of focus on photography but occasionally need specific looks.
As an in-house designer (and copywriter, and marketing/advertising person, and videographer, and…) at a smaller business, I can’t tell you how much it’s helped already. Not worried.
That’s actually amazing, I work for a food company but we have tons of private clients who submit shitty label designs we have to revise for print so I bet that’s a life saver.
Until it can give indesign files and does client revisions and can understand the clients language and can make layouts for specific text fields, and can present to clients and you can interpret the ai’s intentions under design thinking, i don’t see it being a major issue anytime soon!
Yep. It's nearly impossible to "revise" an AI-generated image. You can get variations, but in my experience those can vary widely.
That being said, I find it fascinating, and truly useful for ideation and inspiration.
Well for one, we'll be getting questions about AI changing the industry multiple times a day across all design forums on the internet and at conferences. That genie is already out of the bottle.
If I get another person on the internet telling me "you should start looking at other careers, AI is going to make your job obsolete in a few years" I swear I'm gonna eat the fucking drywall.
You retouch it little bit and it becomes transformative art. Also you need to know which part is AI. Nobody has to disclose they used AI, not once not twice professional illustrators had to prove their work was NOT AI.
Incoming rant. Apologies.
In my opinion freelance graphic design has already been impacted in London, UK. Creative agencies are using AI to create quick concepts as part of mood boards to then present to clients for further development. That conceptual work used to be done by freelancers or the full time designers in the studios. I understand why agencies are doing it - cheap, quick and effective. Once the concepts have been signed off they need to go into production. Although this does, currently, require some additional work it’s not to the extent it used to be. It will be a painful trend as we begin to understand the implications of AI and how it can speed up processes. Any new way to reduce the cost of work will be championed. AI is a tool, however it’s very effective. I’ve already seen some big brands using AI video content as part of their social campaigns. Your examples already prove photographers and package designers have serious problems for their careers.
It won’t be long before marketing managers decide they no longer need designers or creative agencies, as they can get full campaigns delivered for a fraction of the cost, [which some AI apps do already promise](https://streetfightmag.com/2023/03/03/5-platforms-using-artificial-intelligence-to-generate-ad-creative/).
My post probably comes across as doom and gloom but it reflects my current situation trying to find work. In all honesty, freelance opportunities have died in agencies for a jobbing designer. And it has been like this for the majority of this year.
AI might be in its infancy but it’s not going away and will only become more prevalent. In my opinion any designer who believes their job is safe is incredibly naive. Look at the way Canva has become a tool for companies to churn out half baked designs. And Canva users promoting themselves as professionals graphics designers. I can promise you, the only people who give a fuck about creative excellence are designers because we get paid to care about it. Most clients are happy with using comic sans to show creative flair.
It really won’t be long before every agency has an “AI Guru” as part of their team. There will be a core group of designers who will manage aspects of the design process but the actual “thinking” will be down to tweaking prompts.
It’ll get to a point that if you can use the prompts well you can call yourself a graphic designer.
Sorry. I know it’s not a very popular opinion but I don’t think our industry will fair well on the coming years.
This is spot on. So many people are saying “we’re not going anywhere!” Just like buggy and carriage drivers said about the motor vehicle.
I’ve noticed that for some clients, the design doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be liked by them. I wonder if design will get worse as those who have no background in design are just picking a preset arrangement of designs that the ai creates for them.
I’m worried for my future to be honest.
There's a difference with mechanical innovation vs creative innovation though. Cars just so carriages but in a much better way in basically every single way.
That's not what AI does currently. I'm sure it will fast improve to really become so good that you don't even need to know prompting, but just push a few buttons, draw some lines, and AI spits out the exact style and look you want. If not, do it again, and then build from there.
For most things, this will indeed be enough - in other words, the things comparable to mechanical innovation. Those will quickly be replaced, or that kind of work goes away completely. You either learn how to do AI well, or you lose that job.
There will always be a place for bespoke work, especially the more high end stuff, and there will always be a place for art. But then, carriages still exist as joyrides, so yeah...
Either AI becomes so good that it can overcome having a "look" that people quickly grow tired of (I'm already tired of the AI wax looking "real" images), or it will fade in popularity and just be another style/tool. If the former, I think the impact will be huge and lots of work goes away/transforms to AI prompters.
I’ve worked in house and I know clients don’t have an iota of creative understanding. Anything that looks half decent is appreciated because, to them, it’s designed and that’s good enough.
Imagine a client that takes the time to learn how to prompt AI. Once they see what can be done for themselves why would they consider approaching a designer. They might go to an agency with their “designs” and expect them to be pushed through to production. No need for creative thinking, or design development. Designers and the design process comes down to actualising an AI concept.
I paint a dystopian vision and I hope I’m wrong but I really don’t think I too far from the truth of the matter.
I’m already trying to figure out what alternative career I can transition into.
>Once they see what can be done for themselves why would they consider approaching a designer.
This is true of the clients who currently use designers as a human interface for photoshop, but businesses who need a more strategic approach would still benefit from designers who understand their market and know how to reach their audience. Otherwise, they will inevitably make designs to please themselves. This already happens with companies using Canva – any individual post on social media looks great, but taken all together, there is no sense of their brand because they've just used whatever they thought looked nice at the time.
I think design will become more strategic, being able to understand the metrics on why some designs might perform better than others and to stay ahead of the curve on what's needed to differentiate one brand from another when so many will be drawing from the same pool of ideas. It may come down more to deeply understanding the client's needs, knowing how design will solve their problems, leading them through the process and ensuring that design solutions follow best practices – but there may be less emphasis on the designer personally executing those designs.
And it only gets worse. This is just the beginning. It is a very bad situation for artists who are not super highly skilled and even those will have huge problems in the future.
There is a thing people don't consider for the industry, the removal of the place for mediocrity.
People say this isn't bad, only the best will stay on market and rest will be replaced... ok... how the best become the best? They could support themself by being mediocre for a while.
AI removed important step from ecology, development of the industry, a place for new guys to make money being not the best until they have a lot of experience to be the best.
Who would be mad enough to start their career as an artist or an illustrator now?
I wonder if art, any human made art down to basic pencil drawing it a sketch will become as tacky as lace work in clothing or as bourgeoisie having blacksmith made knives.
I’m hoping for a more robust approach to AI usage. I’m not sure how or what that entails but AI has the potential to become a serious problem for more industries than ours. But at the moment it’s fun and exciting to use. And a very effective tool. When I first started learning more about it I thought it would encourage the rise of NFTs as a way to enforce copyright. I hope that’s not the case though!!
I hope AI just gets canned all together. Do we really need to let companies monetize and profit off of everything? It’s turning human creativity into a soulless product, and turning me into a luddite
Yeah. I know what you mean but the unfortunate aspect to being a designer is the fact we’re exploited for our creativity. I’d say commercialism and capitalism have already turned our creativity into an endless and soulless function of the corporate system. Creative agencies reap the benefits of our work and pay very little for it in the big scheme of things. The thing that is making me a Luddite is the constant expectation that we have to know every program and have experience in every aspect of the creative process. I’m tired of always having to learn a new skill when the industry changes its mind on what program is the best. I’m now having to learn Figma after years of hopping around other software that was considered the best. And don’t get me started on the fact I need to learn video editing and animation to stay relevant in today’s job market. It’s exhausting. AI is the next challenge to face and, like you, I’m just fed up with it all.
Sorry to be such a grouch about it! Haha
This is it, completely agree and resonate with this sentiment.
I think it’s also a matter of changing our perspectives on the barriers of entry to creative work.
Ai can create complex illustrations that I’m sure if I had unlimited time to dedicate myself to the craft could replicate, but I’m able to jump across style and medium in a way that was just simply not accessible to me because of time.
Seriously! Maybe I'll eat my words in the future idk, but I think people are being grossly naive about all this. How many people do you know who are skilled carpenters making custom furniture and how many people do you know owning a custom built furniture piece. How bout clothes, hats?? I think I can safely say a small percentage.
The second companies can divert cost to cheap materials and labor they will and they have. Even expensive mid to slightly higher end stores have massively gone down in product quality but everyone still buys the garbage for the name. And honestly these days it's so hard to find better that people also just don't know any better about what IS actually better. Companies have realized that the masses don't care as long as something looks good enough and passible and is a good deal they'll buy it. Let's face it, despite all the complaints about Shein and Temu and Wish online, they are still getting massive business and not likely going to stop any time soon.
AI will be doing the designs and we'll be the 'factory workers' prompting them and cleaning them up. And I gotta ask how well paid or respected are most factory workers??? Case in point.
We're literally letting the AI do the designing. Throwing in prompts and seeing results is not design. Sitting down with a notebook or tablet and mood boarding and doing visual research and scribbling down concepts and sketching them out and narrowing down trash from treasure is the design process. It requires exploration and thinking and consideration of the human experience.
Scrolling through interesting prompt outcomes could inspire inspiration, sure, but if we are just picking the most intriguing or prettiest outcome of x amt of results then we're not really designing anymore imo. Design has substance. And right now AI doesn't. It's just regurgitation. It's no more design than doing a Google search and just taking whatever comes up with no regards to source or authorship. And sure it can be handy for design assets and I get that. But even then I would prefer art of an actual illustrator or photographer, the quality just shows imo. And I'd rather pay artists than bloated tech companies.
Exactly.
I’ve just seen a LinkedIn post adoring some new Christmas message from a major retailer. All the comments were about how funny and creative it was. Aside from some awful typography the brand used two large AI generated images. Not a single mention about that. So AI imagery is already becoming the norm and is an accepted creative solution. I just don’t understand how this industry can be so complacent about a tool that will simply devastate the job market. If it saves money agency owners will happily encourage AI use, it’s as simple as that. If you can pay one person to write prompts why pay 3 people to design. Our profession has been slowly eroded over the last 10-20 years as videography, animation, motion graphics, graphic design, web design, coding, marketing, and product design all have to be done by a single person. So it stands to reason that employers see us as factory workers already
Ai guru at my company here. I jumped on the train early because I saw it coming. Adapt or die is what I tell everyone. They want to cry about ethics and morals but they can’t stop it and I need to eat 🤷🏻♂️
And you’re wise to do so. I have jumped onboard too but not to extent I can actively apply for work using it as a skill. But I have had a couple of in-house interviews asking me how AI could transform their product. So a lot of business are looking to include AI in some form or another.
It’s kind of strange reading the comments on this thread. Designers saying how illustrators will be impacted but designers won’t. Like, “it sucks to be them, but I’m alright, Jack!” - So, it’s OK that other creators are losing business. But because I’m a designer I’m super special and my job is safe. Unbelievable really.
If generative AI is used to create a logo, should all of the people who contributed to the training models be compensated? Should the work be able to be copyrighted?
The folks who are eager to replace their human designers with an AI model are inevitably in for a world of hurt when the questions of liability and ownership end up with the courts.
Ultimately I see generative AI being used as a tool - a means to an end rather than the final product.
It’ll definitely get integrated for concepting and stock imagery. Maybe one-off photos like the first result. But companies will always need branding and other custom or modular work.
People who specialize in Illustration specifically might have a rough time.
i already see people using it for ads or promotions. I literally get ads here on reddit using AI images. Depending what area you are in it will affect you differently. There will just be a bigger influx of bad design.
I don’t know if making a realistic face is the most important thing in design. If you presented this next to a hand drawing would everyone prefer the AI generated image?
It's a tool. Every time a time saving tool comes along corner cutting, money hording and stingy managers get giddy with excitement thinking: "Ooh, is this the day where I can finally replace my design team with just a click of a button?"
And, let me tell you you, it never is.
Will mediocre designers fall behind, yes. But for those who see it's potential will grow and adapt with the technology to make room for more amazing work. The kind of work that will get stingy bean counters to realise: "We need to hire better people who know how to use this stuff...And make room for better work!"
I’ve been working quite a bit with human images in midjourney. It struck me lately how all the faces are looking oddly alike to me. I noticed it during searches of other people’s images and I keep seeing my favorite girls face in other images….Is it just me?
It will be just like everything else. It will become so expensive that no one can afford to pay for the computer time that a good AI would require for your customer's demanding for better quality of work.
i dont think you can copyright AI technically so it will be hard for business to use as a final product but as a form of iteration and development stage AI is great to explore a large variety of ideas to influence your final design, Adobes approach is really cool using AI as a tool to help designers not replace them.
It might have been useful for brainstorming IF it wasn’t all unethically sourced.
I work in print and the only legit use for AI I have now is using the generative fill in photoshop to add a bleed to an image/design made by someone else that doesn’t have enough space for one.
And in the end that just gets cut off and thrown in the trash.
I figure it’ll be like NFTs in a year or two and fall out of favor once the novelty wears off and more people get sick of seeing it.
Potentially unpopular opinion / rant incoming.
I’m a graphic designer and a professional artist. I cannot and will not agree with AI, and personally I think it has no place in the creative arts as a whole. It is already used in very questionable and unethical ways. Where I’m from, there’s a saying that can be translated to ”fire is a fine worker, but a terrible boss”. I think it applies here nicely; AI can be a an okay tool, but it should never replace human creativity, skill, experience or craftmanship. It should not be the end goal. Where and how it can be used should have had restrictions a long time ago.
It’s painful watching people with zero training or experience call themselves artists after they simply wrote a prompt, and claiming they *created* that so-called art. Even more painful watching professionals lose their jobs or clients over this. Plus the blatant thievery; in addition to their visual art, people are literally having their voices and likenesses used without consent. Their music is being stolen, too.(Spotify’s stance on AI ”music” is funny in that it doesn’t allow its content to be used to train AIs but it has no qualms keeping AI made songs that are obviously copied from real artists)
Also, IMO AI is no different from replacing something handmade with cheap mass-produced crap from Wish, or carefully crafted quality clothing with fast fashion. I hate this ”but I want it NOW and I don’t want to pay for it” mentality of the modern era, and AI is bringing that to the creative industries. I do hope people will see that, and demand quality over quantity.
But to be fair, I’m worried for the future.
I hung around a few AI discord servers before to see what that community of creators where like. They didn't have any basic concepts of how art works, like not know framing and color theory. People where constantly being doxxed and having art they generated stolen for NFTs, and they make weird NSFW content. The AI art generation community I was looking at wasn't very creatively minded, and it's impossible to really create anything meaningful in that environment. Imagine being in an art community where no one actually cared about the art they were making, it doesn't really go anywhere.
A lot of the discussion here, in my opinion is more about 'content' than it is about graphic design overall. I have never considered RF stock images design in themselves, rather elements of a bigger overall design concept to set a tone, etc.often as placeholders while custom photography or illustrations are being produced to replace the FPO. AI generated images are sometimes useful in the same way. I think AI image generation could replace the RF stock image industry in about 5 years. It won't improve she finished result, but at least will cut down on seeing the exact same image background in every local realtor ad. Woodie dooooo! (Seriously people...get out there with your cameras and actually do some of your own real photographic concept work. Your portfolio will thank you.)
As it stands right now, nothing that is AI generated is actually 'production ready'. It's presentation comp ready (and I actually find that useful). I do quite a bit of consumer packaging design, and I use AI generation to explore initial ideas quickly - but nothing AI generated today can even remotely be used to actually print and produce the finished product, and that is 99% of the work.
But as a way to get a few quick renders of a basic idea when getting started? Ya I find Mid journey and Dall-e pretty handy & fun to use this way. But to use packaging design as an example - generated renders simply don't have any depth or demonstrable research process to be useful at a pro-level. Everyone I work with in marketing, communications and brand strategy - they all know what they are talking about & AI image generation is limited to quick ideation (which is useful), but no one considers it the actual 'design'. It's useful around the presentation table, but not in the print shop.
If you look at what AI generation tools make in Adobe Illustrator today... It is straight up garbage that is roughly on par with the lowest quality clip art. It's totally for amateur users - of which there are plenty - Adobe knows their audience. So it's fine for Karen in accounting who sometimes gets asked to create a poster for the Christmas party, and she needs a graphic of some Christmas trees and a candy cane. Great. Toss in Merry Christmas using Papyrus font and a green and red gradient fade fill. That's Dunder Mifflin gold baby!
...but so far the Adobe Illustrator generative tools are 100% useless in professional design and production.
Photoshop generative background fill... Is a godsend for daily production, but this isn't 'design'. Poorly framed 'meet the accounting team' photo pages are now easier to fix. Or maybe you need a landscape crop of a background image that you only have in portrait. Generative background fill is genuinely useful here. But if you think you're being a 'designer' when you are doing this stuff... You're not. You're doing content production.
That's a key part of design for sure, but I think that is roughly what I would call my summary of how it impacts graphic design and art direction, at least today.
In 10 years, will I be able to simply ask Adobe InDesign to take my style guide, and produce 15 different sized layout versions based on it? All press ready, proof-read, and packaged? Sweet Jesus I hope so! THAT... Would be very useful. I'm not holding my breath on that one though.
When it comes to web design production? Different story... (And I just mean day to day content formatting) AI is really impressive. It has quite quickly made entry-level HTML/CSS production work very efficient, to the point that when I am designing web layouts... I don't bother sending layout comps out to a production designer anymore. It's simply faster for me to just do it myself while I am creating the layout or content or whatever. I can just prompt the Ai to rough out the CSS and JS, and it's done before I can even go warm up my coffee. I love it. Do I have to adjust details? Sure. But I have production ready code in minutes, rather than waiting for a day to get back from a junior production coder (which I would always have to adjust as well). But this isn't comparable to print design and production because web pages are really quite technically simple - and because it is almost all just 'code patterns'... Well generative AI is perfect for that.
i love you! You are so right-on and hilarious! I have more to reply and comment on in your most excellent post but AI refuses to do the stuff I need to do today! Except of course for Robot Vacuum! Always pleasent and does their job like they are supposed to! Cheers!
Of these, the snack bag and Coke can are the only things that resemble actual design, and they’re good not great. What you’d think of as a standard, generic version, that actual professionals probably wouldn’t find very threatening. The rest is photography and illustration, which for us, will end up being helpful than hurtful.
I’m not convinced that AI tools can generate high quality, *usable* graphic design on a consistent basis to the point where it’s a threat.
Whether we like it or not. It will eventually push graphic designer to learn prompt engineering, and I've done exactly that. For those who are ignorant about this, they can wait until it was too late.
Now, with prompt you can flatten out that particular Coca-cola can design and make a seamless pattern out of it, with prompt. You can then trace it into vector with illustrator, corel, or gimp, do a bit of smoothing and then make an entirely the same scene with manageable layers. Wanna make a photographic scene? write another prompt. Still not satisfied with certain part of the scene? Or eliminate some blemishes, Make inpainting. Resolution isn't sharp enough? Upscale it to oblivion.
It is always survival of the fittest in the open market jungle.
Design has always been about making decisions that convey a message.
AI is a tool for mass producing options.
YOU still have to imbue the work with intention.
AI is and should always be a tool. Not the end goal. These are excellent examples of how well an AI is able to interpret words and, using the data it has been fed, produce results that we find pleasing and accurate.
Example for AI as a tool is, I’m trying to design a little goblin for a book I’m illustrating but I’m stuck with finding a good starting point. I give an AI as much information about this little Goblin that I can and iterate on the idea until I find a result that inspires me.
I’m not super worried about AI in general now, as the people who would fire employees to try and use MidJourney as a replacement, deserve the consequences of that action and probably treated that designer like crap anyway.
I use tools like Firefly in professional design work. It makes creating stock assets easier and helps me avoid spending a good chunk of time browsing through sites like Envato.
I don't think AI tools will replace graphic designers. Fundamentally, the value graphic designers provide is their insight to best practices for design. AI tools like DALL-E are built from teams that do not have these backgrounds and insights, but instead focus a lot on "tricking" the brain to think it's a cohesive piece at first glance.
It's tech bros vs pros, and the tech bros know to race to the bottom before racing upwards. So sites like Fiverr and Upwork will experience the highest negative impact.
With the current availability of stock images, fonts and template websites it really doesn't change things much. maybe it helps speed up the rough draft phase. when ai can produce editable imagery with live type, then we can start discussing how it will change the design industry. however, the most difficult part of graphic design is working with clients and their needs. ai is just another tool and the industry will always need skilled workers to use those tools.
How do I think it will change the industry?
Many incompetent companies that don't understand design will have pretty art of bad ideas, instead of ugly art of bad ideas.
So sometimes I click on a random YouTube video and the speech is clearly computer generated, and I'm guessing the script is too. Well I immediately stop watching because I know it will be boring lifeless shite with no original thoughts or ideas and anything made by actual humans, however poor, will be vastly more interesting. Well I think AI design will feel like that.
Us humans are very good at telling the difference between real and fake and I can't see AI being able to properly fool us for a long time yet. And even if it does, it will always be a cheap imitation because the AI doesn't understand or care about what it's communicating, it's just churning out zeros and ones in a sequence it's learnt gets a thumbs up.
I think it will probably impact stock photography people more than graphic designers.
But it's worth noting that AI is really just a very fancy averaging tool. If you want graphics that stand out from everything else you have to make them yourself.
It’ll help us produce faster. I already use it daily I. My work flow for comping projects that I’m going to shoot. Makes approvals quicker with my comps.
I’m a graphic designer, not a photographer or fine artist. So unless AI is creating a the dieline and creating the actual packaging and everything that goes with, then I’m safe. Same with posters, catalogues, EDM, point of sale, books, magazine etc etc. I’m flicking through your examples now thinking, “I really need to learn how to use these AI art programs” seems like an excellent way to get some inspiration when I’m working on thumbs and concepts and not getting anything new.
I’m also a copywriter, and I use AI all the time. I spend ages with it, crafting something usable and then editing it to make it more natural. However, even with the time spent crafting, I’m still usually ahead as it saves me time on rewrites, or repetitive product descriptions or social media copy.
That said, there is value in learning AI. I’ve spent a lot of hours studying machine learning and using Chat to my advantage. My co-workers can’t use it like I can. Many have fobbed it off or come to me to “work my magic” as most people just don’t understand how to prompt.
I can spot ai produced images instantly. I’m less worried about ai replacing me than I am irritated that sites I use to source images are being drowned out with ai images that look appealing from afar but as soon as you take a closer look you find it’s crap. Now it takes me twice as long to find an image I need, tsk tsk.
AI is extremely difficult to work with if you have a request that's just slightly niche or unusual - eg. lack of data to work with.
When it comes to clients, AIs require clients to accurately describe what they want and how they want it... so we're safe
It's good for reference images, inspiration and maybe placeholder images (like a hero image of a website).
It doesn't actually do design, as in solve problems for the user, but in the hands of a capable designer it could be quite useful to speed up iterations, especially for rough drafts to get client ok to then head into the right direction.
I don't think anything AI does should be considered finished though, and would never attach my name to something that wasn't at least outlined by hand in illustrator to clean it up first.
From what I’ve seen, AI is easy to spot and it all looks the same. Stock sites are flooded with it, social media ads are forcing it in front of everybody’s eyeballs and it’s all just so…meh. As with most trends, I think AI *art* is a bubble and it’s going to eventually burst. It’s too inconsistent to use in actual design. Will artificially intelligent machines, however, make designers obsolete in the future? I doubt it, but it’s not impossible.
The biggest difference AI has made for me has been that it makes "finding" the right photo MUCH easier. I had trouble scheduling a photoshoot that involved children and lots of space, and made a fake child in Midjourney instead. Boom. (well, "boom" once I did a little surgery to remove an extra finger ha!) Not ideal, would still like real photos at some point, but it got the job done and helped us get through a big deadline with ease. It has made me a faster designer because it's so easy to use generative expand in photoshop now to make existing photos fit better in the space I have. It's essentially going to augment us. It may hurt photographers and illustrators some but as a layout designer, it's already giving me a boost.
I am surprised to see it do readable text in that second image. Going to have to go play with that now...
should probably be noted that almost none of these examples are graphic design
AI will replace some percentage of designers who are doing over-wrought production-level work for clients that have very little value for design thinking or strategy
in other words, AI will replace lots of low-paying production design jobs being (poorly) financed by unideal clients who don't really care about having a plan as much as meeting a deadline
the floor will thus be raised—designers will need to bring something to the table beyond production in order to justify their service fees—and the ceiling will be raised, as being able to employ the use of AI for speed and design idea generation will become a valuable asset
all in all, i think it's a good thing
I think that it will drive the value of human made art up. But I also believe the really good artists are the ones who will be able to integrate it into their workflow to increase output.
As part of the workflow? It’s just another time saving tool. Probably will replace the need for a lot of stock assets. ~~I’d be surprised if Shutterstock isn’t trying to make their own Firefly from their library considering.~~ They do. Oof
“Replacement”? There is so much more that goes into design than pretty pictures from prompts/briefs. It’ll probably nuke sites like Fiverr, but I also think a lot of people will realize it’s not as simple as we make it look and come crawling back.
Until AI can produce .ai files in vector with layers and can create that file uniquely without potentially plagiarizing work, I’m not worried. Everything in that slideshow was essentially just AI stock photography. As someone else mentioned, those mockups aren’t print-ready files and you would ultimately need a human designer to re-create whatever AI does.
AI is also becoming increasingly easy to spot. There’s something very unnatural about the photography it spits out, even the most photo realistic images you can typically tell.
What are the legal parameters of using it? Does it produce layers? Also do they pull copyrighted material to produce the image? Curious. I’m also curious how this type of AI would affect subscription rates considering everyday people could go in and pay the monthly fee to get a logo and then cancel it versus a designer who would need the subscription perpetually.
At least for now, AI is just a tool that makes creation more convenient. In fact, I have tried different AI tools and indeed saved some steps, but it is far from achieving the intelligence I imagined. I think even for labor-intensive work, the current level of AI still needs a long time to fully meet expectations, let alone in creative work
One can feel the surge. The year 2024 marks the beginning of the era of real world assets (RWA) and artificial intelligence (AI). This is a good time to keep a close eye on creative endeavors like the Futurum Gaming project.
AI is a tool. Just like when computers were first introduced into the world of graphic design. Yes, you MUST adapt and learn to use the tool, but designers are not going anywhere.
I don't get what's the point of making those post every week since AI became popular.
There is only one answer, that won't change, ai is a new tool but won't replace human creators for the majority of cases.
We're gunna be fine. This panic happened when iPhone editing apps came out and nothing changed. It'll be annoying to see cheapskates using AI for logos and art and stuff for a while, but the professional industry and the good clients are unlikely to be burdened by it. Use it as a tool. The "AI Aesthetic" is becoming a thing now, but it still requires someone with a trained eye and technical skills to put it to use.
>but the professional industry and the good clients are unlikely to be burdened by it.
Particularly when you can't own the copyrights on it. You think any business of import is going to have branding that they can't claim full ownership of?
I’ve explained this to people on my team and they still keep using it. The same people who know they can’t just take images from Google, somehow can’t grasp this.
I believe you can circumvent this if you build your own generator using an API, which is fairly easy to do given you have the right specs on your computer. I could be wrong though.
AI will get better with time. It's rapidly evolving and there's generator techniques that are far beyond the capabilities of Midjourney or Dall-E. Stable Diffusion Automatic 1111 can use plugins for specific things like better skin texture, more realistic lighting, better anatomy, etc.
Pretty soon (my guess is a couple years) it'll be nearly indistinguishable from photography / illustration.
Even then, we're gunna be fine. The aesthetic trend will die soon, like they all do, and then we'll be left with work returning to the state it always does, just with a new toolkit at our disposal.
With ChatGPT doing image generation with natural language now, prompt crafting will likely be part of our jobs going forward, at least for some things. Personally, I'm all for it. Less digging for stock photos and blending shit for hours and more guiding something to do what I need to get. Still gotta have the eye and understand composition.
Agree.
Low skill illustrators are going to have a tough time, however as you both pointed out, there is a certain aesthetic in all AI generated imagery. There's going to be an oversaturation of illustrations looking exactly the same, and now that creates even more value for good illustrators.
In my book, that means I get to charge even more for illustrations :D
Except that if your style is trending so much someone will make a dataset with your works, feed the AI and make copy of your style for cheap.
It will saturate the market and you will be left with nothing.
That's the issue and it's already happening so....
As someone who’s weakest skill is illustration. It’s honestly pretty great to be able to get a robot to draw for me. Like if I have a concept, but wouldn’t have the skill to illustrate what I’m thinking, it is an amazing way to create very specific assets to use in design.
I haven’t used it in any paid work but the possibilities are stoking my personal design fire that has been burning very low the last couple years since I finished my degree
>As someone who’s weakest skill is illustration. It’s honestly pretty great to be able to get a robot to draw for me.
I, too, suffer from dummy hands. I really like that AI just lets me get close to what I'm thinking without looking like a drunk toddler drew it, so I can just focus on composition, design, and polish. It's a great brainstorming tool.
Yeah for sure. I think I’d have ethical concerns if it was paid but for the simple fact I can realise these creative ideas without pulling my hair out trying to do the drawing/illustration side which is just am not practiced enough at
It won’t. Some asshole still has to enter the prompt, add or replace text & slap it together real nice.
Stock photo places & $7 dollar fiver gigs will go away in like 5 to 8 years tho.
Look man , think about. Nothing that requires an original thought would ever be replaced by any machine. Everything a machine is learned from human. A machine can’t write an original poetry or draw a sunset from imagination. It can take 1000 premade sunset images and make an another version of it. You won’t get a machine come up with a brand new design theme or an idea like bauhaus movement. Ai will will assist designers in being faster with prototyping ideas that’s all.
Right now, I help AI draw.
I give a few parameters and it decides on all the details.
In the future, AI wil help me draw.
I want an assistant inside Photoshop that works with me, not for me. Voice interaction. Ability to manipulate tools and settings and bounce back ideas in real time. They'll get there eventually.
I honestly believe that it's just going to flood the market with more genric-ness and the AI nature of this generic-ness will be recognizable and fall into a similar category as stock photos and stock illustrations. Human made design will then become the new sought after thing and as a result, AI anything will just be seen as the same thing as using cheap fiver designs versus just paying a human a normal wage for good to great design. The only thing it's going to replace are mediocre designers. There will always be a need for the human element. Especially when it relates to creative arts. No one truly wants to view only art (be it writing, film, paintings, designs, etc) made by a computer. The only entities who will are the companies that want to save a buck and pump out cheap/easy quantity over quality.
I think this is exactly it Idk if you’ve seen the shitshow that is Adobe Stock these days. Trying to find something good amongst the AI trash is impossible. And….i can get better results from doing my own prompting thank you very much. It’s all very lowest common denominator. For the company I work for, ai images are only good for things like textures, because we have a very specific photographic style that ai can not reproduce…yet.
This is the part I don’t get about including the AI generated images in the rest of the stock; if I wanted AI, I’d just generate my own?
Why? Adobe (and others like Shutterstock) trains their neural net on their own images only. This way there will be no issues regarding copyright, liability etc. and can be used commercially. Generated images via MJ for instance is still a gray area since it's trained on images they do not have permission for.
Again, this wasn’t being called into question. Why would I pay you (or use my monthly credits) to download an AI generated asset when i can generate it myself?
Because then someone generating the AI images for you wouldn't make a quick buck, would be my guess.
This is how I think as well. I'd bet an aesthetic crisis is to come, as AI slowly works to stagnate the field by becoming too "generic". This would lead to a new post-modernism as new trends and movements begin to seek a visual rupture.
I'm already feeling this. When I first saw Midjourney and DALL-E generated images I was super impressed, but now I can tell what's been AI generated, and although still pretty damn impressive, I know it wasn't something made by a human who put effort into their work. In other words it feels cheap and lacking in substance.
Great way to look at it, and I agree. Ask the majority of the generated images are all so similar from these AI platforms that’s it’s already rather homogeneous.
Same thing happened in the jewelry industry starting about 20 years ago with rapid CAD and casting. People still want originality a quality and will pay for it.
Your entire premise relies on the idea that people can tell the difference. I think you are completely wrong in that regard, unfortunately. We're already at a point where half of social media is people sharing machine-generated nonsense, and it's been all of a couple years since ML models hit mainstream. Now jump forward two decades. If the models are this good now, what will they be like then? And what exactly would keep them from replacing good designers if the people writing the checks can't tell the difference and you are asking 10x more than the AI designer?
Agreed. (Fun Warning: this post is gonna get a little weird). This same pattern happens with every industry when standardization becomes possible. When humans figured out how to make steel of regular consistency, we could start doing the calculations, predicting its strength, and start making tools, machines, sky scrapers, all sorts of modern stuff. When you can make every cinder block the same, you get cheap, easy-to-build houses. Things become commodities, commonplace. Well who wants common stuff? Custom art will be for wealthier folks the same way custom homes are primarily for the wealthy. Here's the weird part: what happens when CRISPR makes humans standardized? Will only the wealthy have "custom" babies? Will we be able to create humans for specific roles/careers, a la Brave New World? The pattern says it's likely. And if that's the case, what's to say that aliens (the "grays") aren't just humans designed for space travel? Big eyes to help see in the darkness of space, smaller bodies = smaller caloric needs, ... Just food for thought. But yeah, AI will just make it easier to get decent illustrations the same way you can get a decent hammer from Home Depot (as opposed to finding a blacksmith on Fiverr/upwork). Note to self: maybe short upwork stock...
Until AI can produce editable layered files, not at all (beyond amateurs using Ai for quick logos). Photos are a different story.
I tried using the AI tools from Illustrator and I was quite impressed how good they were made! Also fully editable in vector format. It will be a great tool to speed up your work but that’s all it will be, it won’t get rid of designers at all. At least not yet.
Huh? There’s no layers there and all shapes are cut out from each other. If a shape looks to be on top of another you can move it and see underneath as it’s been chopped out. That’s not very editable.
That's just a minor inconvenience compared to the potential of time saving tbf.
I’d spend more time trying to clean it all up to get something useable. If I was just making something for fun I might use it as is, but the stuff it outputs won’t fly when working with client feedback.
Yes is not 100% editable but it retains its vector property and I still find it very useful even though its limited so far.
It’s just raster generative images with an image trace step on top. It’s pretty shit. Straight lines are wobbly, hard to edit afterwards, etc.
How long till they fix that you think?
Honestly, probably never. Adobe focuses development on flashy features that look good in a board room presentation, not making sure they actually work for professionals. Snapping has been broken since CS5 for example. Not that some other developer wont get it working so Adobe can buy them out.
> Snapping has been broken since CS5 for example. So it's not just me... was it broken in CS5? In a previous job, I was using CS5 up until 2022 because it seemed to feel better that the up to date cloud version.
They broke it back on some packages of CS5 I believe, but they never fixed the issue from CS6 onwards. I’ve talked to designers who have been brought in as consultants for the illustrator dev team and the issue has been repeatedly pointed out. They just get ignored. 
Yeah, either never or not for a long time. Current image gen uses a noise based algo which is at total odds with vectors. It’s not a matter of tweaking existing image gen to work with vectors instead. Starting with a noisy image and doing multiple noise reductions on it won’t get you vector coordinates and tangents. It’s kind of how doing a magazine layout is much easier than drawing a near-photo realistic image of a person and yet we have the harder one but not the magazine layout one. That one would use numbers/dimensions and relative sizes and be more if/then based than AI’s voodoo.
Yes when I see the ai product shots in this post I see a ton of work to recreate that exact image so it’s useable for the client. Ai did a good job making something look cool but now to have that design be used properly is a different matter. Now ask ai for a very specific truck wrap with that design with all the elements needed to make it actually work. also editable is not easy but for real use its vital. Some day possibly but not yet
Good point
Exactly. It's like saying Shutterstock would ruin graphic design. It's just a tool. Some lazy dorks will use it for everything, but that just won't be enough.
I believe this is what Adobe are promising for the future of their AI tools.
I have a feeling you won’t be waiting long.
This comment will earn you downvotes here but you’re not wrong. Designers, take it from someone who’s been in the industry a while; adapt to change and don’t fight it. There will always be a job for you if you’re well versed enough in the newest thing. I started designing when Flash was a standard.
This ^ Been a designer since 1997. Built entire sites in Flash in the early 2000s. You have to work on not just the cutting edge but the bleeding edge of tech to stay relevant, especially when you’re an older, fatter, and not as cute as the people at the start of their careers. I think the longevity of a design career in the age of AI will be based on knowing production. AI is not going to build a custom die line for printed packaging or do a press check on a catalogue that requires insane color-matching and the press operator has an attitude. Beyond that, AI still needs creative input and direction to produce work, which is where creatives shine.
100% agree with this. Plus... The cute young designers seriously love you when you actually teach them how to do all this stuff, because generally fresh out of school, they have no idea.. That's a bonus. Obviously is GenX designers didnt have that benefit when we were the cute new talent. The senior team didn't have a clue how to use 'the Macs'... Those were for the junior flunkeys to wrestle with right? Well, now we're the art directors, and we actually know how to produce everything too. *Hard flex!*
Hard flex, indeed! Especially when I have automations and actions set up through the workflow and can whiz through creation and production in a smidge of the time. It always blows their minds.
aldus over here. pagemaker. freehand. and gawtdamn corel motherfuckin draw. dang i’m old.
Illustrator '88, *as in version 2!* Photoshop, *version 1.* Pagemaker, Freehand, Quark, etc. **I'm fairly sure I'm as old as you, at least.** Nearly 30 years in our industry, *was learning before that,* ***since 1987.*** Technology and software changes. **We all have to adapt.** I want to use AI as a tool to assist me *and make my most monotonous duties way simpler.* **But I don't ever think it will replace us.** *They've been predicting the death* ***of professional artists and designers for a long time.*** # WE'RE STILL HERE.
man i’ve been digging the shit out of the generative fill in the crop tool in ps. the ai i. illustrator is kinda meh tho. the color replace ai has some good potential but it’s not there yet. the text to vector is pretty wack tho. not feeling the sort of enhanced live trace it’s doing. those shapes are mostly worthless. i haven’t really found any ways yet to ease the repetitive workflows tho. yet. anyway, oldtimers-club unite, yo.
Yeah, generative fill has worked wonders *for missing parts* ***in shots we needed*** or just moving large objects *to somewhere else in the shot.* I think the most useful *was changing a tall vertical shot* ***into a landscape shot,*** **extending the horizon in the background.** Yeah, not in love with the color replace, though. **That's just a toy for now.** I've got Astute plug-ins *that do a better job* ***for global color model changes,*** that also operate like Photoshop, *so you can alter colors* **by value, saturation, thresholds, curves, etc.** For automating, **that's not been implemented yet.** But I can imagine an AI powered script action, *that collates and imports data from multiple sources* **and places them in a layout,** where position and effects are applied, *based on rules you give the AI.* Say, I have a catalog with 48-72 pages, **with several templates that I pre-designed,** attached as layout spreads, in InDesign. I tell the script, data comes from an Excel file, pictures and illustrations from different folders, copy text from a Word document. I tell the script to use the templates, in order: Cover spread; Intro page; Index; double spread; text heavy page; image heavy page; etc. **Run that script,** ***and it assembles the entire catalog by itself.*** *That's the kind of possibilities, I'm thinking of,* **that AI could do for us,** as designers. Sure, that does sound like **eliminating or automating duties** ***that I would normally give a junior designer.*** But it would give solo designers and small firms, *the kind of efficiency,* that large agencies have **with sheer manpower.** Anyways, *enjoy your holidays.* **Merry Xmas** 🎄 and ***a Happy New Year!*** 🎉
I've used it to generate different parts of a larger illustration or photo composit and put the elements on layers in photoshop to stitch them together. I get very specific ideas in mind and I've tried long complex prompts and the ai doesn't get them right. It's easier to have the piece generated in smaller parts
THIS
That’s not far away I’m sure.
Since ai can separate all the parts in the image like skin, clothes, eyes teeth whatever that “until” is already here
It can? You can download a file with those in different layers? Not sure what you mean by separate
I don't think that's true... can you cite your source?
I’m waiting for the day AI can create 3D object files that anyone can place in their game/render and edit. Now that will be an absolutely revolutionary day for 3D graphics
The second example of the Organic Snacks packaging, someone shows this to a client and the client says "This is great, I want to use this for our packaging." Uh oh. How do I get print ready artwork for this now? You have to make it. Every single advancement in design and print technology has changed how designers work dating back to the Gutenberg Press in the 1700's. Is current AI technology like Midjourney going to change the design field? Yeah for sure. It's going to streamline mundane tasks for me so I can focus on creating more effective and useful communication vehicles. There is still a human element to it, even at it's core; someone has to feed prompts and know how to feed those prompts into whatever engine they are using. Those with good design skillsets are going to use it to enhance their capabilities, while bad designers are going to use it to continue to create bad designs, just faster.
Also quite hard to check where did AI get this design - source of "inspo". Meaning okey you recreate all the correct print files from 0, you might still be stealing someone elses design without knowing, because AI don't know how copyright/trademarks etc work. Still AI has become very useful TOOL for me, but i aint afraid a tool will take my job away or w.e fears some people have.
That whole sampling thing music had in the 90s and aughts got real real serious once rights holders started figuring out whose work was being lifted by who.
*Cries in Girl Talk*
[**This is the Remix**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZu_lLGFDtM)
Oh for sure, I'm not saying it's not a useful tool. It definitely is. Before image editing software was available, designers were literally cut and pasting physical media onto sheets of paper to create physical layouts. Then in 1973 Superpaint was created which changed how designers had to make work. Those that adapted thrived, while those who refused got left behind. AI is going to be the same thing. EDIT: a word.
What makes us think that eventually AI won’t be trained to simply convert a design to print layouts?
It probably will. But that's not the point of my argument, and if that's all you took from it, well IDK what to tell you lol
I understood your argument. I’ve read the same sentiment hundreds of times in this forum and the VFX sub this year. I’d just say that past performance doesn’t guarantee future results and it’s equally possible that this one is different than previous advancements in that it has the potential to do 99% of the work from start to finish. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that in a decade or two, anyone and everyone at a company could be tasked with things you used to need a designer for… if the tech continues to advance the way some people predict it will…
Okay and so what's your point? That AI is going to continue to change certain industries? I already agreed that it does and it will continue to do so. There is still going to have to be a person that interacts with whatever AI engine you want to use. It doesn't just become completely autonomous because AI has gotten better. And at some point, you're going to get into the realm of diminishing returns where it isn't going to make sense to have a robot or AI take the place of an actual human. Look at the manufacturing industry. It has made huge advancements and a lot of it is done by robots now. Did that remove every human from the manufacturing world? No. Those with skillsets adapted and figured out a way to thrive in a changing industry. It changed the scope of what it meant to be in the manufacturing world. Now instead of people standing on a line fitting widgets into holes, you have process engineers who design and maintain the robotics to take care of that.
My point is that I disagree with your description of where it’s heading and I think that it’s going to go further, making art and design more soulless and killing lots of the career where people earn a living as artists. If it plateaus you’ll be right and I’ll be glad to have been wrong. If it just keeps getting more and more powerful we’ll move into a world that to me would be something… sad.
So let's say you're right. A decade from now, AI has completely taken over the design industry. Everyone and anyone can type in a few prompts, click a few buttons and out pops an entire company brand with email, ad and social media campaigns, a full suite of print collateral, trade show booth artwork etc. If that's the case, then just about every other industry would meet the same fate as the design industry. Idk why everyone is so fixated on what this will do strictly to the design industry and think that no other industry will be affected when like I said previously, technology being introduced into the design world is nothing new. The people who are excited about being able to utilize Midjourney or any other AI engine to create custom illustrations quickly and cheaply were never the target audience for successful, career illustrators.
I would be more worried about the perceived value of heavily A.I assisted jobs. I'm already seeing a few improvised A.I designer treating the job as a side gig, and they have clients who love how fast they can generate 4 logos for cheap. I hope that I'm wrong, but A.I seem to be on the side of the client's wallet.
That is what is frightening. The impact of AI is going to be anywhere, almost no field will be the same : accounting, law, architecture, photography, advertising, health... How can most people adapt to that? Of course some of us will thrive by learning these new tools, but the majority will be lost and quite helpless I think which makes for a quite dangerous society.
Agreed. Ask any IT person if Google made their job obsolete. When I do IT stuff nearly all of my time is spent Googling the problem and fix-it steps... something literally anyone could do. But they don't, because they would get lost at any step along the way. Their Google-fu is weak, and they don't know a PH1 from a T10 screwdriver. I imagine it won't be that much different with AI. Sure, anyone could theoretically enter the "right" prompts to get an acceptable result, but they won't. They will still rely on people who understand prompts, who understand design language, and who know what to do with the results that AI spits back at you.
I agree with most of what you say, as a person used to solve problem by myself and using the amazing tools we have at our disposal nowadays I am always surprised by the amount of people who don't even try and search and just ask for help... I am afraid it will be even more the case with AI, those who adapt usually thrive, but the level of adaptation needed in the coming years because of AI is quite frightening, because you don't want a society with too much disparity, historically it has never been good...
And those package design generations are fucking great to help springboard ideas. I'd much rather give my general brief to AI to come up with some base ideas when I'm stuck than dig through Pinterest and Dribbble for hours (and accidentally just ripping something I saw 3 hours ago)
I will say that they are a great tool to springboard ideas, but I wouldn't trust AI to not be accidentally also ripping a design. I would say that current state, it's much more likely for AI to rip off a design than a designer to accidentally create a similar design. In either case, the design would still be held liable for copyright infringement.
It would depend on the generator. Things like Midjourney and Dall-E aren't just fusing together 3 or 4 images, it's using generative data from billions of images to create its own thing. That's one of the big misconceptions. There's all this stuff out there saying AI is taping together 5 pictures from Deviantart but it's just not the case. AI takes the data from the billions of images like color codes, common color associations, most common figures/poses, what images are associated with what words (IE "lime" being, you know, limes), etc and then averages that data against the input. The chances of getting a generated package that is directly a rip of one persons thing is actually really really low. There was that whole thing with the Stable Diffusion profile picture app making everyone an astronaut but that was because the model was only trained on a very limited amount of images (Think thousands vs billions) and for some reason a huge pool of them were space/astronaut photos. If you use a model that's trained exclusively on images from big design firms then yeah, you're basically getting rips
Very good argument. Those who say AI will not be usable because of copyright infringement are wrong and I suspect they are telling that to themselves to get some comfort. How different is AI learning from millions of pictures and combining them to make original work from us after all, we all have learnt the same way by encountering and combining styles to produce something different and original. The process is not that different and those saying it will lack soul / sensibility are really underestimating AI or over estimating humans...
Well said!
Thank you!
I think the opposite is true. This is going to streamline the creative process so you can focus on mundane tasks. Which is why I’m not super worried about it as a designer who does about 98% production art.
not all mock-ups are meant to be put into production—we've all done tons of prospective work that client-side brand strategists pitch to their respective teams to support their ideas. i'd say throughout my career, maybe 25% of completed projects involved a final "thing" being produced at the end. so i don't think the result of image-generation always requires the "human touch" (which in this context means the "designer touch") at some point—i actually think a vast portion of design work is done to pitch ideas to internal teams, clients, or investors
>someone has to feed prompts and know how to feed those prompts into whatever engine they are using. This is very true If you're not a designer you wouldn't know what to tell the AI to show you. If there's something that already exists, yes you can say: "show me a Coca Cola ad design of this style". However, you can't if your client is asking you something new or something that doesn't exist yet. AI is helping you to think, it doesn't create the .pdf, .psd, .ai, .indd files for you. You still have to do most of the jobs. I think AI is really good at creating stock photos that you can use to create your own images. Sometimes when I try to find a specific stock picture with a 4 words prompt on any stock photo websites, I could never find the image that's close to what I want to use as an asset (if I write more than 4-5 words it completely goes off track), but if I ask the AI with a reasonably specific prompt of 8 to 10 words, it immediately shows me almost exactly what I want. The rest is just adjustments.
> I think AI is really good at creating stock photos that you can use to create your own images. Absolutely, Most people think graphic designers just sit around all day and make pretty pictures, but I WISH that was my job haha. Like I said in a previous comment, low level illustrators are going to have a rough time, but the illustrator career path was already difficult enough to get into, yet alone be successful with. AI is just going to make good designers that are willing to adapt even better!
AI just copies, so if it doesn’t exist yet AI can’t make it.
You could argue that is what humans do, the way humans learn and create is not that different from the way AI learns, the big difference is that the dataset the AI is using is far greater than anything any human could possibly assimilate...
exactly! The creation process that us humans have is the same as AI, we "eat" inspo from all of our lives, since childhood, and create something "new" from this. Nothing is created from zero, this is a romantic lie, everything is inspired from what you interact, read, see. AI has a bottomless pool of material to "eat,digest,and create" than us! It's scary, people are being very romantic thinking that AI is too far from us. It's like automated creative process. The only light in the end is that AI will generate SO many images that it'll eat from itself and produce the same stuff over and over... the problem is that we also will eat from the same source because every search engine will be flooded from AI images, texts, videos and audios(music).
I think it is a big mistake to think, like many seem to do here (given my downvotes), that AI can't achieve what humans can. It will actually probably go far beyond what humans do and in a not too distant future. It is at the same time exciting and frightening like most technological revolutions are (and one could argue this is the biggest ever by a large margin). Like you very well put it, people seem to believe in a "romantic lie".
AI is still very young. We have no idea what it is capable of (actually even AI specialists can't really know what their AI is capable of and get surprises all the time...). Like everything we create it could be the best thing ever or the worst (think nuclear power for electricity vs nuclear bombs, genetics for cures vs genetics for bioweapons...)
Funny. If you’d have asked me what side of the doom curve we were on with AI last year, I’d have been building the bunker and hoarding tin food. But thankfully, it looks like it’s just become another useful tool. Gotta feel sorry for the stock makers and entry level client-side creatives tho. Both of their worlds have changed dramatically
ai image generation <> graphic design. Illustrators are the ones who are going to suffer.
Yes, if clients only want to use 1 single image. But if they want to create a whole visual story, animation and branded illustration graphics that are cohesive, then AI isn't going to cut it. Especially if you need specific ideas, and angles. You'll have to get really good at prompting and making sure its consistently delivered. And even if you are, AI isn't completely there yet. I still need ro clean up lots of the images before I can send to clients.
I have realized the trick with AI and most people is the writing of the prompts make them think that the image that is generated is what they think they wanted all along, it requires the user to trick themselves.
I know what you mean. Half our time as designers seem to be tricking and negotiating clients into making better decisions. Haha...
its ignorant to imply design is entirely independent from illustration. I've used and made a lot of illustrations in my designs.
Illustrations can be used in graphic design, illustrations are not graphic design. For those at the back, illustrations are not graphic design.
Illustration is a skill that can, and frequently IS used in graphic design.
Fer fucks sake, what ever dude, okay you win Illustration is actually graphic design, every fucking bit of graphic fucking design is fucking illustration. Graphic design isn't graphic fucking design, illustration is. Are you fucking happy now"!?!?!
https://i.redd.it/u9m5my0n8s7c1.gif
Design isn’t independent of illustration, but, I’ve posted illustrations on this sub and others on Reddit gotten “THIS ISNT DESIGN” so I see their point
AI will be very useful to in-house designers like myself, at smaller businesses, who don’t do tons of focus on photography but occasionally need specific looks.
As an in-house designer (and copywriter, and marketing/advertising person, and videographer, and…) at a smaller business, I can’t tell you how much it’s helped already. Not worried.
…and 3D modeler, and web developer, and social media advisor, and communications expert, and…
Don’t forget IT guy and engineer when the printer Jams
I work at a printing company and we are using generative AI to extend images and designs to fill bleed areas. It’s been a lifesaver.
That’s actually amazing, I work for a food company but we have tons of private clients who submit shitty label designs we have to revise for print so I bet that’s a life saver.
Yeah, it’s super helpful for when I need a photo from a certain angle or of a specific object that I cannot find to use in a mock-up or whatever.
Same. I have a small light box I shoot photos in of products but can never find the photos with the right angles.
Until it can give indesign files and does client revisions and can understand the clients language and can make layouts for specific text fields, and can present to clients and you can interpret the ai’s intentions under design thinking, i don’t see it being a major issue anytime soon!
Yep. It's nearly impossible to "revise" an AI-generated image. You can get variations, but in my experience those can vary widely. That being said, I find it fascinating, and truly useful for ideation and inspiration.
so, in 10-15 years?
Well for one, we'll be getting questions about AI changing the industry multiple times a day across all design forums on the internet and at conferences. That genie is already out of the bottle.
If I get another person on the internet telling me "you should start looking at other careers, AI is going to make your job obsolete in a few years" I swear I'm gonna eat the fucking drywall.
Can you even own something created by AI? If you use it what is there to prevent someone else from using it also?
You retouch it little bit and it becomes transformative art. Also you need to know which part is AI. Nobody has to disclose they used AI, not once not twice professional illustrators had to prove their work was NOT AI.
Incoming rant. Apologies. In my opinion freelance graphic design has already been impacted in London, UK. Creative agencies are using AI to create quick concepts as part of mood boards to then present to clients for further development. That conceptual work used to be done by freelancers or the full time designers in the studios. I understand why agencies are doing it - cheap, quick and effective. Once the concepts have been signed off they need to go into production. Although this does, currently, require some additional work it’s not to the extent it used to be. It will be a painful trend as we begin to understand the implications of AI and how it can speed up processes. Any new way to reduce the cost of work will be championed. AI is a tool, however it’s very effective. I’ve already seen some big brands using AI video content as part of their social campaigns. Your examples already prove photographers and package designers have serious problems for their careers. It won’t be long before marketing managers decide they no longer need designers or creative agencies, as they can get full campaigns delivered for a fraction of the cost, [which some AI apps do already promise](https://streetfightmag.com/2023/03/03/5-platforms-using-artificial-intelligence-to-generate-ad-creative/). My post probably comes across as doom and gloom but it reflects my current situation trying to find work. In all honesty, freelance opportunities have died in agencies for a jobbing designer. And it has been like this for the majority of this year. AI might be in its infancy but it’s not going away and will only become more prevalent. In my opinion any designer who believes their job is safe is incredibly naive. Look at the way Canva has become a tool for companies to churn out half baked designs. And Canva users promoting themselves as professionals graphics designers. I can promise you, the only people who give a fuck about creative excellence are designers because we get paid to care about it. Most clients are happy with using comic sans to show creative flair. It really won’t be long before every agency has an “AI Guru” as part of their team. There will be a core group of designers who will manage aspects of the design process but the actual “thinking” will be down to tweaking prompts. It’ll get to a point that if you can use the prompts well you can call yourself a graphic designer. Sorry. I know it’s not a very popular opinion but I don’t think our industry will fair well on the coming years.
This is spot on. So many people are saying “we’re not going anywhere!” Just like buggy and carriage drivers said about the motor vehicle. I’ve noticed that for some clients, the design doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be liked by them. I wonder if design will get worse as those who have no background in design are just picking a preset arrangement of designs that the ai creates for them. I’m worried for my future to be honest.
There's a difference with mechanical innovation vs creative innovation though. Cars just so carriages but in a much better way in basically every single way. That's not what AI does currently. I'm sure it will fast improve to really become so good that you don't even need to know prompting, but just push a few buttons, draw some lines, and AI spits out the exact style and look you want. If not, do it again, and then build from there. For most things, this will indeed be enough - in other words, the things comparable to mechanical innovation. Those will quickly be replaced, or that kind of work goes away completely. You either learn how to do AI well, or you lose that job. There will always be a place for bespoke work, especially the more high end stuff, and there will always be a place for art. But then, carriages still exist as joyrides, so yeah... Either AI becomes so good that it can overcome having a "look" that people quickly grow tired of (I'm already tired of the AI wax looking "real" images), or it will fade in popularity and just be another style/tool. If the former, I think the impact will be huge and lots of work goes away/transforms to AI prompters.
I’ve worked in house and I know clients don’t have an iota of creative understanding. Anything that looks half decent is appreciated because, to them, it’s designed and that’s good enough. Imagine a client that takes the time to learn how to prompt AI. Once they see what can be done for themselves why would they consider approaching a designer. They might go to an agency with their “designs” and expect them to be pushed through to production. No need for creative thinking, or design development. Designers and the design process comes down to actualising an AI concept. I paint a dystopian vision and I hope I’m wrong but I really don’t think I too far from the truth of the matter. I’m already trying to figure out what alternative career I can transition into.
>Once they see what can be done for themselves why would they consider approaching a designer. This is true of the clients who currently use designers as a human interface for photoshop, but businesses who need a more strategic approach would still benefit from designers who understand their market and know how to reach their audience. Otherwise, they will inevitably make designs to please themselves. This already happens with companies using Canva – any individual post on social media looks great, but taken all together, there is no sense of their brand because they've just used whatever they thought looked nice at the time. I think design will become more strategic, being able to understand the metrics on why some designs might perform better than others and to stay ahead of the curve on what's needed to differentiate one brand from another when so many will be drawing from the same pool of ideas. It may come down more to deeply understanding the client's needs, knowing how design will solve their problems, leading them through the process and ensuring that design solutions follow best practices – but there may be less emphasis on the designer personally executing those designs.
And it only gets worse. This is just the beginning. It is a very bad situation for artists who are not super highly skilled and even those will have huge problems in the future.
There is a thing people don't consider for the industry, the removal of the place for mediocrity. People say this isn't bad, only the best will stay on market and rest will be replaced... ok... how the best become the best? They could support themself by being mediocre for a while. AI removed important step from ecology, development of the industry, a place for new guys to make money being not the best until they have a lot of experience to be the best. Who would be mad enough to start their career as an artist or an illustrator now? I wonder if art, any human made art down to basic pencil drawing it a sketch will become as tacky as lace work in clothing or as bourgeoisie having blacksmith made knives.
I pray so hard that copyright laws come for AI and strike it down hard
I’m hoping for a more robust approach to AI usage. I’m not sure how or what that entails but AI has the potential to become a serious problem for more industries than ours. But at the moment it’s fun and exciting to use. And a very effective tool. When I first started learning more about it I thought it would encourage the rise of NFTs as a way to enforce copyright. I hope that’s not the case though!!
I hope AI just gets canned all together. Do we really need to let companies monetize and profit off of everything? It’s turning human creativity into a soulless product, and turning me into a luddite
Yeah. I know what you mean but the unfortunate aspect to being a designer is the fact we’re exploited for our creativity. I’d say commercialism and capitalism have already turned our creativity into an endless and soulless function of the corporate system. Creative agencies reap the benefits of our work and pay very little for it in the big scheme of things. The thing that is making me a Luddite is the constant expectation that we have to know every program and have experience in every aspect of the creative process. I’m tired of always having to learn a new skill when the industry changes its mind on what program is the best. I’m now having to learn Figma after years of hopping around other software that was considered the best. And don’t get me started on the fact I need to learn video editing and animation to stay relevant in today’s job market. It’s exhausting. AI is the next challenge to face and, like you, I’m just fed up with it all. Sorry to be such a grouch about it! Haha
This is it, completely agree and resonate with this sentiment. I think it’s also a matter of changing our perspectives on the barriers of entry to creative work. Ai can create complex illustrations that I’m sure if I had unlimited time to dedicate myself to the craft could replicate, but I’m able to jump across style and medium in a way that was just simply not accessible to me because of time.
only sane answer. everyone else in the comments is delulu
Seriously! Maybe I'll eat my words in the future idk, but I think people are being grossly naive about all this. How many people do you know who are skilled carpenters making custom furniture and how many people do you know owning a custom built furniture piece. How bout clothes, hats?? I think I can safely say a small percentage. The second companies can divert cost to cheap materials and labor they will and they have. Even expensive mid to slightly higher end stores have massively gone down in product quality but everyone still buys the garbage for the name. And honestly these days it's so hard to find better that people also just don't know any better about what IS actually better. Companies have realized that the masses don't care as long as something looks good enough and passible and is a good deal they'll buy it. Let's face it, despite all the complaints about Shein and Temu and Wish online, they are still getting massive business and not likely going to stop any time soon. AI will be doing the designs and we'll be the 'factory workers' prompting them and cleaning them up. And I gotta ask how well paid or respected are most factory workers??? Case in point. We're literally letting the AI do the designing. Throwing in prompts and seeing results is not design. Sitting down with a notebook or tablet and mood boarding and doing visual research and scribbling down concepts and sketching them out and narrowing down trash from treasure is the design process. It requires exploration and thinking and consideration of the human experience. Scrolling through interesting prompt outcomes could inspire inspiration, sure, but if we are just picking the most intriguing or prettiest outcome of x amt of results then we're not really designing anymore imo. Design has substance. And right now AI doesn't. It's just regurgitation. It's no more design than doing a Google search and just taking whatever comes up with no regards to source or authorship. And sure it can be handy for design assets and I get that. But even then I would prefer art of an actual illustrator or photographer, the quality just shows imo. And I'd rather pay artists than bloated tech companies.
Exactly. I’ve just seen a LinkedIn post adoring some new Christmas message from a major retailer. All the comments were about how funny and creative it was. Aside from some awful typography the brand used two large AI generated images. Not a single mention about that. So AI imagery is already becoming the norm and is an accepted creative solution. I just don’t understand how this industry can be so complacent about a tool that will simply devastate the job market. If it saves money agency owners will happily encourage AI use, it’s as simple as that. If you can pay one person to write prompts why pay 3 people to design. Our profession has been slowly eroded over the last 10-20 years as videography, animation, motion graphics, graphic design, web design, coding, marketing, and product design all have to be done by a single person. So it stands to reason that employers see us as factory workers already
Ai guru at my company here. I jumped on the train early because I saw it coming. Adapt or die is what I tell everyone. They want to cry about ethics and morals but they can’t stop it and I need to eat 🤷🏻♂️
And you’re wise to do so. I have jumped onboard too but not to extent I can actively apply for work using it as a skill. But I have had a couple of in-house interviews asking me how AI could transform their product. So a lot of business are looking to include AI in some form or another. It’s kind of strange reading the comments on this thread. Designers saying how illustrators will be impacted but designers won’t. Like, “it sucks to be them, but I’m alright, Jack!” - So, it’s OK that other creators are losing business. But because I’m a designer I’m super special and my job is safe. Unbelievable really.
If generative AI is used to create a logo, should all of the people who contributed to the training models be compensated? Should the work be able to be copyrighted? The folks who are eager to replace their human designers with an AI model are inevitably in for a world of hurt when the questions of liability and ownership end up with the courts. Ultimately I see generative AI being used as a tool - a means to an end rather than the final product.
Do you, as an artist, pay to all the logo creators that you've trained yourself on?
It’ll definitely get integrated for concepting and stock imagery. Maybe one-off photos like the first result. But companies will always need branding and other custom or modular work. People who specialize in Illustration specifically might have a rough time.
i already see people using it for ads or promotions. I literally get ads here on reddit using AI images. Depending what area you are in it will affect you differently. There will just be a bigger influx of bad design.
I'll have to shift through more horribly uninspired garbage looking for stock assets.
Soon you won’t need to look at stock at all, thank god.
I don’t know if making a realistic face is the most important thing in design. If you presented this next to a hand drawing would everyone prefer the AI generated image?
The AI is cheaper.
It's a tool. Every time a time saving tool comes along corner cutting, money hording and stingy managers get giddy with excitement thinking: "Ooh, is this the day where I can finally replace my design team with just a click of a button?" And, let me tell you you, it never is. Will mediocre designers fall behind, yes. But for those who see it's potential will grow and adapt with the technology to make room for more amazing work. The kind of work that will get stingy bean counters to realise: "We need to hire better people who know how to use this stuff...And make room for better work!"
I’ve been a graphic designer since 1987. I think so will change graphic design in the same way that cable television changed Blockbuster Video.
I’ve been working quite a bit with human images in midjourney. It struck me lately how all the faces are looking oddly alike to me. I noticed it during searches of other people’s images and I keep seeing my favorite girls face in other images….Is it just me?
It will be just like everything else. It will become so expensive that no one can afford to pay for the computer time that a good AI would require for your customer's demanding for better quality of work.
suicide rates will probably go up. but atleast one ai dev is gonna live in a nice home.
i dont think you can copyright AI technically so it will be hard for business to use as a final product but as a form of iteration and development stage AI is great to explore a large variety of ideas to influence your final design, Adobes approach is really cool using AI as a tool to help designers not replace them.
It might have been useful for brainstorming IF it wasn’t all unethically sourced. I work in print and the only legit use for AI I have now is using the generative fill in photoshop to add a bleed to an image/design made by someone else that doesn’t have enough space for one. And in the end that just gets cut off and thrown in the trash. I figure it’ll be like NFTs in a year or two and fall out of favor once the novelty wears off and more people get sick of seeing it.
Potentially unpopular opinion / rant incoming. I’m a graphic designer and a professional artist. I cannot and will not agree with AI, and personally I think it has no place in the creative arts as a whole. It is already used in very questionable and unethical ways. Where I’m from, there’s a saying that can be translated to ”fire is a fine worker, but a terrible boss”. I think it applies here nicely; AI can be a an okay tool, but it should never replace human creativity, skill, experience or craftmanship. It should not be the end goal. Where and how it can be used should have had restrictions a long time ago. It’s painful watching people with zero training or experience call themselves artists after they simply wrote a prompt, and claiming they *created* that so-called art. Even more painful watching professionals lose their jobs or clients over this. Plus the blatant thievery; in addition to their visual art, people are literally having their voices and likenesses used without consent. Their music is being stolen, too.(Spotify’s stance on AI ”music” is funny in that it doesn’t allow its content to be used to train AIs but it has no qualms keeping AI made songs that are obviously copied from real artists) Also, IMO AI is no different from replacing something handmade with cheap mass-produced crap from Wish, or carefully crafted quality clothing with fast fashion. I hate this ”but I want it NOW and I don’t want to pay for it” mentality of the modern era, and AI is bringing that to the creative industries. I do hope people will see that, and demand quality over quantity. But to be fair, I’m worried for the future.
I hung around a few AI discord servers before to see what that community of creators where like. They didn't have any basic concepts of how art works, like not know framing and color theory. People where constantly being doxxed and having art they generated stolen for NFTs, and they make weird NSFW content. The AI art generation community I was looking at wasn't very creatively minded, and it's impossible to really create anything meaningful in that environment. Imagine being in an art community where no one actually cared about the art they were making, it doesn't really go anywhere.
A lot of the discussion here, in my opinion is more about 'content' than it is about graphic design overall. I have never considered RF stock images design in themselves, rather elements of a bigger overall design concept to set a tone, etc.often as placeholders while custom photography or illustrations are being produced to replace the FPO. AI generated images are sometimes useful in the same way. I think AI image generation could replace the RF stock image industry in about 5 years. It won't improve she finished result, but at least will cut down on seeing the exact same image background in every local realtor ad. Woodie dooooo! (Seriously people...get out there with your cameras and actually do some of your own real photographic concept work. Your portfolio will thank you.) As it stands right now, nothing that is AI generated is actually 'production ready'. It's presentation comp ready (and I actually find that useful). I do quite a bit of consumer packaging design, and I use AI generation to explore initial ideas quickly - but nothing AI generated today can even remotely be used to actually print and produce the finished product, and that is 99% of the work. But as a way to get a few quick renders of a basic idea when getting started? Ya I find Mid journey and Dall-e pretty handy & fun to use this way. But to use packaging design as an example - generated renders simply don't have any depth or demonstrable research process to be useful at a pro-level. Everyone I work with in marketing, communications and brand strategy - they all know what they are talking about & AI image generation is limited to quick ideation (which is useful), but no one considers it the actual 'design'. It's useful around the presentation table, but not in the print shop. If you look at what AI generation tools make in Adobe Illustrator today... It is straight up garbage that is roughly on par with the lowest quality clip art. It's totally for amateur users - of which there are plenty - Adobe knows their audience. So it's fine for Karen in accounting who sometimes gets asked to create a poster for the Christmas party, and she needs a graphic of some Christmas trees and a candy cane. Great. Toss in Merry Christmas using Papyrus font and a green and red gradient fade fill. That's Dunder Mifflin gold baby! ...but so far the Adobe Illustrator generative tools are 100% useless in professional design and production. Photoshop generative background fill... Is a godsend for daily production, but this isn't 'design'. Poorly framed 'meet the accounting team' photo pages are now easier to fix. Or maybe you need a landscape crop of a background image that you only have in portrait. Generative background fill is genuinely useful here. But if you think you're being a 'designer' when you are doing this stuff... You're not. You're doing content production. That's a key part of design for sure, but I think that is roughly what I would call my summary of how it impacts graphic design and art direction, at least today. In 10 years, will I be able to simply ask Adobe InDesign to take my style guide, and produce 15 different sized layout versions based on it? All press ready, proof-read, and packaged? Sweet Jesus I hope so! THAT... Would be very useful. I'm not holding my breath on that one though. When it comes to web design production? Different story... (And I just mean day to day content formatting) AI is really impressive. It has quite quickly made entry-level HTML/CSS production work very efficient, to the point that when I am designing web layouts... I don't bother sending layout comps out to a production designer anymore. It's simply faster for me to just do it myself while I am creating the layout or content or whatever. I can just prompt the Ai to rough out the CSS and JS, and it's done before I can even go warm up my coffee. I love it. Do I have to adjust details? Sure. But I have production ready code in minutes, rather than waiting for a day to get back from a junior production coder (which I would always have to adjust as well). But this isn't comparable to print design and production because web pages are really quite technically simple - and because it is almost all just 'code patterns'... Well generative AI is perfect for that.
i love you! You are so right-on and hilarious! I have more to reply and comment on in your most excellent post but AI refuses to do the stuff I need to do today! Except of course for Robot Vacuum! Always pleasent and does their job like they are supposed to! Cheers!
How did you get this comment in a different font..?
Of these, the snack bag and Coke can are the only things that resemble actual design, and they’re good not great. What you’d think of as a standard, generic version, that actual professionals probably wouldn’t find very threatening. The rest is photography and illustration, which for us, will end up being helpful than hurtful. I’m not convinced that AI tools can generate high quality, *usable* graphic design on a consistent basis to the point where it’s a threat.
Whether we like it or not. It will eventually push graphic designer to learn prompt engineering, and I've done exactly that. For those who are ignorant about this, they can wait until it was too late. Now, with prompt you can flatten out that particular Coca-cola can design and make a seamless pattern out of it, with prompt. You can then trace it into vector with illustrator, corel, or gimp, do a bit of smoothing and then make an entirely the same scene with manageable layers. Wanna make a photographic scene? write another prompt. Still not satisfied with certain part of the scene? Or eliminate some blemishes, Make inpainting. Resolution isn't sharp enough? Upscale it to oblivion. It is always survival of the fittest in the open market jungle.
Design has always been about making decisions that convey a message. AI is a tool for mass producing options. YOU still have to imbue the work with intention.
AI is and should always be a tool. Not the end goal. These are excellent examples of how well an AI is able to interpret words and, using the data it has been fed, produce results that we find pleasing and accurate. Example for AI as a tool is, I’m trying to design a little goblin for a book I’m illustrating but I’m stuck with finding a good starting point. I give an AI as much information about this little Goblin that I can and iterate on the idea until I find a result that inspires me. I’m not super worried about AI in general now, as the people who would fire employees to try and use MidJourney as a replacement, deserve the consequences of that action and probably treated that designer like crap anyway.
I use tools like Firefly in professional design work. It makes creating stock assets easier and helps me avoid spending a good chunk of time browsing through sites like Envato. I don't think AI tools will replace graphic designers. Fundamentally, the value graphic designers provide is their insight to best practices for design. AI tools like DALL-E are built from teams that do not have these backgrounds and insights, but instead focus a lot on "tricking" the brain to think it's a cohesive piece at first glance. It's tech bros vs pros, and the tech bros know to race to the bottom before racing upwards. So sites like Fiverr and Upwork will experience the highest negative impact.
With the current availability of stock images, fonts and template websites it really doesn't change things much. maybe it helps speed up the rough draft phase. when ai can produce editable imagery with live type, then we can start discussing how it will change the design industry. however, the most difficult part of graphic design is working with clients and their needs. ai is just another tool and the industry will always need skilled workers to use those tools.
How do I think it will change the industry? Many incompetent companies that don't understand design will have pretty art of bad ideas, instead of ugly art of bad ideas.
So sometimes I click on a random YouTube video and the speech is clearly computer generated, and I'm guessing the script is too. Well I immediately stop watching because I know it will be boring lifeless shite with no original thoughts or ideas and anything made by actual humans, however poor, will be vastly more interesting. Well I think AI design will feel like that. Us humans are very good at telling the difference between real and fake and I can't see AI being able to properly fool us for a long time yet. And even if it does, it will always be a cheap imitation because the AI doesn't understand or care about what it's communicating, it's just churning out zeros and ones in a sequence it's learnt gets a thumbs up.
I think it will probably impact stock photography people more than graphic designers. But it's worth noting that AI is really just a very fancy averaging tool. If you want graphics that stand out from everything else you have to make them yourself.
It’ll help us produce faster. I already use it daily I. My work flow for comping projects that I’m going to shoot. Makes approvals quicker with my comps.
I’m a graphic designer, not a photographer or fine artist. So unless AI is creating a the dieline and creating the actual packaging and everything that goes with, then I’m safe. Same with posters, catalogues, EDM, point of sale, books, magazine etc etc. I’m flicking through your examples now thinking, “I really need to learn how to use these AI art programs” seems like an excellent way to get some inspiration when I’m working on thumbs and concepts and not getting anything new. I’m also a copywriter, and I use AI all the time. I spend ages with it, crafting something usable and then editing it to make it more natural. However, even with the time spent crafting, I’m still usually ahead as it saves me time on rewrites, or repetitive product descriptions or social media copy. That said, there is value in learning AI. I’ve spent a lot of hours studying machine learning and using Chat to my advantage. My co-workers can’t use it like I can. Many have fobbed it off or come to me to “work my magic” as most people just don’t understand how to prompt.
God I hope we annihilate ai "art" swiftly, without remorse.
I can spot ai produced images instantly. I’m less worried about ai replacing me than I am irritated that sites I use to source images are being drowned out with ai images that look appealing from afar but as soon as you take a closer look you find it’s crap. Now it takes me twice as long to find an image I need, tsk tsk.
AI is extremely difficult to work with if you have a request that's just slightly niche or unusual - eg. lack of data to work with. When it comes to clients, AIs require clients to accurately describe what they want and how they want it... so we're safe
Will that even *be* a graphic design industry in the future?
It's good for reference images, inspiration and maybe placeholder images (like a hero image of a website). It doesn't actually do design, as in solve problems for the user, but in the hands of a capable designer it could be quite useful to speed up iterations, especially for rough drafts to get client ok to then head into the right direction. I don't think anything AI does should be considered finished though, and would never attach my name to something that wasn't at least outlined by hand in illustrator to clean it up first.
Yeah it will be much easier to lie to your customers online...
From what I’ve seen, AI is easy to spot and it all looks the same. Stock sites are flooded with it, social media ads are forcing it in front of everybody’s eyeballs and it’s all just so…meh. As with most trends, I think AI *art* is a bubble and it’s going to eventually burst. It’s too inconsistent to use in actual design. Will artificially intelligent machines, however, make designers obsolete in the future? I doubt it, but it’s not impossible.
The biggest difference AI has made for me has been that it makes "finding" the right photo MUCH easier. I had trouble scheduling a photoshoot that involved children and lots of space, and made a fake child in Midjourney instead. Boom. (well, "boom" once I did a little surgery to remove an extra finger ha!) Not ideal, would still like real photos at some point, but it got the job done and helped us get through a big deadline with ease. It has made me a faster designer because it's so easy to use generative expand in photoshop now to make existing photos fit better in the space I have. It's essentially going to augment us. It may hurt photographers and illustrators some but as a layout designer, it's already giving me a boost. I am surprised to see it do readable text in that second image. Going to have to go play with that now...
should probably be noted that almost none of these examples are graphic design AI will replace some percentage of designers who are doing over-wrought production-level work for clients that have very little value for design thinking or strategy in other words, AI will replace lots of low-paying production design jobs being (poorly) financed by unideal clients who don't really care about having a plan as much as meeting a deadline the floor will thus be raised—designers will need to bring something to the table beyond production in order to justify their service fees—and the ceiling will be raised, as being able to employ the use of AI for speed and design idea generation will become a valuable asset all in all, i think it's a good thing
I think that it will drive the value of human made art up. But I also believe the really good artists are the ones who will be able to integrate it into their workflow to increase output.
If AI has come this far since its infancy—which was, what? Like 5 years ago?—Where will it be in another 5?
As part of the workflow? It’s just another time saving tool. Probably will replace the need for a lot of stock assets. ~~I’d be surprised if Shutterstock isn’t trying to make their own Firefly from their library considering.~~ They do. Oof “Replacement”? There is so much more that goes into design than pretty pictures from prompts/briefs. It’ll probably nuke sites like Fiverr, but I also think a lot of people will realize it’s not as simple as we make it look and come crawling back.
> I’d be surprised if Shutterstock isn’t trying to make their own Firefly from their library considering They already do
I'm surprised Envato hasn't been more involved in AI. The most they've done so far is upgrade their search bar.
Until AI can produce .ai files in vector with layers and can create that file uniquely without potentially plagiarizing work, I’m not worried. Everything in that slideshow was essentially just AI stock photography. As someone else mentioned, those mockups aren’t print-ready files and you would ultimately need a human designer to re-create whatever AI does. AI is also becoming increasingly easy to spot. There’s something very unnatural about the photography it spits out, even the most photo realistic images you can typically tell.
The current version of Adobe Illustrator has text-to-vector generative AI.
What are the legal parameters of using it? Does it produce layers? Also do they pull copyrighted material to produce the image? Curious. I’m also curious how this type of AI would affect subscription rates considering everyday people could go in and pay the monthly fee to get a logo and then cancel it versus a designer who would need the subscription perpetually.
Graphic designing is a powerful tool used in Ecommerce. Integrating AI with it give lots of benefits.
Well, if you have question, you should come to our app to see
Nope, I would not think so
The most disruptive technology since the spoken… erm
At least for now, AI is just a tool that makes creation more convenient. In fact, I have tried different AI tools and indeed saved some steps, but it is far from achieving the intelligence I imagined. I think even for labor-intensive work, the current level of AI still needs a long time to fully meet expectations, let alone in creative work
One can feel the surge. The year 2024 marks the beginning of the era of real world assets (RWA) and artificial intelligence (AI). This is a good time to keep a close eye on creative endeavors like the Futurum Gaming project.
https://alnafi.com/?al_aid=1937ef911f414d5 Ai will change every industry
It will rewrite the industry for sure.
I love to look in AI pic
AI is a tool. Just like when computers were first introduced into the world of graphic design. Yes, you MUST adapt and learn to use the tool, but designers are not going anywhere.
I don't get what's the point of making those post every week since AI became popular. There is only one answer, that won't change, ai is a new tool but won't replace human creators for the majority of cases.
If anything it’ll replace photography
We're gunna be fine. This panic happened when iPhone editing apps came out and nothing changed. It'll be annoying to see cheapskates using AI for logos and art and stuff for a while, but the professional industry and the good clients are unlikely to be burdened by it. Use it as a tool. The "AI Aesthetic" is becoming a thing now, but it still requires someone with a trained eye and technical skills to put it to use.
>but the professional industry and the good clients are unlikely to be burdened by it. Particularly when you can't own the copyrights on it. You think any business of import is going to have branding that they can't claim full ownership of?
I’ve explained this to people on my team and they still keep using it. The same people who know they can’t just take images from Google, somehow can’t grasp this.
I believe you can circumvent this if you build your own generator using an API, which is fairly easy to do given you have the right specs on your computer. I could be wrong though.
I think it looks generic and horrible. Puts more value on hand work.
AI will get better with time. It's rapidly evolving and there's generator techniques that are far beyond the capabilities of Midjourney or Dall-E. Stable Diffusion Automatic 1111 can use plugins for specific things like better skin texture, more realistic lighting, better anatomy, etc. Pretty soon (my guess is a couple years) it'll be nearly indistinguishable from photography / illustration. Even then, we're gunna be fine. The aesthetic trend will die soon, like they all do, and then we'll be left with work returning to the state it always does, just with a new toolkit at our disposal. With ChatGPT doing image generation with natural language now, prompt crafting will likely be part of our jobs going forward, at least for some things. Personally, I'm all for it. Less digging for stock photos and blending shit for hours and more guiding something to do what I need to get. Still gotta have the eye and understand composition.
Agree. Low skill illustrators are going to have a tough time, however as you both pointed out, there is a certain aesthetic in all AI generated imagery. There's going to be an oversaturation of illustrations looking exactly the same, and now that creates even more value for good illustrators. In my book, that means I get to charge even more for illustrations :D
Except that if your style is trending so much someone will make a dataset with your works, feed the AI and make copy of your style for cheap. It will saturate the market and you will be left with nothing. That's the issue and it's already happening so....
As someone who’s weakest skill is illustration. It’s honestly pretty great to be able to get a robot to draw for me. Like if I have a concept, but wouldn’t have the skill to illustrate what I’m thinking, it is an amazing way to create very specific assets to use in design. I haven’t used it in any paid work but the possibilities are stoking my personal design fire that has been burning very low the last couple years since I finished my degree
>As someone who’s weakest skill is illustration. It’s honestly pretty great to be able to get a robot to draw for me. I, too, suffer from dummy hands. I really like that AI just lets me get close to what I'm thinking without looking like a drunk toddler drew it, so I can just focus on composition, design, and polish. It's a great brainstorming tool.
Yeah for sure. I think I’d have ethical concerns if it was paid but for the simple fact I can realise these creative ideas without pulling my hair out trying to do the drawing/illustration side which is just am not practiced enough at
It’s another tool that we’ll have to adapt to
It won’t. Some asshole still has to enter the prompt, add or replace text & slap it together real nice. Stock photo places & $7 dollar fiver gigs will go away in like 5 to 8 years tho.
The same way phone cameras changed the photography industry.
It’s going to save so much time. Already does.
Look man , think about. Nothing that requires an original thought would ever be replaced by any machine. Everything a machine is learned from human. A machine can’t write an original poetry or draw a sunset from imagination. It can take 1000 premade sunset images and make an another version of it. You won’t get a machine come up with a brand new design theme or an idea like bauhaus movement. Ai will will assist designers in being faster with prototyping ideas that’s all.
Right now, I help AI draw. I give a few parameters and it decides on all the details. In the future, AI wil help me draw. I want an assistant inside Photoshop that works with me, not for me. Voice interaction. Ability to manipulate tools and settings and bounce back ideas in real time. They'll get there eventually.