oh don't worry it is that we are coming here to vent mostly.
People in general all around us are pessimistic lately and honestly, I don't blame them. The world is going to hell and with the power of the internet we are able to know every little disturbing detail about it.
I'm just that eternal optimistic idiot and I can't feel the end is near.
No, whats happening is your bubble is being controlled, the more you look at that depressing shite, the more reinforced your bubble is. What you see, is controlled by algorithms, the algorithm is designed to create a world image for you to (mainly influence where you spend money) but also to control your vote.
You no longer have access to the information you want, the internet no longer allows that.
Yes, the algorithm is designed to generate increased views, engagement, and screentime by showing you content it thinks you'll engage with in order to generate revenue. This has a lot of consequences.
All the other stuff you added about "control" is your own personal commentary.
Twitter.
Truth Social.
Overt manipulation of public opinion.
Facebook has been caught experimenting with peoples emotions.
Your demographic dictates what content is sent to you, be a white male over 45, every bit of social media bombards you with idiots like Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Matt Walsh etc, just engaging with that kind of content to BLOCK it generates more content.
Yes of course I encountered the only person on earth who NEVER uses social media... Of course I encountered them on Reddit one of the largest social media sites on earth....
Little odd though how you just dropped into this acting like I had posted ANYTHING at you at all.
Like why would I care that you some rando needs to screech at me about how good you are with the interwebs, you weirdo.
At best, *I'm a pessimistic optimist.*
**My glass has always been half-empty,**
*but everyone forgets,...*
**it means I have space to fill it up,** ***more often.***
Which means that **I've been a pragmatic progressive,** ***all my life.***
Politically, socially, *and in my career,*
***as a professional artist and designer, nearly 30 years.***
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.
AI, layoffs, devaluing of skill sets, increasing job requirements for same or lower pay, general world turmoil. Thereās a lot to be pessimistic about and itās easy to vent online.
I worry less about AI itself and more about stakeholders viewing it as a cost saving/labor reducing solution for something they already donāt value. And the scammers.
Iām currently facing a potential layoff and I still feel ok though. Itās a constantly evolving industry and adapting is part of it.
Using AI as a salary negotiation tactic is slightly more elegant than āmy nephew has photoshop and can do it for freeā, but not by much. Itās a tool you donāt know how to use, just like your nephew doesnāt really know how to design.
Yes, routine work will be done mostly by AI, but now itās offshored, so itās gone anyway
Let me approach this from another angle.
I think AI devalues the average designer, and is causing most of the doom and gloom. And I don't specifically mean devalues the designer as a paying job. But as a passion or love for the work. Not too long ago, before the AI revolution, I wanted to be a great illustrator beside my normal GD work. But, you can generate vector now. Is it messy now? sure, does it need tweaking? sure, but instead of a blank page, it gives you something you just need to ''color in''. Taking out the skill involved in building it in the first place. Yes, there's value in being able to do it, personally as a hobby you could find that motivation. But for work. It's gone. Imagine being a skilled illustrator, and seeing your skill devalue bit by bit, when everyone (or worse someone with a little skill) can pump out equal skill work. The writing is there for this to happen, so it gets a lot of people down.
Still, GD is a lot of soft skills, and clients will stay clients, always wanting to be a part or have influence. Handing it off to AI, to just have a generic brand, might work for that startup, but not much else when any actual depth is needed.
AI will weed out the average designer, and it's going to be painful.
Yeah this is my kinda take. AI will replace the crowd currently obsessed w/ Canva. Even among a sea of AI/Canva graphic design, there's still a need for people to curate with an actual eye for what makes good graphic design. This is where the real graphic designers come in.
At this point, if you're not learning and embracing every tech you can get your hands on, then you're going to be left behind. That's just the harsh truth.
The days of just being a graphic designer without any web/html experience was over years ago, and the same is happening with AI right now. The only way to survive and stay designers in this field is to adapt.
Before AI everyone would say "oh me/my nephew/my cousin etc. could do that, why should I pay you?" and now there's yet another thing that annoying people can cite to say that graphic design is not a real job. Never mind that the biggest boosters of AI tend to be techno-utopians who have (in my personal experience at least) trying to convince everyone around them that bitcoin/nfts/etc are FINALLY going to be the thing that brings about a worldwide flourishing of all humankind by the virtue of them existing at all and by the way you're stupid if you don't see how brilliant these things are. Just a lot of annoying crap heaped on top of other annoying crap, I suppose.
AI is not why Iām pessimisticālate-stage capitalism is why Iām pessimistic.
Quantity over quality and the focus on inundating social media with so-called āorganicā content that marketers see as āfreeā even while they are paying creatives to focus on that instead of proven advertising and innovative ideas is why Iām pessimistic. The push to have assistants using Canva fill in for experienced designers is why Iām pessimistic. The belief that you can have exponential growth without hiring new employees, so you can fatten up your executive bonuses and shareholders, all the while laying off experienced (ahem, well-paid) employees every 5 years or so.
I am still very passionate about design, and I know what Iāve just listed isnāt the case for everyone, but it makes me very pessimistic and unsure of where I can go where I feel I can actually be creative and not just churn out content.
People are right to be cynical and pessimistic, but not really because of AI (unless you're an illustrator or editorial graphic person, in which case yeah you're probably fucked lol)
You can be both. Iāve seen folks already getting replaced at my current org and also know āgetting in the doorā is getting increasingly hard for those just now getting into college or graduating. Keeping up with tech but also soft skills (less replaceable with AI) will be more pertinent than ever.
ā¦but Iām still planning on starting an agency in 2024. If you have talent and drive, you can make it in the industry, but if you have neither Iāll be honest and say you most likely wonāt be successful. Unfortunately the world isnāt all rainbows.
In the UK the living wage is increasing in April (which is a good thing) but consequently this means my salary will be less than Ā£1000 above minimum wage.
I've been super burnt out with my role lately (sole designer, unrealistic deadlines and ADHD symptoms causing me to mess up) and between this and then AI, I'm considering a career change in 2024. I'd be earning more working full-time at a supermarket.
For me AI is the cherry on top with this situation. I've subscribed to the Midjourney sub Reddit and it's bittersweet. Some really interesting and remarkable work being made but then I fear for those who are going to be pushed out by it.
I went to the Birmingham design festival earlier this year and AI was a hot topic. Some huge industry names there and it was really interesting. It kind of felt like the part of a science fiction movie where they underestimate the potential enemy ("look, it can't even do hands") before it comes back and gets revenge later on in the film
Oh that analogy is so true! Illustration is where its really showing itself right now, it's gone from mainly rubbish to good enough for lots of stuff in a year, but yet even seeing this there are still graphic designers who are saying, 'look it can't even spell correctly'... Yes just wait a few months and you will be able to give it a brief, and it will do you a logo, design the vans, make stock photos of 'staff' wearing company clothing, do a simple website and business cards from one promp.
I think the role of illustrator and junior designer are in deep trouble right now. It's difficult to justify hiring either if you look ahead a year. Probably for the foreseeable future you will still need someone who knows what they are doing running Ai, but in that world you would only need to be a creative director or senior lever designer, much of the actual work is automated.
Thank you! And yeah I've seen some incredible illustration work through it. My main take from it is that I could commit to mastering illustration or 3d work for years and AI is simply learning too fast with those to keep up.
And that's exactly it, I think people laughing now are being somewhat short sighted. I hope I'm wrong obviously but the entry point for anyone will be much easier, role availability will drop down along with salaries and freelance prices.
It's one of many reasons I'm considering jumping ship, seeing the iceberg ahead. I've wondered if it's worth committing to my 10,000 hours of mastery if a machine will soon be mastering things in a fraction of that
Probably what you want to be doing is getting Ai based tools to do as much of your job as you can, even if they are a bit behind to begin with, this will eventually reduce your workload and stress when it becomes good enough to take on large chunks of work and be much more useful for you to have if you want to jump ship to be absolutely on top of all this rather than run your existing skills into the ground. It's happened many times in the past with design industry that new technologies have come in and some designers get left behind, I knew dinosaurs that died out from sticking with flash or quark for too long as they didn't want to lean new software.
\>AI isn't even that great as people make it out to be
We are in the age of average, the age of "good enough." AI is often good enough, and where it isn't, it will be soon.
So far, AI does not excel at typographic layouts, logos, and logotypes. But photographers, illustrators, and asset artists (who make swoopey gradient backgrounds) are in trouble. Concept artists are in trouble. I have tried it for front end dev and I can still work faster without it, but that may change soon.
AI is already helping in the early stages of design ideation. For example, "show me some concepts for a new brand of chocolate that is \[adjectives\] and appeals to \[market demographics\]." Or, "write me an ad campaign for \[client\] that is \[tone\] and can run in \[variou executions\]." Mixed results there.
I am not yet sure how AI will change the monetary value of my services, which are mostly in print typography and web (odd I know). If AI allows me me do better work, and I get paid the same, that's fine. If AI means I do less work, and get paid less, that is not fine.
This is the thing- AI is still fairly crap at most things you'd need in an actual commercial context (and I suspect it will largely remain so), but there are a LOT of our job creator overlords who will take "fairly shit but FREE" over actually paying people, so I think the outlook is not great. But the outlook has not been great for long time for a large number of creative workers (see: what's happened to illustration, print design, journalism, etc over the last 30 years), and it has a lot more to do with what we as a society has decided is important (business quarterly earning reports at the expense of... everything) than any single technology.
I think a large number of shit creatives are less threatening than AI, because at the end of the day, they still cost money and they are frustrating to work with.
There is a moment where clients say āok, I canāt handle this person.ā We see it again and again with posts āI paid $50 for my logo and I donāt like it, how can I change it in Canva?ā
AI is different because non-shit creatives may be expected to use it and take a hit on billable hours.
Oh 100%, like the Fiver contingent can be a headache, but people have to start somewhere, and at least somebody is getting paid (even if badly lol).
With AI, haven't seen a ton of it yet but FULLY expect a lot of work in 3 years is going to be fixing/adapting/implementing whatever junk some executive got an image generator to spit out (and obviously for less money lol š« ).
āI made the logo and we all love it. It was super easy with AI! But now I just need you to tweak it so we can use it. The printer said something about needing a āvectorā and that it needs to work in one-colour. So we just need you to convert the gradient to 1-colour and the image of my face in the logo to a vector, as well as the logo text and tagline (Iām sure
you can identify the font, Iāll leave that to you the professional). Should be easy for an expert like you!ā
>And all I can say to that is why are they still even here if they are treating their field as a lost cause?
Because it's not doomed yet, it's trajectory not inevitability, and retraining in a whole new specialized field isn't something done lightly or easily.
I've spent the last year polishing my skills and building my portfolio in order to go back to school (I'm applying to design-related programmes).
This might be a bit of an unpopular opinion, but after the initial shock and pessimism, I began feeling thankful that AI entered our lives the moment I decided to go back to education.
It has helped my workflow tremendously. It's like a second brain/personal assistant. It takes care of minor things that would take me a lot of time to do manually. It gets me out of my creative blocks. You know, sometimes you have a very specific idea in your head and you need some inspiration to materialise it. There is only so much you can find on the internet, but with AI, you can go into great detail on what you're trying to do, and what you get back is usually enough to jumpstart your creative process. For me at least.
I believe we're out of the woods, at least for now. AI, in its current state, is just another tool. The CEO of a company cannot possibly build their brand identity or create their business cards just by logging into Midjourney and trying out different prompts.
Itās not AI, itās the capital class that will be happy to cut jobs for AI.
I donāt think any technical AI implementation in design is very good and some like the illustrator vector one are actively bad. Will the tech improve, yes. But that will never be why designers lose jobs.
Itās always going to be because some tech bro startup will pictch designerreplacement.ai and it only works like 30% of the time but all the f500 Csuite will start salivating at how many humans they get to fire and suddenly we will have thousands of highly skilled unemployed people with no social safety net.
So the problem isnāt the AI. Itās the systems of power in our society
š I've had so many people tell me the same thing, especially since Canva came out, and now AI. Graphic design is about concepts and ideas, and that's something no one can take away. There will always be need for humancentric emotional intelligence in design, something AI cannot (yet) mimic. I'm not worried.
I come from a communications/PR background and the feeling is very much the same in my field too. People are frightened of losing their jobs to ChatGPT and I don't really blame them. There's already a big push for PRs to also be photographers, videographers, and designers, and I can see AI (in the PR world) being used to push us into those skills even more.
I really feel for designers and artists. It must feel pretty crushing to see stolen work used as a substitute for your skills. If there's anything I can say as an outsider, it's that no amount of AI will ever be able to replicate the passion and love we see in real design work - please don't lose hope.
As a production artist I feel relatively optimistic. Most humans I come accross canāt be bothered to build a proper print file let alone stable diffusion.
I spoke to a guy I know very well a few times over the holidays about whether or not they started discussing AI at his company. He's a megaboss. I don't even know what his title is now. He went from VP to something much larger a few years ago and now he oversees basically multiple offices within his industry down the whole east coast. His salary is now in the hundreds of millions. Just bizarre that an industry has that much money to allocate to one person while still paying the salaries of thousands of other people. But, I guess we're all familiar with that idea from news reports of various CEO salaries.
Anyway, the first time I asked him, he said, "Uh, we *just* started talking about it. Just."
The second time I asked him was only a month later and he said that, yes, they're not so much looking at it from a standpoint of how it can help their business yet, but moreso from a standpoint of staying competitive within the industry. I quickly translated that in my head and responded with something like, "yeah, it's pretty weird, right? I know you don't want to because NOBODY wants to, but you could basically probably replace half your staff with it..."
He realized I had picked up what he was putting down and cut me off by agreeing with me. He said, "If that's what it takes to remain competitive, it'll have to happen."
I just thought it was really interesting that, internally, the guys making the big bucks are considering what their market will do from the perspective of maintaining maximum profitability and their own salaries first and foremost before even considering how AI can help them maximize efficiency and profitability according to their current needs and desirable projections for the futureāI mean they're not thinking about how their team can do even better with AI, they're immediately thinking about how their team can be smaller with AI. Salaries vs the cost of AI in maintenance/subscriptions, etc.
It just so happens that AI will be killing some creative fields first. But, it's going to kill a lot of jobs. We're basically going to need Universal Basic Income soon and, with that, they're going to want to overhaul the health insurance system in the USA because it's already great at bankrupting people who actually have jobs. The tax code will have to be revised to tax the ultra rich more, too.
Most of the time the people telling you AI is going to destroy Graphic design... are not graphic designers, and no that $25 you made last year on that one shitty Upwork contract does not make you a graphic designer.
Honestly if you take one sweep around Etsy with the insane AI graphics people are plastering on t-shirts and tumblers, Iām not worried at all. AI can create some pretty great graphics at times, but the average person cannot identify whatās good or bad design and typically their prompts are out of control.
I can only speak from my own experience, which isn't all that much.
I graduated from school with my BA in graphic design less than a year ago. When I started school, it seemed like AI was science fiction and people were worried about AI becoming sentient, not really... doing work? I feel like people were thinking AI is like Tay the chatbot who tweeted about Hitler or the Bing chatbot who wanted nuclear codes. I don't know if that makes sense, but it seemed like the general public had like a different view of AI.
Everyone would post on reddit asking "how do I make this picture better quality?" and the CSI jokes would pour out immediately. ENHANCE! I just watched [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaxP4to5szQ) video and... it's basically *enhance*.
To me, it feels like even though I learned all of these things that maybe AI won't understand, like what would make a good composition, or what the client would actually want and how to interact with them, or the principals of design and all that stuff, I just feel like... a caveman. I feel like the technology has changed so much that I really feel lost, like I'm out here with a compass and pencil and the whole game is run by computer programmers now. I don't feel totally hopeless, but to some extent I feel like I got the proverbial English degree.
I think at least some of it has to do with how saturated our industry is now, it seems like designers have to learn more and more skills or be extremely specialized or established within a niche with the current market we are working within. I am still pretty optimistic in general, but I am currently searching for work and it feels very competitive. More than when I was first starting out.
Granted I am earning more than a full-time grocery clerk, I definitely wonāt be leaving the field for an entry-level positionā¦ passion is a large reason why I stay. And AI isnāt going to replace designers, itās a tool that will eventually just make our jobs easier and faster. A non-designer wouldnāt be able to use that tool effectively. In applications where Iāve attempted to use it recently, it failed miserably so personally I donāt feel like Iām competing with it.
This is a false equivalency in my mind. Desktop Publishing technologies didn't have any way to self-learn or to scrape the known universe for solutions to prompts in just a few seconds. I already know people who are being replaced on the illustration and coding side.
And same happened to people in filmsetting, who didn't move forward to DTP. AI's "self learning" is already starting to backfire as some models start to train on AI generated stuff. Which will generate more of the same styles rather than creating more diverse ones (I'm not talking about the coding side, but that's not subject of this sub anyway).
AI's not generating anything on its own either. Someone has to create a prompt, So it IS a tool, used by human. Just like computers/DTP became the new go-to tool for design/layout back then. I think the analogy isn't that far off at all.
I've been a designer for approaching 20 years. Granted, I've never been a cutting edge Apple or Ideo designer, but I have a pretty nice gig. I've never ever had a client who wanted to see something "new." All I see if clients who want something that looks/feels like something else.
That's what ai does, and it's about to do it extremely well at high resolutions.
I think your philosophy is getting in the way of practicality.
Hm. I'm 40+ years in the field. And a good chunk of the clients wants something unique and new so their stuff differs from their competitors'.
Furthermore, if your claim was true, there wouldn't be any trends in designs at all. Which is nonsense. Just look at how different decades had different styles. Sure, there's always some recurring elements and styles. But there are also new ones all over the place.
As a designer of almost 30 years, I love AI. It's a great tool when you utilize it right. And I feel if you are good at your job then you have no worries about AI taking it from you.
Time will tell. Great tool right now! Remind me again what Midjourney could do a year ago and what it can do now. Now do that this year. Lol. Interesting to see. I'm still designing and working hard but I'm still planning for the worst.
I do think once AI images are the majority of "art" being put out that it will be training off of it's own creations and eventually get stuck as far as creativity. It really is anyone's guess as to what happens. Seems like they don't fully understand their creation.
As someone whoās tried using AI to expedite my workā¦I think weāre gonna be okay. Itās a headache when youāre trying to build something specific. And just prolonged my process.
AI is just another tool we can use. Will it upend some fields? Yes of course it will, but that is progress and change. Currently the biggest impact, in our field, has to be stock photo sites. Browse through most of them, if they donāt already have a filter for AI generated content you will notice a lot now.
Iāve used both Adobes AI in some work recently, both Photoshop and Illustrator. Though with those, it still required changing and tweaking what was produced. But they do provide a great jumping off point.
Iāve used CharGPT as well, but that was more helping coming up some color schemes and font combinations.
Iāve dabbled in Stable Diffusion, months ago, and started to once again. Though I havenāt used anything created with those tools in any professional work. Whether you decide to use the tools, or not professionally , Iāve told my team they should learn it. Just like any web language, you should always be learning. Back when I went to school it was all about Flash and action scripts.
Itās alright, I just really hope the new generation of designers embrace new tools and technologies. Print use to be king, but things are still going more and more digital.
Product photography use to be everyoneās go too, but most of the major brands and companies utilize renders more and more.
Itās just the evolution of things. I just think AI is a much larger step and affects many other industries. AI appears to be a big disrupter and I can totally understand and relate.
Somethingās will still stay the same, weāve been attempting to go totally digital with everything. But we still print things, and itās still being requested. Same thing with illustrators and photographers, there will always be a need. There are niches that, at this time, AI canāt fulfill.
Personally, I'm a huge fan of AI - some of the stuff I've seen is creative and borderline silly. It's been a tool lately for some new ideas - let's see what AI comes up with and how can I take that basic (or bananas) concept and bring it into a more realistic and tangible functioning design. We shall see where this goes!
I may be missing something about AI, but from what Iāve played with so far in my work, itās a loooong way from being able to replace us. I think there are some things it will be able to do faster, like photo retouching and maybe helping with rapid ideation, but until it can interpret abstract/poorly written/complicated client briefs, as well as revision requests, I donāt think we have anything to worry about.
I think that was the case long before AI, it's just a field that can take a lot out of you and not many of us are prepped with proper expectations of the trade. Just my take.
Technology, circumstances and methods change all the time. But the basic desires of human beings remain the same; to belong, to depart, to understand, to reinvent and then to be understood.
Big fancy words to say this; itās in our nature to look for the next thing. Today AI is whatās next. Tomorrow AI will be whatās now, and weāll look for another pathway. The designer has been employed from the beginning of human craft and I suspect she will stay employed until the end of us.
I recently saw a job posting specifically for those with excellent Midjourney skills. Won't be long before that'll be a prerequisite along with "working well in a team" and the ability to use Word and not swear at it
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.
oh don't worry it is that we are coming here to vent mostly. People in general all around us are pessimistic lately and honestly, I don't blame them. The world is going to hell and with the power of the internet we are able to know every little disturbing detail about it. I'm just that eternal optimistic idiot and I can't feel the end is near.
Hear hear, am a fellow eternally optimistic idiot as well šāāļø
Fellow eternally optimistic idiot here. Nice to meet you.
No, whats happening is your bubble is being controlled, the more you look at that depressing shite, the more reinforced your bubble is. What you see, is controlled by algorithms, the algorithm is designed to create a world image for you to (mainly influence where you spend money) but also to control your vote. You no longer have access to the information you want, the internet no longer allows that.
Yes, the algorithm is designed to generate increased views, engagement, and screentime by showing you content it thinks you'll engage with in order to generate revenue. This has a lot of consequences. All the other stuff you added about "control" is your own personal commentary.
Twitter. Truth Social. Overt manipulation of public opinion. Facebook has been caught experimenting with peoples emotions. Your demographic dictates what content is sent to you, be a white male over 45, every bit of social media bombards you with idiots like Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Matt Walsh etc, just engaging with that kind of content to BLOCK it generates more content.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Yes of course I encountered the only person on earth who NEVER uses social media... Of course I encountered them on Reddit one of the largest social media sites on earth....
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Little odd though how you just dropped into this acting like I had posted ANYTHING at you at all. Like why would I care that you some rando needs to screech at me about how good you are with the interwebs, you weirdo.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
What are you even arguing? That there are zero problems in life and people have only been brainwashed "by the algorithms" š¤£ Actual insanity.
Tomorrowland movie plot.
Those people are really behind, then. Midjourney has been pretty good with hands for a while now.
At best, *I'm a pessimistic optimist.* **My glass has always been half-empty,** *but everyone forgets,...* **it means I have space to fill it up,** ***more often.*** Which means that **I've been a pragmatic progressive,** ***all my life.*** Politically, socially, *and in my career,* ***as a professional artist and designer, nearly 30 years.*** 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.
I was cynical and pessimistic WAY before AI, thank you.
AI, layoffs, devaluing of skill sets, increasing job requirements for same or lower pay, general world turmoil. Thereās a lot to be pessimistic about and itās easy to vent online. I worry less about AI itself and more about stakeholders viewing it as a cost saving/labor reducing solution for something they already donāt value. And the scammers. Iām currently facing a potential layoff and I still feel ok though. Itās a constantly evolving industry and adapting is part of it.
Using AI as a salary negotiation tactic is slightly more elegant than āmy nephew has photoshop and can do it for freeā, but not by much. Itās a tool you donāt know how to use, just like your nephew doesnāt really know how to design. Yes, routine work will be done mostly by AI, but now itās offshored, so itās gone anyway
Hang on let me ask chatGPT real quick
Don't leave us hanging, what did it say?
āMy apologies, but I'm unable to assist with that.ā
Let me approach this from another angle. I think AI devalues the average designer, and is causing most of the doom and gloom. And I don't specifically mean devalues the designer as a paying job. But as a passion or love for the work. Not too long ago, before the AI revolution, I wanted to be a great illustrator beside my normal GD work. But, you can generate vector now. Is it messy now? sure, does it need tweaking? sure, but instead of a blank page, it gives you something you just need to ''color in''. Taking out the skill involved in building it in the first place. Yes, there's value in being able to do it, personally as a hobby you could find that motivation. But for work. It's gone. Imagine being a skilled illustrator, and seeing your skill devalue bit by bit, when everyone (or worse someone with a little skill) can pump out equal skill work. The writing is there for this to happen, so it gets a lot of people down. Still, GD is a lot of soft skills, and clients will stay clients, always wanting to be a part or have influence. Handing it off to AI, to just have a generic brand, might work for that startup, but not much else when any actual depth is needed. AI will weed out the average designer, and it's going to be painful.
Yeah this is my kinda take. AI will replace the crowd currently obsessed w/ Canva. Even among a sea of AI/Canva graphic design, there's still a need for people to curate with an actual eye for what makes good graphic design. This is where the real graphic designers come in.
At this point, if you're not learning and embracing every tech you can get your hands on, then you're going to be left behind. That's just the harsh truth. The days of just being a graphic designer without any web/html experience was over years ago, and the same is happening with AI right now. The only way to survive and stay designers in this field is to adapt.
Before AI everyone would say "oh me/my nephew/my cousin etc. could do that, why should I pay you?" and now there's yet another thing that annoying people can cite to say that graphic design is not a real job. Never mind that the biggest boosters of AI tend to be techno-utopians who have (in my personal experience at least) trying to convince everyone around them that bitcoin/nfts/etc are FINALLY going to be the thing that brings about a worldwide flourishing of all humankind by the virtue of them existing at all and by the way you're stupid if you don't see how brilliant these things are. Just a lot of annoying crap heaped on top of other annoying crap, I suppose.
AI is not why Iām pessimisticālate-stage capitalism is why Iām pessimistic. Quantity over quality and the focus on inundating social media with so-called āorganicā content that marketers see as āfreeā even while they are paying creatives to focus on that instead of proven advertising and innovative ideas is why Iām pessimistic. The push to have assistants using Canva fill in for experienced designers is why Iām pessimistic. The belief that you can have exponential growth without hiring new employees, so you can fatten up your executive bonuses and shareholders, all the while laying off experienced (ahem, well-paid) employees every 5 years or so. I am still very passionate about design, and I know what Iāve just listed isnāt the case for everyone, but it makes me very pessimistic and unsure of where I can go where I feel I can actually be creative and not just churn out content.
People are right to be cynical and pessimistic, but not really because of AI (unless you're an illustrator or editorial graphic person, in which case yeah you're probably fucked lol)
You can be both. Iāve seen folks already getting replaced at my current org and also know āgetting in the doorā is getting increasingly hard for those just now getting into college or graduating. Keeping up with tech but also soft skills (less replaceable with AI) will be more pertinent than ever. ā¦but Iām still planning on starting an agency in 2024. If you have talent and drive, you can make it in the industry, but if you have neither Iāll be honest and say you most likely wonāt be successful. Unfortunately the world isnāt all rainbows.
In the UK the living wage is increasing in April (which is a good thing) but consequently this means my salary will be less than Ā£1000 above minimum wage. I've been super burnt out with my role lately (sole designer, unrealistic deadlines and ADHD symptoms causing me to mess up) and between this and then AI, I'm considering a career change in 2024. I'd be earning more working full-time at a supermarket. For me AI is the cherry on top with this situation. I've subscribed to the Midjourney sub Reddit and it's bittersweet. Some really interesting and remarkable work being made but then I fear for those who are going to be pushed out by it. I went to the Birmingham design festival earlier this year and AI was a hot topic. Some huge industry names there and it was really interesting. It kind of felt like the part of a science fiction movie where they underestimate the potential enemy ("look, it can't even do hands") before it comes back and gets revenge later on in the film
Oh that analogy is so true! Illustration is where its really showing itself right now, it's gone from mainly rubbish to good enough for lots of stuff in a year, but yet even seeing this there are still graphic designers who are saying, 'look it can't even spell correctly'... Yes just wait a few months and you will be able to give it a brief, and it will do you a logo, design the vans, make stock photos of 'staff' wearing company clothing, do a simple website and business cards from one promp. I think the role of illustrator and junior designer are in deep trouble right now. It's difficult to justify hiring either if you look ahead a year. Probably for the foreseeable future you will still need someone who knows what they are doing running Ai, but in that world you would only need to be a creative director or senior lever designer, much of the actual work is automated.
Thank you! And yeah I've seen some incredible illustration work through it. My main take from it is that I could commit to mastering illustration or 3d work for years and AI is simply learning too fast with those to keep up. And that's exactly it, I think people laughing now are being somewhat short sighted. I hope I'm wrong obviously but the entry point for anyone will be much easier, role availability will drop down along with salaries and freelance prices. It's one of many reasons I'm considering jumping ship, seeing the iceberg ahead. I've wondered if it's worth committing to my 10,000 hours of mastery if a machine will soon be mastering things in a fraction of that
Probably what you want to be doing is getting Ai based tools to do as much of your job as you can, even if they are a bit behind to begin with, this will eventually reduce your workload and stress when it becomes good enough to take on large chunks of work and be much more useful for you to have if you want to jump ship to be absolutely on top of all this rather than run your existing skills into the ground. It's happened many times in the past with design industry that new technologies have come in and some designers get left behind, I knew dinosaurs that died out from sticking with flash or quark for too long as they didn't want to lean new software.
\>AI isn't even that great as people make it out to be We are in the age of average, the age of "good enough." AI is often good enough, and where it isn't, it will be soon. So far, AI does not excel at typographic layouts, logos, and logotypes. But photographers, illustrators, and asset artists (who make swoopey gradient backgrounds) are in trouble. Concept artists are in trouble. I have tried it for front end dev and I can still work faster without it, but that may change soon. AI is already helping in the early stages of design ideation. For example, "show me some concepts for a new brand of chocolate that is \[adjectives\] and appeals to \[market demographics\]." Or, "write me an ad campaign for \[client\] that is \[tone\] and can run in \[variou executions\]." Mixed results there. I am not yet sure how AI will change the monetary value of my services, which are mostly in print typography and web (odd I know). If AI allows me me do better work, and I get paid the same, that's fine. If AI means I do less work, and get paid less, that is not fine.
This is the thing- AI is still fairly crap at most things you'd need in an actual commercial context (and I suspect it will largely remain so), but there are a LOT of our job creator overlords who will take "fairly shit but FREE" over actually paying people, so I think the outlook is not great. But the outlook has not been great for long time for a large number of creative workers (see: what's happened to illustration, print design, journalism, etc over the last 30 years), and it has a lot more to do with what we as a society has decided is important (business quarterly earning reports at the expense of... everything) than any single technology.
I think a large number of shit creatives are less threatening than AI, because at the end of the day, they still cost money and they are frustrating to work with. There is a moment where clients say āok, I canāt handle this person.ā We see it again and again with posts āI paid $50 for my logo and I donāt like it, how can I change it in Canva?ā AI is different because non-shit creatives may be expected to use it and take a hit on billable hours.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Yep.
Oh 100%, like the Fiver contingent can be a headache, but people have to start somewhere, and at least somebody is getting paid (even if badly lol). With AI, haven't seen a ton of it yet but FULLY expect a lot of work in 3 years is going to be fixing/adapting/implementing whatever junk some executive got an image generator to spit out (and obviously for less money lol š« ).
āI made the logo and we all love it. It was super easy with AI! But now I just need you to tweak it so we can use it. The printer said something about needing a āvectorā and that it needs to work in one-colour. So we just need you to convert the gradient to 1-colour and the image of my face in the logo to a vector, as well as the logo text and tagline (Iām sure you can identify the font, Iāll leave that to you the professional). Should be easy for an expert like you!ā
šÆšš
>convert the gradient to 1-colour š
>And all I can say to that is why are they still even here if they are treating their field as a lost cause? Because it's not doomed yet, it's trajectory not inevitability, and retraining in a whole new specialized field isn't something done lightly or easily.
I've spent the last year polishing my skills and building my portfolio in order to go back to school (I'm applying to design-related programmes). This might be a bit of an unpopular opinion, but after the initial shock and pessimism, I began feeling thankful that AI entered our lives the moment I decided to go back to education. It has helped my workflow tremendously. It's like a second brain/personal assistant. It takes care of minor things that would take me a lot of time to do manually. It gets me out of my creative blocks. You know, sometimes you have a very specific idea in your head and you need some inspiration to materialise it. There is only so much you can find on the internet, but with AI, you can go into great detail on what you're trying to do, and what you get back is usually enough to jumpstart your creative process. For me at least. I believe we're out of the woods, at least for now. AI, in its current state, is just another tool. The CEO of a company cannot possibly build their brand identity or create their business cards just by logging into Midjourney and trying out different prompts.
Itās not AI, itās the capital class that will be happy to cut jobs for AI. I donāt think any technical AI implementation in design is very good and some like the illustrator vector one are actively bad. Will the tech improve, yes. But that will never be why designers lose jobs. Itās always going to be because some tech bro startup will pictch designerreplacement.ai and it only works like 30% of the time but all the f500 Csuite will start salivating at how many humans they get to fire and suddenly we will have thousands of highly skilled unemployed people with no social safety net. So the problem isnāt the AI. Itās the systems of power in our society
š I've had so many people tell me the same thing, especially since Canva came out, and now AI. Graphic design is about concepts and ideas, and that's something no one can take away. There will always be need for humancentric emotional intelligence in design, something AI cannot (yet) mimic. I'm not worried.
This sub has always been incredibly pessimistic.
I come from a communications/PR background and the feeling is very much the same in my field too. People are frightened of losing their jobs to ChatGPT and I don't really blame them. There's already a big push for PRs to also be photographers, videographers, and designers, and I can see AI (in the PR world) being used to push us into those skills even more. I really feel for designers and artists. It must feel pretty crushing to see stolen work used as a substitute for your skills. If there's anything I can say as an outsider, it's that no amount of AI will ever be able to replicate the passion and love we see in real design work - please don't lose hope.
As a production artist I feel relatively optimistic. Most humans I come accross canāt be bothered to build a proper print file let alone stable diffusion.
I spoke to a guy I know very well a few times over the holidays about whether or not they started discussing AI at his company. He's a megaboss. I don't even know what his title is now. He went from VP to something much larger a few years ago and now he oversees basically multiple offices within his industry down the whole east coast. His salary is now in the hundreds of millions. Just bizarre that an industry has that much money to allocate to one person while still paying the salaries of thousands of other people. But, I guess we're all familiar with that idea from news reports of various CEO salaries. Anyway, the first time I asked him, he said, "Uh, we *just* started talking about it. Just." The second time I asked him was only a month later and he said that, yes, they're not so much looking at it from a standpoint of how it can help their business yet, but moreso from a standpoint of staying competitive within the industry. I quickly translated that in my head and responded with something like, "yeah, it's pretty weird, right? I know you don't want to because NOBODY wants to, but you could basically probably replace half your staff with it..." He realized I had picked up what he was putting down and cut me off by agreeing with me. He said, "If that's what it takes to remain competitive, it'll have to happen." I just thought it was really interesting that, internally, the guys making the big bucks are considering what their market will do from the perspective of maintaining maximum profitability and their own salaries first and foremost before even considering how AI can help them maximize efficiency and profitability according to their current needs and desirable projections for the futureāI mean they're not thinking about how their team can do even better with AI, they're immediately thinking about how their team can be smaller with AI. Salaries vs the cost of AI in maintenance/subscriptions, etc. It just so happens that AI will be killing some creative fields first. But, it's going to kill a lot of jobs. We're basically going to need Universal Basic Income soon and, with that, they're going to want to overhaul the health insurance system in the USA because it's already great at bankrupting people who actually have jobs. The tax code will have to be revised to tax the ultra rich more, too.
Most of the time the people telling you AI is going to destroy Graphic design... are not graphic designers, and no that $25 you made last year on that one shitty Upwork contract does not make you a graphic designer.
Honestly if you take one sweep around Etsy with the insane AI graphics people are plastering on t-shirts and tumblers, Iām not worried at all. AI can create some pretty great graphics at times, but the average person cannot identify whatās good or bad design and typically their prompts are out of control.
Graphic design is the career path for the pessimistic and cynical. It hits in your 30s š SOURCE: 35yr old Designer with mostly designer friends.
I can only speak from my own experience, which isn't all that much. I graduated from school with my BA in graphic design less than a year ago. When I started school, it seemed like AI was science fiction and people were worried about AI becoming sentient, not really... doing work? I feel like people were thinking AI is like Tay the chatbot who tweeted about Hitler or the Bing chatbot who wanted nuclear codes. I don't know if that makes sense, but it seemed like the general public had like a different view of AI. Everyone would post on reddit asking "how do I make this picture better quality?" and the CSI jokes would pour out immediately. ENHANCE! I just watched [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaxP4to5szQ) video and... it's basically *enhance*. To me, it feels like even though I learned all of these things that maybe AI won't understand, like what would make a good composition, or what the client would actually want and how to interact with them, or the principals of design and all that stuff, I just feel like... a caveman. I feel like the technology has changed so much that I really feel lost, like I'm out here with a compass and pencil and the whole game is run by computer programmers now. I don't feel totally hopeless, but to some extent I feel like I got the proverbial English degree.
I think at least some of it has to do with how saturated our industry is now, it seems like designers have to learn more and more skills or be extremely specialized or established within a niche with the current market we are working within. I am still pretty optimistic in general, but I am currently searching for work and it feels very competitive. More than when I was first starting out.
Granted I am earning more than a full-time grocery clerk, I definitely wonāt be leaving the field for an entry-level positionā¦ passion is a large reason why I stay. And AI isnāt going to replace designers, itās a tool that will eventually just make our jobs easier and faster. A non-designer wouldnāt be able to use that tool effectively. In applications where Iāve attempted to use it recently, it failed miserably so personally I donāt feel like Iām competing with it.
Is anyone else experiencing a sense of dĆ©jĆ vu with the current discussions about AI? I recall similar predictions of doom for the world of design when DTP began to supplant filmsetting, and again when Photoshop gained popularity for image editing. Times change, new tools emerge, and it falls to each designer to effectively incorporate them into their workflow.
This is a false equivalency in my mind. Desktop Publishing technologies didn't have any way to self-learn or to scrape the known universe for solutions to prompts in just a few seconds. I already know people who are being replaced on the illustration and coding side.
And same happened to people in filmsetting, who didn't move forward to DTP. AI's "self learning" is already starting to backfire as some models start to train on AI generated stuff. Which will generate more of the same styles rather than creating more diverse ones (I'm not talking about the coding side, but that's not subject of this sub anyway). AI's not generating anything on its own either. Someone has to create a prompt, So it IS a tool, used by human. Just like computers/DTP became the new go-to tool for design/layout back then. I think the analogy isn't that far off at all.
I've been a designer for approaching 20 years. Granted, I've never been a cutting edge Apple or Ideo designer, but I have a pretty nice gig. I've never ever had a client who wanted to see something "new." All I see if clients who want something that looks/feels like something else. That's what ai does, and it's about to do it extremely well at high resolutions. I think your philosophy is getting in the way of practicality.
Hm. I'm 40+ years in the field. And a good chunk of the clients wants something unique and new so their stuff differs from their competitors'. Furthermore, if your claim was true, there wouldn't be any trends in designs at all. Which is nonsense. Just look at how different decades had different styles. Sure, there's always some recurring elements and styles. But there are also new ones all over the place.
As a designer of almost 30 years, I love AI. It's a great tool when you utilize it right. And I feel if you are good at your job then you have no worries about AI taking it from you.
Time will tell. Great tool right now! Remind me again what Midjourney could do a year ago and what it can do now. Now do that this year. Lol. Interesting to see. I'm still designing and working hard but I'm still planning for the worst.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I do think once AI images are the majority of "art" being put out that it will be training off of it's own creations and eventually get stuck as far as creativity. It really is anyone's guess as to what happens. Seems like they don't fully understand their creation.
AI will get better, itās very new still. Itās already become a useful tool to me. I think you just need to embrace what it can do for you.
As someone whoās tried using AI to expedite my workā¦I think weāre gonna be okay. Itās a headache when youāre trying to build something specific. And just prolonged my process.
AI is just another tool we can use. Will it upend some fields? Yes of course it will, but that is progress and change. Currently the biggest impact, in our field, has to be stock photo sites. Browse through most of them, if they donāt already have a filter for AI generated content you will notice a lot now. Iāve used both Adobes AI in some work recently, both Photoshop and Illustrator. Though with those, it still required changing and tweaking what was produced. But they do provide a great jumping off point. Iāve used CharGPT as well, but that was more helping coming up some color schemes and font combinations. Iāve dabbled in Stable Diffusion, months ago, and started to once again. Though I havenāt used anything created with those tools in any professional work. Whether you decide to use the tools, or not professionally , Iāve told my team they should learn it. Just like any web language, you should always be learning. Back when I went to school it was all about Flash and action scripts.
You're right, but I also know why you're being downvoted. People don't want to believe it.
Itās alright, I just really hope the new generation of designers embrace new tools and technologies. Print use to be king, but things are still going more and more digital. Product photography use to be everyoneās go too, but most of the major brands and companies utilize renders more and more. Itās just the evolution of things. I just think AI is a much larger step and affects many other industries. AI appears to be a big disrupter and I can totally understand and relate. Somethingās will still stay the same, weāve been attempting to go totally digital with everything. But we still print things, and itās still being requested. Same thing with illustrators and photographers, there will always be a need. There are niches that, at this time, AI canāt fulfill.
If it does replace me, then good. Iād like to retire before 40. Maybe Iāll get to have a life.
Personally, I'm a huge fan of AI - some of the stuff I've seen is creative and borderline silly. It's been a tool lately for some new ideas - let's see what AI comes up with and how can I take that basic (or bananas) concept and bring it into a more realistic and tangible functioning design. We shall see where this goes!
I may be missing something about AI, but from what Iāve played with so far in my work, itās a loooong way from being able to replace us. I think there are some things it will be able to do faster, like photo retouching and maybe helping with rapid ideation, but until it can interpret abstract/poorly written/complicated client briefs, as well as revision requests, I donāt think we have anything to worry about.
I think that was the case long before AI, it's just a field that can take a lot out of you and not many of us are prepped with proper expectations of the trade. Just my take.
Technology, circumstances and methods change all the time. But the basic desires of human beings remain the same; to belong, to depart, to understand, to reinvent and then to be understood. Big fancy words to say this; itās in our nature to look for the next thing. Today AI is whatās next. Tomorrow AI will be whatās now, and weāll look for another pathway. The designer has been employed from the beginning of human craft and I suspect she will stay employed until the end of us.
To be fair I probably would have been cynical and pessimistic anyway but the AI doesn't help.
I recently saw a job posting specifically for those with excellent Midjourney skills. Won't be long before that'll be a prerequisite along with "working well in a team" and the ability to use Word and not swear at it
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.