I’ve been thinking recently about the boom in Artificial Intelligence (AI) that is significantly transforming the work of designers. But will we soon become an expendable workforce?
It's a lot of things at once!
We blink and suddenly there is AI for everything: writing and translating texts, creating images, mockups, slogans, videos, programming websites, among others. Suddenly, countless options have emerged to make our work easier. It is even a little difficult to keep up with so much evolution in such a short time, to test and understand how we can incorporate these technologies into our daily lives.
For now, I would say the biggest impact is efficiency.
I remember early in my career, back in the 2000s, when I heard a designer say that he had spent hours adding water droplets to an image of a soda can in Photoshop. Today, it's hard to believe that we spent so much time on something that can now be solved in seconds!
What is definitely making designers’ work much faster is the efficiency that AI provides. Need a mockup? Three prompt attempts and voila! Want a different effect on the website? A few more words in the prompt and it’s ready! Optimizing time for the more “manual” work, execution, has been one of the biggest advantages for us designers. Now, we have more time to dedicate ourselves to the ideas, intelligence and creativity of our projects.
But will AI replace designers one day?
It’s hard to predict, with so many changes occurring in such a short space of time, but I would say that, in part, it is. AI can replace the work of designers who specialize in more technical and repetitive execution, such as those who focus on image processing, layout replication or creating websites based on ready-made templates. AI can easily take the place of designers who follow a more mediocre style, who follow the trend and copy models that are already saturated in the market.
However, AI is not yet capable of bringing soul or intelligence to a project. It is trained to do what everyone else does, but is more generic. If the focus of branding is to position itself differently in the market, with a unique personality, it will be very difficult to obtain good results with AI alone. In other words, designers who are more strategic, creative and who focus on giving personality and telling unique stories will continue to be essential to the market.
Even with many tools, most companies do not know how to use them to obtain better communication solutions.
Although there are already many AI tools, many clients who are not in the design field do not have the necessary know-how to define what they really need in a prompt. AI is just a tool, and to extract a good result, it is necessary to have a minimum of expertise in communication. Let me give you an example: suppose a company needs to renovate its website. If they ask the AI to create it, ok, it creates it, but it will probably be a ready-made model or very similar to that of many competitors. However, if there is a strategic designer involved, he or she will give more intelligent direction so that the website stands out and becomes more memorable to the public, bringing more results to the business.
But for now, only joy.
I admit that I am very impressed with the developments in AI every day. There is still a lot to improve, such as in the generation of images that often have a very artificial appearance, but the extent to which this technology has helped to speed up the execution part (putting together presentations, writing texts, mockups, image processing, etc.) is truly impressive.
And as ChatGPT itself says:
So be it, amen!