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AI won’t replace you; people who know how to use AI will.
You may now not only generate new graphics, but also write with AI. It is now possible to create music in the voice of our favourite musicians, and you can also have them sing in your preferred language. There are videos created with AI that are just as good as their human equivalents.
In recent years, the AI landscape has expanded, allowing designers to broaden the horizon of their creativity. ChatGPT and Midjourney have taken the design world by storm and that is just the tip of the iceberg. Tasks that used to take hours or days to complete can now be completed in seconds. Some keyboard prompts can complete the work of a ten-member crew. Yes, this does sound terrifying, and it should. These AI might quickly replace us designers, and there is likely nothing we can do about it.
But what if I told you that that’s not entirely true, that there’s more to it than meets the eye? Simply put, we designers will be replaced by designers who know how to use AI, not by AI.
The Past and the Present
We are experiencing some incredible AI capabilities in the modern world, which began with Alan Turing’s simple question “Can machines think?” roughly 50 years ago.
Learning from existing data is similar to how humans think. Later, this method was used to create programmes and software that could learn from existing data using neural networks. This accelerated the development of AI, and subsequently we got IBM’s Deep Blue (1977) chess master and Google Brain’s deep neural network, both of which could recognise and categorise objects.
AI skills have lately been enhanced by advances in neural network model sophistication, data availability, and processing power. Ian Goodfellow made the most significant breakthrough when he developed the first generative adversarial neural network, which allowed machines to generate new data with the same statistics as the original data set in 2014.
This achievement enabled the development of tools such as DALLE 2, StableDiffusion (public release as stability.ai), and MidJourney in 2022, which illustrate the original creation abilities stated at the start of the article.
You may now not only generate new graphics, but also write with AI. It is now possible to create music in the voice of our favourite musicians, and you can also have them sing in your preferred language. There are videos created with AI that are just as good as their human equivalents.
The key question is, “Is AI really a threat to creators?” This will undoubtedly be addressed later in the article.
Advantages of AI, its importance and its effects on productivity
The amount of data generated by humans and machines today greatly outpaces humans’ ability to consume, comprehend, and make complicated decisions based on that data. Artificial intelligence underpins all computer learning and represents the future of all sophisticated decision making.
AI has enormous promise for designers, and it will primarily focus on speed and optimisation. With the assistance of AI, designers may generate designs more efficiently and quickly, lowering expenses. AI can quickly examine enormous amounts of data and recommend design changes. A designer could select the proposed changes and create numerous prototypes for further testing.
AI tools (I’ll mention some of them) can help designers create faster designs by allowing them to enter parameters based on the client’s requirements or brand guidelines and generate hundreds of design prototypes. Later, the designer could accept some of them and apply his personal assistance to make them suitable for the actual use case. It is already being used by companies such as Airbnb to develop design components for their websites.
AI might also assist designers in monotonous activities such as generating posters for the same movie/show in multiple languages. Designers only need to define basic rules, and AI will generate hundreds of iterations of the same design for them to pick and approve. Netflix is already using this way to generate thumbnails of shows in different languages to cater to different countries.
Why is AI literacy important for designers ?
Instead of referring to AI as “Artificial” Intelligence, we should consider it “Augmented” Intelligence. The world is changing at breakneck speed, and massive amounts of data are being generated, making it difficult to stay up. However, these AI technologies excel at data analysis, sorting, collection, optimisation, and generation. This is what they are best at, and this is what designers may benefit from.
Designers generate thousands of ideas, but for obvious reasons, they can only implement a small percentage of them. Even after the concepts have been implemented, they must be tested and optimised. This takes a long time, and there is a possibility that humans will overlook critical data. This is where designers can use AI to complete these checks quickly. This will assist designers in developing more creative and innovative ideas.
Other than this, designer has to a lot of mundane tasks like maintaining a design system, making design iterations, taking notes in meetings, making MVPs etc all these can be done by AI leaving more time for designers to be creative.
Saving time and boosting creativity equals more money, which is why businesses are already investing heavily in AI development. Airbnb and Microsoft are developing sketch-to-UI software that can generate UIs as well as code from a sketch. Amazon is already assisting their consumers in better shopping by allowing them to upload images of the items they desire.
Tiktok, Instagram, and Netflix all want to show their consumers the material they want to view, and they are using AI to do so.
“Let designers do what they do best”
Some AI tools designers should start using right now !
Till now we have discussed how AI can help designer and creator to become a better designer, here are some tools that designers can use right now to start benefiting from it :
This AI tool converts your scribbles into drawings. This could be very helpful for making icons for UIs as the generated drawings are very minimal and consistent, also you can play with styles.
UIZard is a web design tool that can turn hand-drawn sketches into professional-looking web designs with just a few clicks.
Ebsynth is a proficient AI-powered music synthesiser capable of producing realistic and lifelike sounds. It analyses the sound of actual instruments with artificial intelligence and then makes its own version of that sound.
Magician is a Figma plugin that helps you with everything by utilising artificial intelligence. From copywriting to generating one-of-a-kind word symbols. It can produce text-to-image icons, AI-powered copy suggestions, and pictures based on text prompts. This might be incredibly useful for any UIUX designers and will undoubtedly aid in their workflow.
Colormind is a colour palette generator powered by AI that assists you in selecting colours for your creations. Palettes can be generated from scratch or based on a starting colour. It can also help in generating a colour palette from a picture.
Create a website from scratch in your 30s. These tools help you create a basic website with all the basic sections with just a few clicks. You don’t even need to code and all the sections are editable.
Runway provides AI-powered video editing software. It offers customers capabilities including automated video stabilisation, object identification, and scene recognition. These tools allow you to swiftly modify videos without having to manually select each element in the frame.
Now that we know a lot about how AI is shaking up the design industry and how designers are getting affected.
The big question still remains: “Is AI really a threat to creators?”
The answer is “no” at least not yet.
These AI tools should be seen as only tools. No matter how good they get, they still need designers’ intervention to make it more relevant. Of Course they do the “making” part of it. Which should be seen as a blessing because now designers can focus on thinking more than creating. And the designers who know how to use these tools will remain.
These AI tools are like minions which will do all the hard, time consuming and mundane work for you so that you can use their “Gru”.
We are in the phase of transitioning from being a “creator” to being a “curator”.