Will A.I. replace your design job? It’s here! Skynet is coming for you, me and the rest of the designers in the world. Creative professionals are nervous about the rapid influx and popularity of some amazing artificial intelligence and wondering what impact it will have on their creative job or freelance business. And the nerves are for good reason.
In my recent YouTube video, I used several different A.I. tools including Midjourney, ChatGPT and Google (if we consider Google search as A.I.) to generate a product idea, design a brand and create marketing content. I also utilized template design tools to create a logo and build a marketing website without code using Editor X. And I did it in just a bit over 20 minutes.
Is A.I. going to steal your design job and shutdown your creative agency? Watch my recent video. Check out how powerful the A.I. tools are and then listen to my thoughts at the end.
For those of you interested in a text version of my thoughts on A.I. and how it will impact your design job, here you go…
A.I. Is an Amazing Brainstorming Partner
I was really impressed with ChatGPT as an idea feeder. So much of the content it spit back at me sparked great ideas (oftentimes things I wouldn’t have thought of on my own). If you are a solo-freelancer, ChatGPT should be open on your computer all day long. And you should be feeding it with this question… “Give me other ideas for…”
A.I. Can Write Killer Copy
ChatGPT’s ability to write awesome copy is mind blowing. Ask it to write 10 hooks for your next content marketing piece. My original title for this article was, “Will A.I. Steal Your Design Job?” I asked ChatGPT to give me 10 alternate options. Here is what it wrote (pretty solid stuff)…
- “Is your design career at risk from the rise of artificial intelligence?”
- “Will A.I. be the end of human designers?”
- “The future of design: will machines take over?”
- “Are you ready for the A.I. design revolution?”
- “The impact of A.I. on the design industry: what you need to know”
- “Design jobs under threat: the rise of A.I. in the field”
- “Will robots replace designers? The A.I. revolution in the industry”
- “The role of A.I. in the design process: friend or foe?”
- “Designing the future: how A.I. will change the industry”
- “A.I. and design: is your career at risk?”
A.I. Is Great at Naming
As you’ll see in my video, I used ChatGPT to come up with names for a brand of headphones in the style of Game of Thrones. We (me and ChatGPT) landed on “War Horns.” This was ChatGPT’s explanation of where the name came from, “War Horns: This name plays off of the idea of the headphones being used in battle, evoking the image of a horn being blown to signal the start of a battle.” Pretty killer. I wonder how long it would have taken me to land on that with a human brainstorming partner? Probably much longer than the 23 seconds it took ChatGPT to feed that idea.
A.I. Can Make Amazing Images
Midjourney’s ability to output awesome artwork should have illustrators uneasy. (Will it completely replace human illustrators? Not tomorrow, don’t worry. But the world is about to get a lot more visually interesting with Midjourney in the mix.) As you’ll see in my video, I used Midjourney to make product images of the “War Horns” headphones. To be honest, I freaking love them. It is easy to envision a bunch of Twitch-gamer-streamers wearing this bad boys.
I also used Midjourney to create marketing images of “warriors wearing headphones in battle.” Most of these were good too, but not as impressive as the headphone product images themselves. The headphones are only clear in a few of the marketing images. The A.I. didn’t quite capture that I wanted the headphones to be the prominent element in the image. I could have kept pushing it with new prompts and probably gotten to a good place, but instead I’ll just express my dissatisfaction here. Haha.
A.I. Still Sucks at Logos
I tried using Midjourney for the logo design and it seems to miss some design nuances required to make a great logo. I wasn’t too impressed with this output, so in my video I used a downloadable template logo for the “Warn Horns” brand.
Final Thoughts
A.I. is here to stay, but for now, it is best used as a tool for designers. It is really only as good as the input you give it. YOU, the human, still need to guide the A.I. to do what you want. But, don’t be deceived into a false sense of security, A.I. is coming for your design job…and almost every other human job that exists. If the Terminator movie franchise is any indication of the future, we all should be a little worried in the long term and a lot excited in the short term about the recent emergence of A.I. tools.
Where is your safe haven? Creative strategy and empathy! If you understand the tools, know how to use them to produce creative solutions for your clients you’ll be fine. And if you focus on the importance of empathy for the target customer, it will help. According to the movies, even in the year 3,000, robots still seem to struggle with real emotions. Haha.
As for today, don’t hide from these A.I. tools. It is time to play around and get familiar with them and figure out ways to use them to improve your creative services and dazzle your clients.
