The StAit of Design

Adobe, Affinity, Ai–designers, your toolbox just got a new addition. Much like Songs of Innocence by U2, whether you wanted this or not, you're getting it–Ai is here and it's all yours.

So use it.

Use it to help you do what you do. Ai "art" is already called slop by the gatekeepers and it's only a matter of time before that opinion reaches far and wide (not criticism, just the way it works). The war is won, Robo Bob Ross has been defeated. But Ai isn't going away just because it's getting treated like the equivalent of a stock asset by we who ironically have been using an application whose icon is literally "Ai" for years. There's a lot more "normies" than niche weirdos like us out there and when you see how Ai is helping people rather than lighting-up Reddit threads, you start to understand why this technology is worth keeping around.

Globally, we've been working hard for a long time. A lot of bars have been raised, a lot of "things" have been created and discovered, a lot of information has been shared but it's getting harder and harder to navigate it all. I get the arguments of "what if it's used for evil?!?" and I counter with "what if it isn't?" What if kids can more easily look up things they're interested in and create animated diagrams and explanations specific to ways they'll understand in order to learn rather than only having an education plan that is designed to cover the "average"? What if new parents can get a healthy, affordable weekly meal plan that can be quickly implemented into their new life without having to spend hours researching online with minimal time available? What if designers can generate reference images with any specifics they want rather than spend 45 minutes on Pinterest looking for a collection of references that sorta sum-up your idea? (it's okay to tear-up at this)

There's always a risk of good things being used for bad things, but I like to think humans collectively do a decent job of keeping seriously dangerous behavior under control. Skynet could be real, man, yeah, but we could also heed The Terminator's warning and get in front of that. Ai isn't going to make creative people unnecessary, but it is going to force all of us to raise the bar. Build brands by yourself with the help of Ai agents trained in general creative tasks while you free-up time to think big picture before manually creating and refining the details later. Bounce ideas off an LLM with unlimited computational and research capabilities to check your logic on an idea against actual data. Tell clients to use Ai to generate better reference visuals to better explain their ideas during project meetings and close the communication gap between creative speak and non. Ask Ai how to drive more traffic to your site so it can tell you a blog is great for improving SEO. Raise the bar on what you do by improving how you do it. It is difficult and routine-breaking to learn new things and grow and change. Thankfully we all have a new tool to help us make the process a little easier.