Post-hype, what is AI doing for and to designers?
I've been, and continue to be, relatively sceptical of AI in general. I think it's in part a personality thing; those that know me know I have a fairly low tolerance for people that don't know what they're talking about. Whatever you think of AI personally, it's pretty well known that AI also has no idea what it's talking about. It can just as easily give you the leg-up you need as it can throw you under the bus. To me, if you can't trust the tool, then the tool isn't fit for purpose.
Worse, I still can't overlook the devastation that AI is continuing the wreak on our environment and infrastructure. Regardless of what you think of AI's utility, the cost we bear to make rich people richer I find difficulty in reconciling.
That being said, I still try to have an open mind about how AI (the tool) might make life easier and/or better for designers. However, I don't use any AI tools in my everyday design work because they're simply not good enough. But just because they're not good enough for me (yet, but also maybe ever), doesn't mean they don't have some place, some where in design.
AI's Current Place
A couple of months ago, Design Week published this article about how AI tools are currently being used within design agencies. In short, the findings from the Design Week survey was that AI was being used to replace some of the early concept work that was normally the domain of junior designers. Or more importantly, was the domain of collaboration between junior and senior designers together. These AI tools are being used by more experienced designers who know what they want and what they're looking for. Compared to junior designers, they can get the most out of these tools, while avoiding the potential pitfalls. The result of this is that there is a widening gap where experienced designers can accelerate their design development, and junior designers are being denied the opportunity to gain that experience. I wasn't surprised that this read like a different flavour of the rich-getting-richer.
As the article states:
The divide is stark. Senior designers report feeling enhanced by AI tools, while juniors feel diminished. Experienced designers view AI as their creative assistant; junior designers see it as their creative competitor. This isn’t about tool proficiency – it’s about creative authority and professional judgment.
This seems to be the case, even when they don't really know how AI properly fits into their design workflows. Nor do they know how to bill for it, or if clients even believe they should be billed for it.
I have no direct experience with this as the last time I worked in a design agency was 2021, before the AI hype bubble really started inflating. So I asked a few designers if what the article described aligned with their own experiences. Apparently so. AI tools are being used to generate some of the early concept exploration that would normally be the domain of the young designers; where the stakes are lower and the time it takes to develop these concepts is relatively high. Surprisingly, it's even being used in environments where it's prohibited because of IP concerns. Obviously against company policy.
The more I read up on people's experiences with AI in design, and chat with others that use AI in other contexts, the more this seemed to be reinforced. AI is great for getting you started.
An Antidote to Blank Page Syndrome
In another Design Week article published last month (I read more than just Design Week, promise), they showed a similar trend in an experiment where two web designers created a landing page. One experienced designer without AI tools, vs another inexperienced designer with AI tools. While the below graph is more for illustration than graphing any kind of metric, it's a good illustration of the observations nonetheless. The AI tools are great for giving you an early boost.
Anecdotally, this has been what I've been hearing from many others; AI is an antidote for writers block or blank page syndrome. It can help you make a strong start, and then once you've wrapped your head around what you're doing, you can let your design skills take over to elevate the work beyond what AI is capable of. Assuming you have those skills.
With my sceptics hat back on, it is and continues to be an extraordinary amount of power, water, money, and effort going into creating these tools, which for design at least, mostly just helps us decide what we want to think about. Which leads me to my two big speculative concerns for AI in design:
What will these AI tools do to our own lateral thinking skills? If we're letting AI do the hard part for us? Secondly, if we're using these tools to guide us, and the tools are opaque in how they work, how are we being unwittingly led?
I'm not just thinking now, I'm thinking years from now. In the same way most graduate designers can't sketch, in 10 or 20 years from now is it possible most graduates can't think?
The Atrophy of Lateral Thinking
In this fantastic video by Technology Connections, he goes into a lot of depth about how algorithms are breaking our ability to think for ourselves. We've stopped making own decisions, being guided by our own curiosity and problem solving, and instead have happily surrendered the decision making to algorithms, and by extension the megacorps that control them.
More specifically, as the video opens with, we've stopped looking for things, and instead have become happy just the be shown them. When we're trying to make connections between seemingly unrelated insights in our concept development, we must also actively looking for them.
While we all hate Blank Page Syndrome, overcoming it is how we produce valuable insights and novel solutions to problems. Sometimes the struggle against the blocks in our mind push us to make breakthroughs. The struggle is where we let our minds dig deep and make those connections and insights. If AI randomly generates flash cards to prompt us into action, we are not doing the deep thinking needed to be properly innovative.
Lateral thinking is a skill. It takes years to learn and you get better at it as experience and knowledge deepens. Using AI tools to slot-machine new ideas at us to help us get started isn't us going and looking for things, it's us being shown them*. If we don't use those skills, and instead let AI do our ideation for us, our lateral thinking skills surely will atrophy. If you don't use it, you lose it.
The Atrophy of Critical Thinking
If we're using these tools to help get us started, there's nothing stopping these tools thumbing the scale to nudge us in any direction whoever controls these tools chooses. It's already well known that most companies are actively making things worse for us to make them better for them. There's no reason to suspect AI companies will in any way continue to have our best interests at heart. Assuming they do presently.
That might sound conspiratorial, and I can accept that it might be. Though I do think this is why the tech megacorps are throwing so much money and resources are AI. AI is starting to make up notable percentages of our media content. These megacorps already control so much of what we read, I'm quite sure they'd like to keep it that way. As Jim Morrison, et al. put it:
Whoever Controls the Media, Controls the Mind.
The potential problem I can see is that if these AI tools are influencing our initial concept development, without constant critical thinking we may find ourselves guided in ways not of our choosing, but in the way of the tool's choosing. By the time we realise we're going in the wrong design direction it's going take more time and money to change course than if we'd just done the concept development ourselves to start with. The cost to make a change in design is always exponential to time. This goes entirely against the point of using AI; to make things easier and faster for us.
While currently this is probably a low risk if experienced designers have hold of the AI reigns. As generally good critical thinker, they know garbage when they see it. I don't, however, expect that always to be the case. Even if they are good critical thinkers, the constant need to test and verify every output surely will become fatiguing. Junior designers in years to come, having been beaten over the head with AI for a decade or more, may find themselves ill-equipped or too apathetic to spot when the tools are influencing their work in undesirable ways. By the time they realise they've been led down the garden path, it might be too late. This was a concern raised by clients in the above Design Week article, clients are concerned the use of AI in design will lead to sameness.
Let's make an innocent enough analogy: It's 2014 and Google has just released their Material Design visual language. Hypothetically, they also have their Gemini or whatever tool for generating UI concepts that everyone knows and loves. Would it be coincidence if UI concepts generated by this tool all started looking Material Design-ey? It is, after all, in Google's interest for Android apps to have the same visual language. This is why they put out design guidelines. A little thumb on the scales might help too. A senior designer may notice when they're being led, a junior might not. Regardless of if it's actually good design or not, soon enough everything looks like Material Design.
In Combination
Think then of the two in combination. We allow AI to seek our inspiration and insights for us because we are either unwilling or unable to seek them ourselves. Then overlay AI tools that are more than happy to show us what it wants us to see, to suit its own interests. At best everything looks the same, but in our current timeline it's not hard to see worse outcomes for design and designers.
Further, by letting AI do the early ideation for us, we're not only producing shallow work, but shallow work faster. More work faster is a symptom of capitalism, not creativity. Creative works need time to flourish, just look again at the above graph. Yet if we buy into the more faster mindset that drives most of our economy, I fear it'll be to design's own detriment.
Finally, separately, and philosophically, when the early ideation and concept development is also the funnest and most valuable part of design, why would we just let AI do it for us? So we can spend more time on the low-value grunt work like CAD drawings?
*It's not a huge stretch to think that an AI tool like Midjourney will come out with an infinite scroll feature like social media. At that point, how different would our cognitive approach be to this tool compared to social media? We all know social media is brainless consumption. As an aside, you know what else is infinite-scroll? Slot machines.
