Will The Demand For Graphic Designers Diminish In The Near Future Because Of AI?

Last Updated on November 17, 2021 by Editorial Team

Author(s): Ali Al Khaulani

Nowadays, artificial intelligence is often used to solve problems in almost every aspect of human life, from household chores, transportation technology to advertising. Our behavior, rituals, attitudes, and environments are about to be radically transformed in the coming decades by this new technology. Due to the fact that graphic design is not an isolated discipline, AI development will embrace and function in this field. People cannot avoid the fact that this technology fundamentally changes the way we work in every field and make life easier. 

The advantage of graphic design automation is that a person can get rid of boring routine processes like export or selection of color bases, plugins can help resize design for different platforms, etc. But you need to understand that such a partner as AI works with ready-made materials and has its own limitations. That is why a person cannot be completely displaced from the position of a designer.

Artificial Intelligence limitations

Throughout history, humans have used emotion as a coping mechanism (example: fear helps to keep oneself out of danger). A person can recognize the emotions of others by their body movements, tone of voice, the context of the situation, and social cues. By interacting with others and mastering cultural norms, we learned to understand emotions. Unlike us, AI cannot feel, and it hasn’t lived among humans for years. It is difficult for AI to understand emotional subtleties.

The machine can use a facial recognition algorithm to paint pictures. AI learns patterns and builds on them in the process. However, scientists often doubt whether these paintings have emotional content and artistic value. But in order for the machine to be able to do them, you have to download huge amounts of data with images from tech companies, museums, and other organizations.

It is important to understand how the AI collects variations, it compiles variations from the millions of data loaded into it, selecting items by key search parameters that the designer sets. Its power is to collect an infinite number of options (and this is already a lot) from the existing one, but AI will not be able to analyze the context and produce something completely new and original.

Or AI is not able to reformulate the task in the course of work, which every designer does when working on a task, because the given characteristics often evolve in the course of work. Also, the problem is that it is difficult for AI to instill a concept of morality. People cannot convey morality objectively, in measurable terms that a computer can process. AI does not have its own moral and social consciousness, so it cannot filter incoming databasing on ethics.

Best Qualities of AI

AI is good at personalizing content, working with many variables at once, and creating variations. Machines are great at handling hundreds of data items at once. For example, IBM Watson AI can diagnose faster and more accurately than humans. Watson is able to view over 600,000 medical reports, 2 million pages of medical journals and retrieve up to 1.5 million patient records. This is the amount of knowledge that no doctor can keep in mind. The same thing with the knowledge base of any designer.

Think about what happens when you meet a person. You unknowingly begin to judge them based on their appearance and manners. AI does the same but takes into account the subconscious choice of the person. For example, Instagram feed changes (dynamically personalizes) based on many things: time of day, liked posts, posts you’ve stuck with, friends’ interests, fashion trends, location, and the type of device you’re using. Once the AI recognizes the pattern, it can instantly generate multiple variations.

Conclusion

If you think about the future and whether AI will “remove” the profession of a designer, then everything is not so simple. Any professional in any field should grow and not perceive technology as a threat. Technologies threaten only those who do not want to develop and build their careers on monotonous and routine work. Therefore, of course, it is better to take AI as your allies.

In the future, it will be possible to entrust AI with such routine tasks as developing references, creating unexpected combinations of options, but the decision will still be made by a person, only a HUMAN understands positioning, and the temporal context. So neural networks will take away more technical and routine tasks, such as processing layouts and their layout, this is already happening in processing and resizing photos, but there are no fewer photographers.

While robotics experts promise a significant long-term impact of artificial intelligence and machine learning on design work, robots will not replace actual designers in the next 10 years. Based on industry trends, the role of a designer is to go from creator to curator.

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