AI Will Not Replace the Graphic Designer: The Product is the Process and not End-Result

Artwork generated with AI

I want to address a few concerns in which generative AI seems to be the main conduit. To the non-creative, generative AI skews the expectation of what the design process really is. Consumers of media have become accustomed to seeing the replicable end-result of design thinking, but never the painstakingly long, laborious, skillful and strategic process that comes before the final product.

Lately, I've been getting a lot of freelance project requests where the client comes to me with an AI generated reference. I attribute the influx of clients to the month of May. For starters, it's my birth month and everyone knows that the best of the best are born in May! For others, it's Q2 and they're ready to make substantial investments into the growth of their business. For some, it's simply the fact that Spring time brings warm weather and active people ready to connect, network, and spend. Lastly, this is a month of new growth where some might feel inclined to begin the voyage into a new business venture.

AI is available at the finger tips of anyone with an internet connection. It's allowed non-creatives to become creatives—and non-designers to feel like designers—no longer having to go through a designer, marketing strategist or production artist to synthesize scattered thoughts and concepts. By use of generative engines like ChatGPT, users are able to do a ton of idea refining on the front-end. It may be to the detriment of someone who's livelihood relies solely on refining the abstract parts of project conception, but there is still hope. Where time, education and experience in conjunction may no longer be the primary driving engines to salaries, pricing and relevancy is where lived, human experience comes into full effect. AI can provide the most complex strategies and concepts, but without context and an understanding of nuances identified through professional experience and trial and error, they become inefficacious.

For example, let's consider logo makers, graphic designers and illustrators. Anyone can now go online, enter a detailed prompt, and generate a pretty good mark if we're just considering clean rendering and stylization. For a designer, mark maker or illustrator, this can feel very scary like your skills are slowly becoming irrelevant in an AI-driven era. However, I would say that while you might spend less time in ideation mode, your execution is still to be reckoned with. 

As I noted in an earlier article about the dilemma of AI artwork not being a vector-ready file, the experienced creative hand and mind is still to be respected and sought after. The nuances of human interaction, human nature, human experience and the human hand all play a huge factor. While AI can certainly do a great job at replicating each of these things—and very good I might add—it's still not taking into consideration context and guess what? It's still not human. From a technical perspective, it lacks capacity. I have 100% confidence that its technical deficiencies will be patched up over time. Consider Adobe Firefly, which gives users the ability to use generative AI to create vector artwork. It's the work that needs to happen after the generative artwork is created is where traditional graphic designers come into play.

I'll even add on one more perspective that makes this whole separation of creative versus non-creative even more nuanced all for good reason. We are all created in the image of our creator, God, and therefore each and every one of us possesses ability to be creative by nature of our being. Nevertheless, the term "creative" has been coined to described a professional practitioner involved in creative production which requires its own training, knowledge and set of skills. I truly believe that the field of graphic design, being ever-ubiquitous as it is in our contemporary lives, should be a required study no matter the professional field you specialize in. Graphic design literally spans across and touches every industry to some degree. So that fact that AI is making graphic design a little bit more accessible to the "non-creative" is not something that I'm upset with at all. As long as the integrity of the trade, its history, and it's craft remains honored, I'm all for AI.

Now, let me pull this all together. For someone who offers freelance design work like myself, the time spent coming up with ideas graphically, sonically and visually is without a doubt becoming endangered. Some might argue that there is a craft involved in prompting and that just because anyone can type into the prompt does not mean it ensure valid results. I agree. However, let's talk about the person who is fairly happy with how their AI rendering conveys their idea. No problem at all! I think this is an opportunity to educate the client on things that they might have missed. If I can bring up one problem in graphic design and creative production, it's that the user always sees the end-result, but never sees the painstakingly long, exhaustive, strategic and daunting process that goes behind that final work. The product is in the process and not just the end result.

A word to all of my fellow designers, artists, and creatives: If we want to defend our industry, let's start by educating the world on our craft. Our culture is already suffering from over-consumption of media and malicious advertising. Let's not let our world become overrun by lifeless, AI-generated renderings. It might be unnoticeable and fun today, but in a few years it might be concerning to see and feel media that feels semi-human, but never quite the real thing. Just because a comparable end-result can be rendered in seconds using AI compared to a production artist taking hours to create the rendering, does not mean we should disregard other invaluable factors at play here. There's nuance in the human experience, there's economic and socioeconomic stability involved, job creation, creative integrity and ultimately the joy of living in a world surrounded by authentic experiences and a visceral ethos expressed by the human soul. 

All in all, AI will not replace the graphic designer.