Is Ai Killing the Graphic Design Industry?

I hope you enjoyed the video! If you did, then here's another video of me designing a brand identity in 5 hours! https://youtu.be/TuALprEtwEU

I miss the days where AI stood for Adobe Illustrator

Logo design has always been a big part of the design services I offer. Just the past month I have had three small business clients send me logo examples that "they did themselves" using MidJourney and wanted me to just "fix" their choices. With one of those clients, I initially offered them a couple fairly refined designs up front as a starting point and they came back with 20 MidJourney examples they liked better. I don't see any way to compete as this takes hold (and shortly they will probably offer AI generated vector logo sets of choices!). While A.I. has been helping me as a designer in the short term, the writing is on the wall as far as the bulk of logo design.

Everyone here seems really optimistic about AI not taking over design jobs, mostly because of things that AI can't do right now, forgetting how quickly AI can be improved and learn to do what it couldn't do before. I believe that, eventually, AI will be able to do ANYTHING, and it will get easier and easier for us to tell it what to do and get the exact results we want. It may not get there in the next 5-10 years, but you can be damn sure it will happen eventually.

I just saw a documentary film with an expert in the field of AI. And he said that the knowledge with which AI makes itself smarter is happening very fast and will go even faster the more years will pass.Within 10 to 20 years, he predicts that AI will be up to 100,000 times smarter than the average human. I have to work at least 30 more years until I can go on retirement. So yes, I fear for my job as a graphic designer!

I’m scared of AI since I’m in college rn learning about design and spending a ton to do so, and if it isn’t worth it then I’m screwed

Its killing it the same way HDR killed photography for a few years where every amateur thought they had to use it turned up to 11. Once the novelty wears off and people get sick of all the similar midjourney images, real design and skill will still be left. Anyone can type an idea into AI but you still need skill to do anything useful with it, or god forbid actually "edit" it.

Game AI programmer here, with some background in ML technic. I use to say the same thing about AI doing the same thing as the human does to generate new art, but a writer with a law degree made me change my mind about the whole thing, and made me switch my stance to 'yes it is indeed theft'. The main argument is that it is a machine and not a human who is doing the analysis, and the machine is own by a company who is making profit out of it. The only intellectual property these company are entitled to is the source code of the AI, but that code is useless unless it can analyze thousands of different images, all of which is own by different artist. Effectively, the AI only work with the intellectual property of people who do not work for that company. Now does that solve the issue in the long run ? Not really, because these company can still hire artist to feed the machine data and then we come back to the same thing as today. But essentially, what midjourney and OpenAI is doing is theft right now. ChatGPT work because of the hundreds of article it analyze from the internet, none of it written by people who work directly for OpenAI. Their algorithm is useless without it, and they make profit out of other people hard work. Same thing can be said about midjourney.

I think graphic design will still exist as a job for awhile, but only for really big brands. And one designer will do the work of multiple existing titles today. So a "graphic designer" will be a 3D modeler, web designer, logo designer, etc all at once with the help of AI

As an illustrator I am busier than ever. AI can come up with some pretty interesting and amazing visuals, but if you have something specific in mind then you have to really work hard to communicate to it exactly what you want. It lacks the experience that a human illustrator has. That said, it can be useful when you are looking for some ideas, or if you just want it to generate some reference images or some color palate, composition, textures, thumbnail ideas, etc. I have even been able to coax it, after hours of prompting, to generate some pretty good foundations which I can then use as a basis to paint on top of. It's sort of like working with an intern. They bring some of their own ideas to the table, but at the end of the day their job is to work with you to help you create your own unique vision.

As far as i could remeber i always wanted to be a designer. I tried a lot of jobs but only design was something to give me motivation to grown and live a life. Now almost 30 percent of designers are replaced. What a truly wonderful purpose of AI, to take jobs from people and ruin their lives

I think a bit part of the missing debate is commodification. Perhaps an AI uses a similar process to create art as a human does, but there is no human labour involved — a non-artist profits financially from knowledge production that they have not contributed to or put effort into

I've been designing books for 20 years, if AI can design a book to a high standard then I have a problem. But it doesn't end there. Adobe will have a massive problem because who will need Adobe Creative Suite when/if AI can do everything in Creative Suite. I imagine that's why, when announcing Firefly, Adobe emphasised AI won't replace the designer and they'll steer their company in that direction. The next few years will be interesting. Thanks for an interesting watch!

I work as a graphic designer for a company and the photoshop AI tool is used on a daily basis by all of us designers, for removing unwanted objects from images in second s

My gripe with AI is the number of people using it to call themselves 'artists' or 'designers' or 'writers' because theyve been told they can make X amount of money by putting a few words into a prompt box. Easy. They dont have to be creative, or put in the time or training to know what they're doing. No consistency or professionalism. Just look at the cases of AI producing 'art' with the original artist's signature or copyright still on it! Unfortunately i think the trend is here to stay but i hope more regulation comes in so the real creatives dont have to jump through so many hoops to be seen or stop their work from being stolen.

Yes and not just graphic design all creative industries. The people who hire creatives don’t give a toss about being creative they only care about money and if they can save a few dollars using ai instead of hiring you, you damn well know they will. Chatgpt and midjourney are already putting people out of work and it’s only going to get worse

In think the harm of AI is that customers use it as a cheap and okayish alternative to human designers. The quality of creative work is devalued when mediocre becomes the new good. But we get a lot of great tools in all fields. As you said, AI is just part of the development.

Thank you so much @Will Paterson. I have recently started learning graphic designing and your videos help me so very much. I am a newbie but a great mentor/guru like you is really an asset in many ways. So thank you once again. Just keep up the good word and stay blessed always.

Honestly for me the main problem is the capitalism, its an amazing tool that could be used to enhance and make our lives easier, but in reality it will be used by big companies to replace artists and not pay them, i dont care if ai use a similar way of 'creating' than human artists, we need to work to survive and they are trying to take it from us, thats why its so important to regulate It as soon as possible

There will always be a gap between those who are trained in design and those whose are not. Therefore AI will not replace designers as an average user will not have the knowledge to use AI to create what is considered as a good design, its like canva, there will always be limitations as to how far the non designer user can go. For example, commercially can someone claim the copyright to a design that they only gave a prompt for and did not literally make it themselves, i don’t think so. 😅