Context

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Designers and artists have used technology to develop their skills and expand the possibilities of what they can create. From the camera obscura, the invention of photography, typewriters, or spellcheck, adopting new technologies has often been slow and criticized by the artistic community.

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These advancements were sometimes seen as shortcuts or threatening to their creative practice. 

With the rise of advanced hardware and software, new tools have become commonplace, artificial intelligence (AI) is the latest iteration of design tools to face this scrutiny, and for good reason.

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As designers we should always be adapting to, and potentially adopting, new tools into our practice. We should see these AI advancements for what they are – tools to help improve workflow and open a world of new possibilities. However, like any technology, they require evaluation and refinement before they are truly ready to be infused into the artistic world.

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This is a speculative project on how the advancement of AI tools will affect the workflow of future designers and artists. 

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At the moment, AI tools are democratizing and devaluing specialized skills that took designers and artists years to develop. Combined with the unlicensed use of training data, AI needs to take an ethical shift. 

 

These models are advertised as Artificial Intelligence when they are more simply automated functions. Many, such as ChatGPT run off a similar language model to a mobile phone’s predictive text. That is why they still require human intervention to ensure accuracy. Similarly, generative “AI” that creates art and designs still require a designer or artist at the helm to get high quality, long-lasting results.