A.I.: Any Ideas? The Machine vs. Humanity of Design
Caution: naughty words.
The focus of this article is about artificial intelligence and its potential influence on the humanity of the design profession. But first let me ask you a question: have you ever felt the need to sit in your car and rage-eat an almond croissant after doom scrolling the internet?
Wait, don’t answer that.
I have, and let me tell you about it.
Our story begins with this article titled ‘Headlines You Thought You Missed From 2020’ which looks just like a tabloid magazine having a panic attack — a harrowing 9 News reading experience.
What did I learn?
Look out!
In ascending order of magnitude, here are the top 3 people I would not want to be in the year 2020:
Corona Brand Manager
Back in God-forsaken 2020, just as toilet paper manufacturers were starting to wipe tears of joy with giant wads of cash, something interesting was taking place on your old nemesis and mine, Google.
Curiously (but unsurprisingly) in the english-speaking world, search results for the term ‘Beer Virus’ began to trend in January 2020 and in February another spike in search results for ‘Corona Beer’ connected to ‘Coronavirus’, just as world news headlines about the then-mystery illness began to reach fever-pitch.
I hope we’ve learned by now there's absolutely no connection between Corona and Coronavirus. ‘Corona,’ in this context, refers to ‘crown’ akin to the emblem on the beer bottle. The resemblance lies in the crown-like spikes of the COVID-19 virus when viewed under a microscope.
The mere mention of the word ‘Corona’ in the same breath as ‘Virus’ would be enough for even the hardiest of brand managers to wish they were on a one-way trip to the Bermuda Triangle, and brings into question the old adage ‘any publicity is good publicity’.
In addition, according to lexology.com, two surveys conducted in early 2020 in the US found that 38% of Americans would not buy Corona Beer under any circumstances and that consumers’ intent to purchase the product had fallen to its lowest in two years. Ouch.
The following opinion may come across as a sweeping generalisation, but this eyebrow-raising trend highlights that (most) people aren’t necessarily stupid, just prone to sensationalism and laziness.
I’d call this high-level philosophical observation, but that would be trolling. And we don’t go for that…
At the risk of tarring my freedom-loving audience with the same brush, let’s just say the rest of 2020 would go on to prove that a good portion of the world population were inclined to skip fact-checking due to their apathetic attitude to misinformation.
This laziness is part of the human condition. We invent things to make our lives and jobs easier and more productive.
Enter Artificial Intelligence.
Artificial intelligence, as we know it, has been around for a while now. Smart TV’s and mobile phones are now firmly embedded in our daily lives. Collectively this technology represents a significant chance to enhance human abilities and reshape our interactions with work and life.
We love it because we can automate tasks that might otherwise require mental and physical effort to complete. It offers the path of least resistance, and I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords. As a creative agency I’ve found it incredibly useful in my day-to-day operations. Without shame I’ve used ChatGPT to:
Explain ‘Lebensmüde’ to me as if I were a six year old
Calculate projected revenue
Fix page index redirection errors
Capitalise entire sentences to save time
Fix my broken CSS code
Because the design profession is inextricably linked to commerce, for good or for bad, we need technology like this. Not to get all Utilitarian, but I find that what is useful about artificial intelligence right now is simply speeding up efficiency. Maximising visual output. Taking out the thinking and rendering in the creative process.
Like many tools in a creative’s bag, Artificial Intelligence is a shortcut to commercial productivity. However, this kind of productivity assumes a thirst or demand for marketing and advertising that just doesn’t exist.
My cynical prediction? Within the next few years, almost every company will have its own proprietary A.I. platform. There are endless applications for learning software like TL;DV, Dall-E, PlaygroundAI, Tome. This is great news for tech startups around the globe… look under your chairs! YOU get a proprietary A.I. software! YOU get a proprietary A.I. software!
Typically, as technology is built in a capitalist economic environment, increased competition will drive the price down, and eventually the quality.
Narrow A.I., which includes generative software like Midjourney and ChatGPT, can ingest massive amounts of text and image data to perform narrowly-defined tasks. These tasks can involve scraping the internet for data, inferring information that might not have been stated and the ability to reason and calculate. Even robotics is a subset of A.I. — teaching robots to tie a shoe, or close a door.
All of these are based on human capabilities.
It differs from general A.I. which can demonstrate versatile, intelligent behaviour across a broad range of tasks. It includes deep learning, involving nodes and the statistical relationships between them in order to model the way that our minds work.
Something like Jarvis from Iron Man, just not self-aware! (Yet) …It’s a long way off.
As John Oliver points out, there are some key ethical and technical issues baked into the way A.I. works. Such as the ‘Black Box’ problem. A.I. is capable of solving complex tasks much faster than humans, is able to teach itself and does not always have to show its work — this creates a scenario in which “not even the engineers or data scientists who created the algorithm can understand or explain how the AI software arrived at a specific result.”
But does knowing how the sausage is made help us?
Let’s take a step back and ask what the end goal is — where is A.I. supposed to take the creative industry?
via A LINE Studio
Let’s not forget the idea is the launchpad, not the moon.
A.I. will never be able to effectively critique creative work. This is not a particularly incendiary statement.
Commercial artwork does have objectives: convince the reader to act, buy or remember something. However, critiquing a piece of graphic work requires a subjective point of view of your own. G.K. Chesterton describes breaking free of ‘doomed fortress of rationalism’, paraphrasing H.G. Wells by saying that one should test acts not like a thinker, but like an artist, saying, "I feel this curve is right," or "that line shall go thus."
Poor creative direction says ‘this doesn’t work for me’ and shortcuts the process of refinement. Poor creative direction doesn’t know what to do with a shit idea because it usually only has the time or the wherewithal to go the the first idea.
On the other hand, good creative direction says ‘this doesn’t work, because people…’ and to fill the space at the end of that sentence requires intangible characteristics far beyond quantitative data sets — the kind of experiences that binary code will never know.
Ideas are still the only thing that separates common work from innovative work.
May I enthusiastically recommend to you a blog called Copyranter by Mark Duffy, a Copywriter/Creative Director with 30+ years experience who's won awards out the ass. He obsessively, borderline unhealthily, covers advertising creativity and recently published an article praising the Nikon ‘Don’t give up on the real world’ campaign by Circus Grey (Lima, Peru) which won a Cannes Lion.
Mark writes “Ad trade writers are calling these Nikon Gold Lion-winning ads an ‘anti-A.I.’ campaign. But it’s more than that. It’s an anti-digital, anti-online, anti-non-creativity, anti-sit-on-your-ass campaign”.
He continues: “Nikon used real photos of real places taken by real photographers and then wrote fake AI prompts. See, that’s a concept. That’s a Big Idea.”
Mark is spot on, as usual.
Should we be concerned with A.I. replacing designers? Shit no!
Designers working with any form of A.I. will outperform those working without A.I. The versatility of Narrow A.I. allows for rapid innovation, allowing designers of wide-ranging capabilities to deepen their expertise and thus offer more value to their clients.
For the most part though, without human insight, A.I. adds precious little to the pool of knowledge, rhetoric and persuasion needed to push our industry forward. For our uses, it can only reference historical data to make sense of it for humans, but not yet the predictive part — the kind of foresight needed to set the direction for the kind of earth we want to live in.
Doing something few others could dream of is often as simple as daring to do something most others have forgotten how to do — observe the world, trust your gut, explore ideas… take your time.
In order to create impactful, lasting work, designers are still going to have to do their homework: ethnographic qualitative research. This is studying people, cultures and lived experiences and translating that into great creative direction. It is doing things the long, hard, stupid way.
I would argue these things are more critical to the survival and efficacy of the creative profession than programming.
But what happened to Corona?
According to this report by Brand Finance, despite the association between their brand name with a pandemic which has killed tens of millions of people, Corona has achieved 21% growth in brand value in 2022 and was ranked as the most valuable beer brand in the world with brand value up to $7 Billion. They got Snoop Dogg and Andy Sandberg in their commercials, they’ll be fine.
