With, not against
Couple the visions of creative doom with the open-for-work posts and one can’t help but wonder: is it all over?
Warning: I come with a rant, not an answer. But my analysis may help ease that collective anxiety and even bring back optimism.
What is AI ‘replacing’?
Human creation differs from machine generation on many levels. While AI excels at recursion, data processing, and pattern recognition, human cognition combines known knowledge and interpreted experience with abstract thinking to create new understanding. While neural networks are optimized for predictability, we integrate reasoning, sensing, and concepting to venture past normal distribution (aka, innovation.)
So far machines can expedite the process, and they may get better at it over time. If we’re smart, we’ll accept the help and focus on the aspects of design that demand human interpretation (the parts that are impossible to fake, like abstraction of knowledge.)
Bridging problem-solving and sense-making has been at the core of Design throughout its evolution (from a on focus production efficiency, to usability and accessibility, to mediating culture-forming.) We now need to adapt that capability to bridging human creativity and machine processing.
Let’s do what designers do
Perhaps the irony of today’s conundrum is that Design is at its best solving problems of this kind (in this case, the integration of two systems) diligently, confidently, and systemically.
Rather than resisting the technology, we need to design our own way forward, ensuring that the integration of AI in the creative processes serves human interests, including the designer’s. This means resisting the opportune approaches that confirm theories of replacement. Let’s stop posting the lazy Coca-Cola christmas ad, or spending countless hours getting mid-journey to produce the picture in your head. Instead, let’s use your design skills to envision systemic approaches for the use of AI in our work.
Art’s job is to provoke. Take a look at new goings on between Art and AI and I promise you’ll see visions of the future that may change how you conceive design in tomorrow’s world.
Let’s focus on what matters
One thing machine processing and data bring designers is the power to co-create at scale. In that network, we sit at the center (that is where we’d want to be.) I’ve been thinking quite a bit about that, and so far came up with three principles. It’s a moving target, but so is everything today. They are:
Balancing Consciousness and Computation
Connecting human creativity to machine capability must recognize and leverage both parties’ strengths. What engagement models offer the best balance of recursive processing and human creativity? Are text-to-image generative models really the best we can do? I know designers who create generative brand systems based on proprietary visual languages.
Preserving Human Leadership
Acknowledging AI strengths, how do we maintain authorship? Which AI capabilities are needed, and when and where do we fit them in? In the early days, I heard many people say that poets would be in demand, because they could translate images into word prompts. If we learn to think like a machine, we can do better: we can tell the machine how to infinitely run our “design code.” (I know it works because this is the idea that guides one of my classes.)
Scaling with Purpose: Whatever will be made, it’ll be made for humans, not machines. our continued oversight is critical to keep generative systems true to intent and evolving with culture. The ease of production will diminish the impact of novelty, the quest for predictability (AI’s purpose) and consistency. Our ability to connect the human experience with production are crucial to stay tuned to human values.
Let’s keep at it, in a new way
Design was born as a humanistic response to industrialization, a way to bring back art into production. Perhaps we need to do it again, this time in response to the loss of the cognitive realm. Or maybe we need to take a clue from Art, which decided to embark instead on a new journey: abstraction.
Whatever the answer, we must trade the fear of replacement for the courage to invent the next version of ourselves.
A couple of notes:
1: As I mentioned in the chat, I will be shifting gears to discuss applications and tools more. In a way, it’s recognition that we’re no longer in ‘entering mode.’ I’d love your feedback and suggestions!
2: For a related discussion also read Designers as Knowledge Makers.]