Will Robots Take My Job In Design?

As artificial intelligence technology continues to advance, the creative sector is grappling with the new opportunities and risks that come with this innovation. While AI has the potential to revolutionise the way we work as creatives, there are also concerns that this buzz-word technology could lead to significant changes in the future, rendering many creative roles redundant and resulting in job losses across the industry. But are these concerns well-founded, or simply a fear of the unknown? As is often the case with future-mapping, the past becomes our best barometer for the days that lie ahead. 

Since the agricultural revolution, human’s have tirelessly invented new ways to improve our quality of life and streamline the processes therein. From the invention of the wheel to electric vehicles, we have tirelessly toiled throughout the centuries, passing the baton from generation to generation in the endless forward march of progress. 

The technological revolution of the past five decades has had a profound impact on virtually every facet of life in the modern world. Developments have dramatically changed the way we live, learn, work, travel, socialise and date, and for each new development stems new industry. 

The mass adoption of home computing technology has singlehandedly paved the way for the creative sector and brought about a boom in career opportunities across the world of design. Pre-1990s, jobs within this field tended to be far more specialised and required a college education to be considered at an established agency or studio. At the turn of the decade, the introduction of a novel technology for our homes known as ‘the internet’, alongside the launch of Photoshop 1.0 (exclusively for Mac), changed the world of design forever. The evolution of these tools has thrown open the floodgates to the creative sector, allowing artists and designers to hone their crafts, share work online, start businesses and make a name for themselves in the industry without the need for formal training. 

Make no mistake, in the early years of these innovative tools, there was no shortage of fear, uncertainty and doubt surrounding the future of professional design. The idea of traditional working methods being cast aside and protocols broken to make way for new technologies seemed to mark the end of the golden age of the industry. We have seen this debate play out before in the creative world, with the invention of the camera over a hundred years ago. Portrait painters and art purists argued that the tradition of having one’s likeness painted was a centuries-old honour, and the painstaking dedication required to master the artists’ skills could never be replaced by a cumbersome new gadget. In the blue corner, photographers presented the arguments in favour of the photographic portrait with a simple motto; ‘precision, speed, cheapness’. They argued that even the most gifted painter cannot achieve the degree of faithful reproduction of which the camera is capable. Even the quickest painter cannot supply a portrait within minutes. And the cheapest painting is guaranteed to be more expensive than the most expensive photograph. Nowadays, the preferential choice is completely subjective, but what we have seen in both debates - paints vs. cameras and pencils vs software - is that the feared replacement of the old mediums has never taken hold, and instead, opportunities for creative expression and expansion have become abundant.

So where does the rise of artificial Intelligence lead us on this journey? The truth of the matter is that AI has been a feature of contemporary creative software for much of the past decade. It quietly works away in the background to make our working processes easier and more streamlined by removing the arduous and repetitive jobs that we’d rather not deal with. The Adobe Creative Cloud suite currently uses AI technology to ‘solve problems in content understanding (including images, videos, documents, audio, and more); recommendations and personalisation; search and information retrieval; prediction and journey analysis; content segmentation, organisation, editing, and generation; and more’.  Think of the Clone Stamp Tool or Content Aware Fill, both very useful for completing laborious tasks in a timely manor; both driven by AI.

The budding contributions don’t solely sit within production software though; AI is also being deployed to understand audience behaviours and how they receive work once it has been launched to the public. A 2015 ad campaign by M&C Saatchi surprised even its own creative team, when its artificially intelligent poster examined how long people looked at its different creative iterations and evolved accordingly, reaching peak effective poster within just 72 hours.

When viewed through this lens, AI could be seen more as a helpful personal assistant and less like an ominous, job-hunting T-1000 closing in on our future careers. As we’ve seen throughout history, the adoption of new technology will more than likely become just another tool in the creative arsenal, and work to give us back our most precious resource, time. There is no denying that AI is fantastic at creating dozens, if not hundreds, of iterations on a pre-composed design, and all in a snip of the time it would take us to do manually. But this ability falls short of creating something new, unique and beautiful in a trance of inspiration as only the human brain can. This is due to the parameters of large datasets that an AI learning model functions within;  it can only pull information from what has come before and reference existing work rather than build it’s own perspective on the world. And it is within these parameters where new opportunities for future creatives lie. Curating datasets for learning models will soon become a sought after and lucrative profession, as we learn to adapt and fine tune the way that we can use AI as a tool for inspiration and a contributor to our work. 

Circling back to my original question, ‘will AI take my job?’  The answer is no. I caveat that with the inevitability that our roles as designers will change with the introduction of this technology, but there is a humanistic element to design and collaboration that cannot will not be replaced (at least for the foreseeable future.) As AI continues to change and affect the way we design, our roles will too evolve, adapting to the new technologies to achieve the previously inconceivable. It is now a matter of viewing AI less as a threat and embracing it more as a partner in our craft that helps extend our ability to tackle problems. With the right mind set and a willingness to keep up to speed on technological break-throughs within the industry, this period we are living in is arguably the most exciting period in the history of design, and we are only at the beginning.

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