Sendi Jia, a designer running her own studio between Beijing, China and London in England, says that she mainly uses AI generators, such as Dall-E to create fraudulent photos for panels in the background or websites, when her clients do not have access to real. This helped clients with constrained budgets, but it is also revealed how much a original process can replace AI. Recently, a potential client working at the University contacted JIA regarding the creation of a logo for a recent project. Then they changed their minds. They said they used artificial intelligence to do this.
Chinese graphic designers quickly experience the influence of painting generators on their daily work: technology enables followers and deeply shifts the perception of their work by clients, in particular in terms of labor costs and how much time it takes to produce. Independent artists or designers working in industries with clients who invest in stylized, eye -catching graphics, such as advertising, are particularly threatened.
Long before popularity, AI image generators, graphic designers in major technology companies and internal designers of huge corporate clients were often instructed by managers, that the aesthetics of competitors or social media, according to one employee on a huge online shopping platform in China, who asked to maintain anonymous from the employer’s website.
Where a man would have to understand and reverse engineer, in order to recreate it, AI image generators simply create his randomized mutations. Often, the results will look like obvious copies and include errors, but other graphic designers can then edit them on the final product.
“I think it would be easier to replace me if I didn’t accept me [AI]”Says an employee of the trading platform. Earlier, because tools such as stable diffusion and midjourney became more popular, their colleagues who spoke English were chosen to study AI image generators to escalate specialist knowledge about how to write successful hints and identify what types of tasks were useful.
“I think it forces both designers and clients to think about the value of designers,” says Jia. “Is it about creating a project? Is it about consultations, creativity, strategy, direction and aesthetics?”
“You can get a good result, but there will be dozens or even hundreds of poor … personally, I see [AI image generators] As a more toy than a tool. “
For example, in advertising agencies, graphic designers are working on comprehensive campaign strategies aimed at creating iconic, recognizable visual identities in various formats. Therefore, AI image generators are less useful because they do not produce anything particularly special, according to Erbing, a graphic designer in Beijing, who worked with several advertising agencies and asked to call his nickname.
“Each project is in the face of various problems, and designers are there to solve specific problems, not to create identical visualizations,” he says. “Sometimes the process of thinking through the project lasts longer than the actual creation of visualization.”
In the face of more convoluted tasks, the usefulness of AI is decreasing. Image generators are able to create many images, but this does not replace the work of understanding what the advertising campaign needs to determine the visual identity and convey what the customer sells and why people should buy it. Then the productive translation of these concepts into AI is its own challenge. Among the graphic designers in China there is a joke that using an AI image generator is like a gacha, referring to addictive games in which users spend money to receive randomized items and find out what they won.
“You can get a good result, but there will be dozens or even hundreds of poor,” says Erbing. “Personally, I understand [AI image generators] As a more toy than a tool. “
However, artists and designers say that AI Hype has a negative impact on the clients’ view on the value of their work. Now customers expect that the graphic designer will create work in a shorter time and for less money, which also has their own influence on averaging, reducing the ceiling for what designers can provide. Because customers reduce budgets and squish schedules, the quality of designers’ production is decreasing.
“Currently, there is a significant misunderstanding about the burden of designers,” says Erbing. “Some customers believe that since artificial intelligence had to increase performance, they can reduce their budget by half.”
But this perception is contrary to what designers spend most of the time, which does not necessarily simply create a picture, says erbing.
Erbing, like other designers, hopes that AI image generators can become more useful for graphic designers in the future, and notes that people perceived their usefulness ahead of their actual application. In the meantime, it distorts the clients’ view of the usefulness of the artists themselves.