A Utopia and Dystopia for AI in design
Will AI ever be a true sidekick for our lives?
I recently had the pleasure of participating as a panelist in AI in design: what, how, when, and why with Paula Intravaia and Dario Miticocchio about the applications of General AI and Generative AI, and what it means for the future of industrial design. We had an excellent conversation–meandering through the ethics of AI use in design, what it means for how design students will learn and use it, and what it actually means for design.
While the discussion is still fresh in my head I wanted to capture what we covered and share them in a multi-part series, starting with the utopian and dystopian views of how AI will embed into the creative process.
Utopian and dystopian applications for AI in design relies on how you should be using the tech in the first place. Before we really dive into anything, remember that AI is just a tool, and like every new advancement in technology, the hype cycle can create a lot of noise that hides the truth of the tech.
AI does a lot of amazing things, but it isn’t a magic bullet to address all current tooling and process issues.
Nothing is.
To use AI effectively, like using any tool, you need a goal. Additionally, if you don’t have a clear game plan of how you’re using the tech to achieve your goal it’s not fair to ask the tool to solve your problem. So, you need to know what you want to do and how you want to use a tool to achieve your goal. Tools solve problems, they aren’t there to direct the problem-solving process.
Thus, AI is not a replacement for design or designers. When you look through a critical lens, it’s easy to see it as an incredibly powerful pattern recognition tool, capable of remixing existing material into something new, but not perfectly, and without soul. As humans, we are trained to sort signal from noise and to see patterns. When we see AI do a job it’s easy to see it as a threat since it can be mistaken for delivering critical thinking or creative problem solving when it’s going through combinations and permutations.
Maybe I’m getting a little philosophical here, but this is where I draw the line between creativity and…not creativity: a designer creates not just from the inspiration drawn on during a project, but every single moment of their life up until that point. Consciously and subconsciously, every experience we have had influences what we do as designers. Until you can translate that into code, AI will only produce copies of what it has access to–with pre-programmed variations.
So what about the utopian world, where AI acts as our super effective assistant? I think it's pretty simple. Using AI as an interpreter to find information that we then use to design with is the best case scenario. Having something that can do deep searches for us based on queries to help source information? The ideal application.
Another perspective on this approach is using it inspire us by creating inspiration that we direct. GenAI tools to create moodboards, explore early concepts, upscale hand drawings, are all great ways of generating ideas as an extension of problem solving.
On the flipside, the dystopian scenario is where the convenience of AI tempts us, takes over our process, and erodes originality. The worst case scenario is that we mistake the imagery and ease that AI presents as effective and well considered design. At first, it is easy to mistake the images created by AI as wholly original work. Yet any sufficiently educated expert on a specific artist or genre can instantly extrapolate all of the inspiration points, and in some cases, the source imagery that a machine generated.
The concerns of AI resulting in lazy design isn’t an unfounded one. We are already seeing a trend of low stakes imagery like blog headers get pulled from genAI. I am guilty of this. When it comes to applying AI to the physical and material is a concern for me. Using GenAI to come up with concepts for design and trying to literally translate that into physical product, is just… a terrible, terrible idea. But people are trying to do it, and are declaring it as a point of celebration.
Please do not do this
I don’t like ending a writing on a down note, so here’s the gleaming beacon of hope to all of this: Good design stands the test of time, and human design will forever outperform tech in that respect…probably because software engineers aren’t designers, and vice versa, but that’s a conversation for another time.