The AI Conundrum
The way the media has been talking about AI lately, you would think we're witnessing 'the singularity'. The recent development of tools like DALLE-E 2, Chat GPT, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Adobe Firefly, and many others have pushed AI to the centre stage as a major topic of concern for creative professionals. The advanced capabilities of these tools have convinced some people that AI represents an existential threat to the creative profession and the protection of our intellectual property. However, I have a different perspective.
Throughout my childhood I’d always drawn with paper and pencil, but when our family got our first computer and I learned how to use MS Paint (or Paintbrush as it was originally called), it was revolutionary. It never stopped me drawing with paper and pencil but it did give me a greater range of tools to create with and ultimately built foundational skills I would later use in my career.
When I started working nearly two decades ago, the industry was in a hybrid state, using a combination of traditional and digital techniques. Graphic designers and artists were still performing a lot of their work by hand, but more and more companies were starting to embrace software like Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator. A few years into my first job, almost everything I did was on a computer. There were similar concerns about technology back then as there are about AI today, but for me, it seemed like a natural evolution. The only people it ended up negatively impacting were those unwilling to adapt and harness the power of these tools to their advantage.
Early on in my career I realised this could one day be me, so I made sure to keep up with the latest techniques, trends and software. I mastered new tools early and introduced them to the industry myself. Additionally, I diversified my skillset so that I would always have something to fall back on should anything change.
My approach to AI is much the same. Although it is still in its infancy, I believe we as creative professionals should embrace it as just another amazing tool to add to our kit. In these early stages we should really be experimenting with it and finding innovative ways to use it to our advantage. Some obvious advantages are the automation of mundane, time consuming tasks and to help us when we hit those delightful creative blocks we all know and love.
That’s not to say there aren’t legitimate legal concerns surrounding some of these AI tools, not just in the way they are being trained but also how they might be exploited and misused by unscrupulous individuals in the future. Undoubtedly as the lines between what is real and what is artificial continue to blur, we will see new laws and regulations emerge regarding the use of AI as it pertains to fraud, identity protection and intellectual property.
We creative professionals have spent many years painstakingly mastering our trade and there are always going to be people who undervalue our creativity and try to cut us out of the process. There’s a line Don Draper says to Peggy in the hit show Mad Men, that has always stuck with me: “They can’t do what we do and they hate us for it”.
Despite this I don’t believe AI tools will replace us or take paying customers away from us. People who don’t want to pay us will keep doing that and people who do pay us already understand our value. All AI really does is create more opportunity and it is up to us to take advantage of it. By mastering how to use these new tools, we can further enhance ourselves as the skilled creative experts we already are.