this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2024
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If current "AI" is taking one's job as a graphics designer, it means that one isn't a very good graphics designer.
I think more likely answer is that most businesses are cheap and a mediocre image generated by AI is good enough vs paying a human to make a really good one.
This is something people always miss in these discussions. A graphic designer working for a medium marketing company is replaceable with a Stable Diffusion or Midjourney, because there, quality is not really that important. They work on quantity and "AI" is much more "efficient" in creating the quantity. That too even without paying for stock photos.
High end jobs will always be there in every profession. But the vast majority of the jobs in a sector do not belong to the "high end" category. That is where the job loss is going to happen. Not for Beeple Crap level artists.
I would question the efficiency claim. Uber and the like claimed incredible market dominance, driving local food delivery and taxi services out of business. They're only now really being forced to find profitability.
I wonder if AI is going to be similar. The powerful models right now, as I understand it, have ludicrous power requirements. I don't know their balance sheets, but in the current race to market share, I'm skeptical that most of these services are in the green.
What that ultimately says about the future I don't really know. Like it could be we reach some point where the models get better, or more specialized, or something and profit arrive. Or maybe theres a point of diminishing returns where the profit just can't be made, and once the hype falls off (and investors stop clamoring for AI) these companies will ask what they're getting for the money spent.
(And of course I could just be straight up wrong about profits today not being there.)
Replacing a human with any form of tech has been a long standing practice. Usually in this scenario the profitability or the efficiency takes a known pattern. Unfortunately what you said is the exact way the market always operated in the past, and will be operating in the future.
The general pattern is a new tech is invented or a new opportunity is identified, then a bunch of companies get into the market as competing entities. They offer competing prices to customers in an attempt to gain market dominance.
But the problem starts when low profit drives some companies to a situation where either they have to go bust or dissolve the wing, or sell the company to a competitor. Usually after this point a dominant company will emerge in a market segment. Then the monopolies are created. After this point companies either increase the price or exploit customers to get more money, and thereby start making profits. This has been the exact pattern in tech industries for several decades.
In the case of AI also, this is why companies are racing to capture market dominance. Early adopters always get a small advantage and help them get prominence in the segment.
They are absolutely eating the real costs in order to gain market share. I suspect that there's going to be a mad dash to rehire humans when the bill comes due and the VCs want profits.
You can only cut out so many people in so many industries before the economy collapses. I'd like to see what it would look like if like 30% of people lost their careers to AI. Maybe there would finally be a push for UBI and/or stronger tax laws for large corporations.
Almost, the likeliest answer is that CEOs and the ruling class have no fucking clue whether AI can be good enough to replace graphic designers but they also know that this was never the point, AI is a weapon of class warfare, and a nuclear one at that.
Even if the entire industry crashes and decides it does actually have to hire lots of human artists back, those artists will be hired as alternatives to cheap AI and graphic design will have permanently been dissected and destroyed as a decent career for hardworking people who may or may not be the most talented people in the world.
If you (as in anybody reading this not who I am responding too) think this isn’t happening you need to shut your mouth trap and go read a book about the Industrial Revolution not written by an apologist for the ruling class.
High-end businesses that need high-quality design would never use output from an "AI".
If they do, that means they don't take design seriously, and are fine with "not a very good graphics designer". So my point stands, IMO.
The diploma mill MBAs that run the place don't know (or care) what good design is.
They only know how to look at business costs as "cutting into our profit".
Yeah, not a high-end business.
These days they're aware that good marketing & design = $$$.
I could not care less what low-end suits decide, they're not what brings designers money.
More "AI" garbage means that good designs will have an easier time crystalising.
You are incredibly naive.
Nah, I've just been in the industry long enough to not be scared of competition. Quality is something that a lot of well-paying businesses very much appreciate.
A crappy visual generator is on-par with an intern, at best.
The people who are startled the most, probably have never actually done design large-scale.
Classic "fuck you got mine" take from someone who has experienced no difficulty in decades with a field. If you're ignoring the mass layoffs happening across multiple fields right now, ESPECIALLY in well-performing companies, I guess it looks like AI is not having much of an effect. Like if you consciously decide to not look at any business news at all this take could make sense.
My dude, I'm literally replying to a person who said "rip graphics designers". Of course I'm talking about my on field.
BTW, I have no problem with "fuck around and find out". Fuck those companies layinf off people because of LLMs. I'll watch them go down with a grin on my face and balls in my hand.
Not only are you a fool, you spit in the face of people trying to begin careers in your field because you are so naively confident that this massive change in the labor market conditions of your industry won’t affect you or other graphic designers negatively.
Please retire, change careers or at least keep your mouth shut and actually listen to less experienced people in your industry. Stop acting like a boomer, it is just embarrassing yourself and publicly committing your online identity to words that will age so terribly it will make your future self’s head spin.
You are fucking high on your own farts. Learn to generate garbage images if you're so scared, I don't give a shit.
I know how it works, since we're always hiring and looking for new talent.
I really don't care what a passer-by-AI-is-the-future rando thinks about me.
I'm talking from a perspective of reality. What you "predict" or "feel" or imagine the industry is or going to be, doesn't really interest me much.
Damn... not sure how you work in an industry that requires good interpersonal skills with an attitude like this but you didn't really listen to what I was saying at all. I am not defending AI or even claiming it can actually replace human graphic designers in any serious fashion longterm.
Let me lay this out for you really simple, this is a class war, and vapid MBA majors who will always placed by the ruling class in charge of most graphic design jobs don't give a flying fuck if AI is a scam, the whole point of being a business major is to scam people. At the end of this when the AI hype bubble bursts most of yall aren't getting your jobs back, and even if you do those jobs will longer be the good quality sustainable jobs they used to be because you will be now seen as an expensive temporary stopgap to AI (independent of the reality of AIs inane bullshit), a temporary "return to using horses while we get cars figured out better" approach that never treats the horses as worthy of a future...
It is hilarious given that you are a storyteller and artist by trade that at this late stage in the game you actually genuinely believe the truth actually matters here compared to the overwhelming roar of economic narratives set by the ruling class....and yeah you mighttt personally get lucky and be fine for the rest of your career but how cruel and naive to use your experience as a device to divorce your empathy from less talented/experienced graphic designers fighting tooth and nail for the privilege to follow in your footsteps.
Stop being a coward and hiding behind the niche little square you have cut out of your industry to support yourself, stand up and actually defend the futures and quality of life of the countless younger versions of you getting ground to dust by the industry before it is too late and the decent future of your career is rationalized away to capitalists and the path you walked in life becomes a mocking foreclosed dream to the next generation.
Like wake the fuck up please, this is catastrophic for graphic designers and it has nothing to do with whether AI works or not
I disagree with the optinions stated in your reply.
Good GFX designers are expensive. AI is cheap. Welcome to capitalism.
Yeah, quality is expensive, welcome to Earth.
That's not capitalism, that's economics. It's the way it should be.
I invest half of my life's time studying and honing my skill. I will charge accordingly for it.
You missed the point. Where I made it rather clear why AI is chosen over GFX designers. Why buy good and expensive, when you can have mediocre and dirt cheap? That's capitalism.
You've made it clear, but it seems you're unaware of how the design industry works.
You cannot beat a Nurburgring lap record with a slow, cheap car. You CAN do laps, but "doing laps" is not what the high-end companies want & need.
You cannot replace quality, expensive work with cheap work and expect the same result. Otherwise, companies would hire 1st-year-dirt-cheap freelancers, or outsource to fivr. Companies that do that are mostly starting themselves or are so cheap, that they are of no value to the designer.
Stop the "AI" dooming that's only beneficial to the prople who sell it.
None of the highly successful people I know within the industry is worried about the generative garbage, because it's all that is.
Did you land your gigs at high end companies right out of uni?
No, I ate shit the first few years after uni, making coffee and changing texts on visuals.
Are you truimg to imply that a crappy image generator that can barely make text and has trouble generating the appropriate amount of fingers has taken over THE ENTIRE visual design industry?
We probably live on different planets.
What they are trying to point out is that as self confident as you portray yourself in your skills, at one point you sucked and you got hired anyway.
The new reality is you never would have been able to get into this industry because nobody would have given you a chance.
Yeah, on my planet I'm living with someone that earns her living with marketing focused DA. On that same planet I've spent close to 200hrs trying to figure out how close the current tech can come to artistic talent. With the correct keywords it can come eerily close.
You shouldn't dismiss it just because you can't get it to deliver what you need.
The garbage I see on the internet is enough for me to not use it. Let me hire a "prompt engineer", I'm sure that's more useful than a junior graphics designer. In your world, maybe.
Glhf
That's your response? Cheap copout bro.
Most clients don't understand art or graphics to begin with, I guess. They just wanted someone good at Illustrator.
That means shit prompts and shit visuals.
Well, that's where the "not very good at graphics design" comes in. If you're only hired because "you know illustrator", that says more about you than the client.
Your attitude says more about you than your supposed knowledge does, if you think AI won’t have a catastrophic impact on the value of your work, of the artistry of what you do in relationship to being valued by society, you are an utter fool.