Graphic designers are constantly being told that AI software will steal our jobs. How will the advancement of AI software affect the graphic design industry?
In our experience, whilst AI is great in some situations, it can be very frustrating when you are trying to do something very specific. Let’s explore some more about some of the issues and classic AI fails we have seen during our AI experimentation.
A regular fail is the extra limb achieved in AI software when you try to generate human images.
At the moment AI software can’t work out that men with beards and babies would not be likely to wear a head scarf at a muslim dinner table. It knows what is a typical muslim dress, but fails to apply it in the right context.
At the moment AI technology doesn’t seem to be able to add the text you asked it to add in your instructions. Happy Birthday text is jumbled up and not shown properly.
One of our attempts to generate a creative perfume bottle ended in a bottle which it is impossible to manufacture. With a cap proportion which would be far too small to fit a pump inside. Often proportions are wrong and impossible to manufacture.
Another issue we have faced is that AI does not understand what constitutes a certain style of design. For this bottle we asked for a French simple style design with a wooden cap. The resulting design would most certainly not class as a French design, as it is too elaborately decorated, probably it would be more at home in an oriental setting.
For this image we asked for an Arabic man smelling some paper smelling strips. We didn’t ask for smoke or floating bottles to be present. No matter how many times we reworded this request, the paper smelling strips never appeared. AI doesn’t seem to understand what they are.
For this AI fail we had uploaded an image of a beautiful lady with bare shoulders and curly long hair. She was twisted around and her head was facing the camera, smiling nicely. There were two bottles of shampoo to the right side of the image which we were unable to remove. So when we asked AI software for a similar type of image, this is the result, shampoo bottles in the beautiful hair !
AI software doesn’t yet understand that a ladies blouse is not an acceptable dress for men in most countries. So when we asked for an African American family smiling together we got a man with a ladies blouse on him.
Finally, we were exploring options for UAE national day. Every time we asked for images relevant to the UAE with flags, the wrong flag was portrayed. AI software just doesn’t know the flags of the world well yet, which is quite surprising.
Despite all of our AI fails, we also got some surprising and useful results. AI software can be a useful tool to generate some quick ideas which can be reworked and used slightly differently when you have the experience to know what to do with them. AI software is likely to improve a lot over the coming years, as many people are using it and each inputted image or command with feedback is giving it the tools to improve. The images we got were not a big file size, often a bit hazy and low resolution in some parts. So they were more useful for small print format or to use for instagram, etc. Not for larger formats such as billboards. Although AI tools are still not perfect, we can see that they can be used to speed up some workflows and generate some quick new ideas. Will AI software steal our jobs? Only time will tell, but we need more improvements in the software to make it a reality.