Can an AI Design? Sure, it Can! Says the AI and its Marketers
A short critical look at the reality behind generative AI's outputs and hype
Dear Designer,
I want to use this week’s newsletter to talk openly and offhandedly about generative AI and its current deployment in commercial digital design.
There is a good chance that AI will come for some of our jobs in the near future — and my personal review of the blogging and newsletter landscape shows that not too many designers are speaking publicly or honestly about it.
Yes, there are a few writers on Medium that are making a living scaring the bejesus out of designers. That must be fun! But I want to do the opposite — or at least turn the conversation 90 degrees around so that we can think about the current status of AI and the constellation of issues it provokes in an altogether different, rational, and colourful way. AKA, taking a piss.
What the AI generators hype machine is saying
We are getting a lot of marketing from the AI companies and I thought it might make sense to present their “point of view” here. Some of these companies have spent millions of dollars upselling us designers on using their wares. A few are monopolies and behemoths like Adobe and Figma while others are well-funded startups and upstarts like Ideogram, Midjourney and ChatGPT.
If we do a close read of some of their marketing speak, we may be able to ascertain what their real goals are for them and for us — and how they will impact our daily lives and daily bread. And I wanted to test each of their tools and show you what some of the preliminary results are.
Let’s first look at Adobe. Their Firefly product says this:
Generate images, audio, and now video all in one place with award-winning, commercially safe Firefly generative AI models. Go from ideation to production with seamless integration with your favorite Adobe apps [italics mine], giving you complete creative control.
First off, they are indicating that we are going to make the entirety of our workflow faster and easier. And we’re going to do it with our “favorite Adobe apps”, each of which now have various generative AI tools integrated into their processors. Not only do we get to stay locked into their “ecosystem,” but through our overpriced Creative Cloud subscription, we gain the privilege of speeding up our use of those tools through enhancements and effects.
So, I prompted Firefly to “create a logo for a law firm focusing on creative service businesses”. The result?
The AI created four images that look more or less like this one. It’s not exactly a logo. And it won’t satisfy any lawyer that I know. But it’s definitely something! Okay, remember, this is Adobe’s Firefly — a company that has helped create over 9 billion images with its tools.
Next, let’s look at Figma. Figma is doing its best to argue that they are on the side of us designers in the new AI game. Here is what they say on their AI intro page:
As with everything we do at Figma, our main goal is to give you the tools you need to do your best work—to look beyond the hype and find real solutions to real user problems. Through that lens, we’re excited to introduce Figma AI, a collection of features designed to help you work more efficiently and creatively. Whether you’re searching for inspiration, exploring multiple directions, or looking to automate tedious tasks, we’re building Figma AI to unblock you at any stage.
What does mean? Faster and more “creative” designs.
Do you know any designer that wants that? Over the past 30 years of being in the world of design, I don’t recall one designer that I have met who has said to me “Andrew, I’m trying to really speed up my design process and be more ‘creative’. Do you know of anything that can do that?” Not one person.
Yes, many people have said that they would like to take the pain out of using various tools and they would like to be more effective. But truly creative time is a variable that aligns with the old adage of “garbage in, garbage out”. Faster design typically just means shitty design. We all know this.
And yes, designers do want to be as impactful as they can, as do their client and managers. But almost nobody wants speed at the expense of quality.
I wanted to put Figma’s AI beta called “First Draft” through its paces. Opening a brand new file in Figma, here is my prompt: “Please make a simple homepage for a three person law firm that only handles movie stars, influencers and technology startups — make it truly unique and engaging.”
The result was this.
What is this refuse? A blond woman in a white shirt staring boldly at the black space beneath the logo for “StarLaw”. StarLaw. The header text overruns the entire top few blocks, making it not only illegible but downright deranged. Below, three different AI-generated images present young, fake millennials doing something or other related to entertainment and technology and none of them look either happy or speaking to one another. In the bottom photo, the poor subject on the right looks like a 12-year old boy in a cheap suit made for a 250-pound man.
Everything about it says “Scream! Run for the hills!”
Okay, let’s have a look at Ideogram, which has raised nearly $100 million, including from Andreessen Horowitz and recently released its 2a model. Their launch page, which is absurdly hard to find, provides this breathless prose:
Our mission is to help people become more creative through generative AI. We are developing state-of-the-art AI tools that will make creative expression more accessible, fun, and efficient. We are pushing the limits of what’s possible with AI, with a focus on creativity and a high standard for trust and safety.
Again, we’re getting that “more creative” language. And yet everything on their site looks and feels manufactured, as if their images were run through a data processing machine. Which is exactly what happened.
I asked Ideogram to help me out, too. My prompt was to “create a small website homepage for a law firm that serves creative service businesses”.
The result:
Welp. Not exactly a homepage — but again, it’s something. The text is not editable. I don’t know what “Protecting your Creativity for Elements” and “Edeat your Gleaph LLages” means. Here is Ideogram’s stated rationale:
A warm, inviting website homepage for a small law firm specializing in creative service businesses, illustrated in a clean, modern design with soft pastel tones. At the center, a sleek logo reads "Creative Legal Solutions" in elegant script. A subtle gradient background features abstract illustrations of legal scales intertwined with paintbrushes and graphic design elements, symbolizing the intersection of creativity and law. Below the logo, a tagline in bold yet friendly font says "Protecting Your Creative Ventures," surrounded by minimalist icons representing various creative industries.
I’ll let you decide.
Finally, 400 million people are using OpenAI’s ChatGPT every day. The uptake over the past few years has been phenomenal. According to Open AI, ChatGPT acquired 1 million users just 5 days after launching; for Instagram, it was 2.5 months to reach 1 million downloads.
Let’s have a look at what they say:
Increase employee efficiency and creativity with high speed access to GPT‑4o, our flagship model, and tools like DALL·E, web browsing, data analysis, retrieval, and more.
It’s the same. “Efficiency and creativity.” These two concepts in our material world are usually oil and water.
I asked ChatGPT: “Please create a small website homepage for a small law firm that serves creative service businesses.” Here is the result, a fully coded page for your kind review.
Ugh.
Why make fun?
Why am I doing this? Designers and artists have conceptual armaments that stretch way beyond the physical and digital dimensions of our work. Two of these include disgracing and discrediting — both time honoured tools that breathe in the political and social catch winds and breathe out the idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies of authorities and those who claim to be “helping” us.
Sometimes this just takes the form of bullshit-detection. Other times, it looks like pastiche, graffiti, detournement (a Situationist-fueled attempt at hijacking an artwork and changing it), or some other kind of visual subversion. Canadian-based magazines like Adbusters have been speaking designer truth to power for 36 years. Banksy does similar shtuff to varying effect.
There is a good chance the AI will fundamentally reformat the economy, putting lots of fine folks out of jobs, force-spying on our every movement, and governing our bodies in ways that science fiction writers have gently imagined for a century.
But when using these new tools and systems, which I argue we designers must and should do today, we can also hold a mirror up to them. Right now, they are making ridiculous and even dangerously poor decisions for us. Our job is not to correct them for the benefit of our potential technological overlords but to consistently demonstrate that design has value.
A few more things before I jet. First, nowhere in this piece is AI privacy, copyright (and intellectual property theft), data ownership, digital accessibility, or environmental impact discussed here. Good thing there are more Mondays ahead.
I also want to start sharing with you, dear designer, a few other folks who are skeptically embracing or experimenting with AI.
Here is a recent post by Alex Mathers of Mastery Den that argues that critical thinking is where writers differentiate — not in putting words down per se.
My analogy, as you may have seen earlier, is that we designers are artists first.
Please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Wishing you a good week ahead.
Yours,
Image of the week
I recently renewed my membership with Letterform Archive. It is a phenomenal one-stop shop for historically important typographic resources, and contains multitudes of fine specimens like this. You can look up the history of this first issue of Bauhaus. But I’d rather you just compare this piece with the shlock and shite you saw above.
Quote of the week
You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.
~Alexander Solzhenitsyn
P.S. Thank you for reading, dear designer. If this newsletter was forwarded, you can get your very own subscription here. This newsletter is free and so are you.
So far, Adobe's AI hasn’t really taken off in its early stages and hasn't met the subscription numbers they were expecting. From what I've read, it seems like they're a bit confused about why adoption has been slow within the design community. To me, it’s a bit like our coffee habits: why spend $5 on a Starbucks coffee when you can get something nearly as good at McDonald's or Tim's for half the price? Right now, Adobe’s solution, as it often is, is to raise the monthly subscription for Creative Cloud to meet their revenue goals. Their main focus, unfortunately, seems to be keeping shareholders happy. Unfortunately, it most often comes at the expense of their customers.
Confession; I use ChatGPT (paid version) almost every day for tasks like rewriting emails, creating callouts from articles for magazines I’m designing, reworking proposals or quotes, generating code for website functions, or even helping me figure out whether I should take my dog to the vet or adjust his diet and for troubleshooting suggestions.