Let the Robots Chatter, but Keep Designing
AI may accelerate, but it cannot replace the depth of true communications
Dear Designer,
Last week, I had a coffee with a clever colleague who also works in digital communications and we quickly went to — what else — AI. There is no bigger topic among writers, designers and developers today. We are in the midst of this grotesquerie, an attempt to hollow out the creative human endeavour with the goal of creating faster and less expensive communications. AI’s onslaught, as fascinating as it is, applies to every knowledge-based activity — but especially those in which deep cognition are involved.
I have seen calls for us designers to ignore the AI. Some have called for a boycott.
It’s going to happen and will accelerate under our new tech overlords. There are going to be new platforms emerging in which AI reduces the time of creation and production of design to hours and minutes. Figma already showed the way seven months ago, albeit failing to put in any ethical or critical guardrails.
AI will run ruin but will not reign
It is not the end of design, communications, marketing or, more importantly, the working artists — and I will continue to call you an artist, dear designer — who toil in those fields. So I don’t despair. Here’s why.
My colleague mentioned that about half of the written content in his LinkedIn feed is generated by AI. Articles that two years ago would have been typed out by human hand are now being pushed by paste. And there is a pattern to the prose — short paragraphs littered with emojis combined with stunted, short-form phrasing and disjointed narratives.
I can’t replicate his experience — my LinkedIn feed is either more boring or less marketing-driven — but long-form content at LinkedIn, Medium and Substack, is increasingly bot-made. Last June, a study by Amazon researchers titled A Shocking Amount of the Web is Machine Translated: Insights from Multi-Way Parallelism, found that 57% of all published online content is now generated by or translated using an AI algorithm:
Machine generated, multi-way parallel translations not only dominate the total amount of translated content on the web in lower resource languages where MT [machine translation] is available; it also constitutes a large fraction of the total web content in those languages,” the researchers wrote in the study.
Degradation is part of the natural (and artificial) order
The AWS AI researchers found that the overall quality of this new content, much of which is simply translated from one language to another, is poor. The result is that search engines and chatbot algorithms themselves are regurgitating the content, further devolving the digital universe that was once relatively useful, honest, and straightforward.
Cory Doctorow called this enshittification (word of the year in 2024) and the resultant slop that is emerging as “what happens when you have power without consequence.” In other words, large companies emerge by offering high quality and convenient products (e.g. content) and then avoid regulation (e.g. copyright) while degrading their own offering until people barely notice — at which point, they are locked in, loaded up, and leaving the platform is difficult.
So, Facebook, Instagram, and now LinkedIn are increasingly enshittified while the rest of us poor souls try to eke out a valuable career.
Then why am I still hopeful for design and written communications?
Two reasons. First, we are only two years in with the launch of ChatGPT and most of us communicators are already aware of the slop that is being foisted on us. Google’s search results are less helpful and sometimes downright wrong (suggesting that you add glue to pizza or how you might want to eat a rock) with its new “Organized with AI” summaries. Facebook itself is worried enough about AI slop that it is training AI bots to identify it before people start leaving in droves.
I predict that new tools, systems and frameworks — some even inherent to these platforms themselves — will emerge to showcase non-AI content. Some platforms — I’m looking at you Medium and Substack — will privilege human-written content, gating or removing AI-generated garbage.
Others will create higher paywalls for real content, which we’re increasingly seeing for leading newspaper and magazine sites. Tech news outlets like The Verge and Vox now require paid subscriptions for visitors to read most of their site content.
Platform devolution has happened before: MySpace, Friendster and LiveJournal all bit the dust after millions of people fled.
Quality ideas will always emerge — and win — if there is an open internet. (The bigger question is whether we will continue to have an open internet, of course.)
Second, there is this small thing called human emotion. Why do we like podcasts so much? Why is TikTok so wildly popular? Why is conspiracy a powerful means to sell subterfuge? How can Substack publishers have hundreds of paid subscribers? It is the power of endearment. We are drawn to people first, producers second. We want to know that, behind and beyond the words — and the images — are living and breathing fellow feeling humans that fail, flail, fart and fuck-up.
We not only want to know that we are connected; we need to know.
Every good communications modality, design very much included, rely upon creating emotional responses to what is presented. Humans not only require but demand emotion to be served warm in our bright corners of connection. Designers and writers who have the opportunity to cultivate and corral their emotional (and I dare say, spiritual) responsibilities will be able to better respond to the odd dictates of an undiscerning robot culture. Conscious human design that is rooted in history, beauty, values, and madness — not to mention grief, guilt, godliness and goodness — will sing.
Let the robots chatter.
And remember that you are made of major miracles.
I’ll leave you with a poem by Canadian author, Margaret Atwood. It’s called February (1995), a month which is itself a kind of onslaught.
February
Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries
to get onto my head. It’s his
way of telling whether or not I’m dead.
If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am
He’ll think of something. He settles
on my chest, breathing his breath
of burped-up meat and musty sofas,
purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,
not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,
declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory,
which are what will finish us off
in the long run. Some cat owners around here
should snip a few testicles. If we wise
hominids were sensible, we’d do that too,
or eat our young, like sharks.
But it’s love that does us in. Over and over
again, He shoots, he scores! and famine
crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing
eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits
thirty below, and pollution pours
out of our chimneys to keep us warm.
February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.
I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You’re the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.
Yours,
Image of the week
Artist and designer Ben Shahn created this print in 1979, quoting the last paragraph of Dissertation VIII by Maximus of Tyre, who lived in the late 2nd century AD in Greece. In consternation, humanity raises its muscular arm to heaven.
Why should I further examine and pass judgement about images? Let men know what is divine. Let them know. That is all.
Quote of the week
All art is based on nonconformity… Without nonconformity we would have had no Bill of Rights or Magna Carta, no public education system, no nation upon this continent, no continent, no science at all, no philosophy, and considerably fewer religions.
~ Ben Shahn
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I’m with you on the hope that Substack will ban or somehow flag content created by AI. I avoid or unsubscribe from folks who use it, even just to create illustrations.
Once again, thought provoking, beautiful writing. Also the inclusion of Margaret Atwood's poem -- now there's some writing based in lyrics and truth. It was new to me and already I've read it twice and will return to it again, unusual in my poem-reading ways.