Revisiting the question with updated technology and approaches that may very quickly render designers obsolete.

Warning: this article is inherently controversial and contains some really depressing insights. Reader discretion is advised.

Overview

Whether we want to admit it or not, AI is absolutely poised to take our jobs as designers and run away with them.

We can’t stop it at this point, so the main thing we need to understand is how to work with it, and understand its operation boundaries in order to work in tandem with automated design systems that will become prevalent.

Today, we’re revisiting the question with updated technology and approaches that may very quickly render designers obsolete.

Better, faster, cheaper

One designer doing the work of 10,000 for less than half the pay of one.

This is the level of leverage that AI will allow for and does through modeling, sampling, and reassembling based on both given heuristics and approximation using deep-learning.

You still need a human pilot for error control, but not very many, and AI can/will essentially do the rest.

You don’t need highly-trained designers when you have the work of highly-advanced deep-learning models that can turn out hundreds of samples in a matter of seconds. Just an operator who knows what they’re doing, running the prompts and checking for errors.

What we’re looking at here is a total revamp of the way that we work across teams, organizations, and yes, this automation revolution absolutely WILL leave quite a few design professionals in the dust.

The issue of copyright

Now it has been said that AI-generated works cannot be copyrighted…

That being said, you know as well as I do that the provisions allowing AI artwork to be used in a derivative fashion and THEN copyrighted will ABSOLUTELY be allowed in one form or another.

Why? Because it’s profitable. Bottom line: why would a business pay $80k+ a year for a broad-spectrum UI/UX professional when they could pay someone anywhere in the world to prompt the art with minimal design training?

Short answer: they wouldn’t, and that’s where we’re headed.

It happened with artisans and craftspeople at the turn of the last century, and every time there’s been a technological revolution, so you can bet that’s it’s gonna happen to us.

Fidelity is an issue, but not for long

Now I know what you’re thinking: “yeah, but AI still has a long way to go before the fidelity is good enough for production.”

Oh, really? How about this:

If this doesn’t scare you, it absolutely should, because there are models for copy writing as well. How long do you really think it’ll take for someone to step in and fuse these models into a production-ready system?

“Okay fine, but UX isn’t UI. UI might get automated but UX is totally safe because it’s about human connection and-”

Gonna stop you right there. UX patterns have reached nearly-full maturity and users have a pretty good idea of what to expect at this point in terms of accessing their outcomes.

There are only so many types of products and services. Only so many industry verticals, and only so many points that you can compete on.

→ Emotional, utility, convenience values. Better, faster, cheaper, or more personalized. It’s not rocket science, and it’s ripe for automation.

At this point, the outcome is going to be the only thing left to design. How many designers do you really think they’re going to need to make that happen?

Answer honestly for full points.

The death of designers

You spent years training, AI has spent centuries of countless human lives compressed into the span of less than a decade.

How are you, hell, how is anyone supposed to compete with that?

They’ve got AI for middle-management. They’ve got AI for compliance control. They’re working on AI for legal, accounting, sorting, compiling, financing, inventory, medicine, driving machinery, and that’s just the beginning.

→ Let me be as blunt as possible here: we will not be spared.

We are expensive, unreliable, and difficult to organize compared to AI and machine learning. The second that large-scale organizations are able to automate design in any tenable manner, we will see the near-immediate death of basically every internal design division on the map.

So what do we do?

We evolve. We adapt, and most importantly: we understand how it works, and how to work with it. That’s what we do.

We don’t lean on outmoded, outdated ideas of how design is “supposed” to be done. We understand the specs, we understand the tools, and we leverage them to their maximum-possible efficacy.

Here’s how: Google every tutorial you can, learn everything you can about generative AI, and how to work with it to create pieces.

Learn how to extract assets from compositions. Learn how to have AI generate your copy for you too.

Bottom-line, learn how to work with it rather than against it. Will it take your job in 2023? Probably not, but don’t get comfortable because it’s way closer to commercial viability than anyone wants to admit.

This is what we’ve got now, and for better or worse we either learn to make peace with it, or risk going to war with it, which if history is any indicator, we’ll almost certainly lose.