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ChatGPT has been THE big revolution of the beginning of 2023. Artificial intelligence, until now part of science fiction, are now a reality.

More concretely, AIs open to the general public have seen the light of day. Deep learning and artificial intelligence have been used for some time in the research world and specialized industries. Chatgpt and other applications like Dall-e are mostly AI creation applications that have been opened to the general public.

As with every new technology, people cry foul, everyone thinks their work is threatened.

There are hints of 1950 when factories started to equip themselves with robotic arms to improve the speed of production lines.

Let’s be clear, the work of UX designers is not in danger because of chatgpt any more than the work of programmers is in danger because of WordPress canvas.

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How will AI be used in UX design soon?

Several articles give examples such as “find the best training”, “write a UX design brief” or “generate catchphrases”. Nothing very interesting if you know how to use Google and have a minimum of imagination.

Text-to-text AIs are not very interesting in UX work, text to image AIs will be.

These AIs will allow you to focus on site specifications and generate sample mock-up pages based on the specifications.

These tools will serve as shortcuts for wireframes, component design, and design systems; in short, AIs will save us time by taking care of mass producing the basis for mockups based on our ideas.

Image-to-image AIs will also have a role to play in mock-up, i.e. the drawing on paper can be interpreted to create something square on Figma or any other design tool.

“Five screens of a restaurant reservation app” generated by Dall-e

However, this will not impact the job market for two reasons. The first is that these design shortcut options already exist, they are all the design systems and other canvases available in the community tabs of Figma. You can easily copy a design system or an entire application created by someone else to have a ready-made work base, which you can then modify according to your needs.

The second is customization and imagination. Start-ups and companies that want to develop applications that need designers always have particularities, contexts of use, constraints, and innovations that will need human imagination.

Yes, but AIs are stronger than humans at suggesting ideas if you explain them. No, AIs rely on what exists and what has been documented to design things that seem credible. GPT chat is a very advanced version of the word suggestion of numeric keyboards on mobile and assisting bots.

Drawing its copies works found on the internet, which is obvious since it also copies artists’ signatures when there is no reason to sign for an AI.

It will be years before AIs have enough data to understand all the ins and outs of specific contexts of use such as applications for the disabled, illiterate, military in the field, and people who don’t want to use an application but have to.

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The last point that proves that we are not in danger: is the use. Chatgpt is particularly appreciated because it simulates a conversation. You ask a question, you get an answer. It is what we wanted to do with Alexa and Siri. But the majority of people are content to experiment without understanding the functioning behind it.

AIs are technologies and like all technologies, people will know how to use them more or less well depending on their needs. Not everyone will be able to interact with an AI well enough to make it produce an application as desired. Specializing in AI-assisted design will be the future of the profession.

Let’s stop being afraid and imagine uses to benefit us. Those who will not follow the current will probably be left aside and will become incompetent because too slow. AIs will mainly allow us to gain in production time, but they remain tools made by and for men.