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Freelancer Q&A
"Should design agencies use ai to design or refuse to support it?"

“I refuse to support or use ai for design,  Also, based on this poll alone…It doesn’t look like people who adopt it will have very good sentiment towards them from the majority of the actual talent out there.”…

this is a bit like protesting against the steam engine.

It’s happening people.
Refusing to acknowledge technology advances won’t change anything.
Refusal to participate won’t stop that train,
Get on board or get left behind.

If you feel threatened ask yourself how you would feel about a designer that refuses to use Photoshop, and sticks to pen and paper

You’d think: “what a dinosaur”

Good design should serve a purpose.
Rewards will be distributed depending on the effectiveness of results.

Ai is just another tool to produce a result.
ai provides leverage in terms of reducing labour.

Sloppy work will always be sloppy work,
no matter what tools you use.

Good work will be good work.

If people using ai are providing good results,
I doubt the customer will know or even care how it was produced.

If designers have a poor sentiment to other designers using ai,
Then I’m disappointed in them.

Their negative sentiment will have zero effect on designers using ai, so long as they are getting clients good results.

Over time, more progressive designers who continue to evolve their tools and skillset will secure better clients and more opportunities,
Which I imagine might embitter designers refusing to use ai even more,
However it won’t have any impact on the success of the progressive designers.

That’s just the nature of a free market.

The direct output of ai generated won’t compare to original creative work.

But there’s also some pretty beautiful stuff out there which has been created by ai then manipulated and refined.

If using ai makes you unprofessional, and untalented, by your logic…
People who use assets from Adobe stock are talentless because they didnt take the photography themselves.
website designers usung WordPress should have coded the CMS by scratch.

Clearly this isn’t true,
And the idea of judging other designers for using ai would be highly entitled.

AI is often used for ideation, feedback, inspo, editing etc.
It’s a broad spectrum in a creative process.

AI still falls flat when it comes to any fuzzy logic, or anything strategy related, but that doesn’t lessen the talent of designers who use it.

AI reduces the labour input.
The mind that imagines, guides and refined is still the talent.

But on a more human level as designers,
Our goal should be to lift each other up,
not hold each other back or put each other down.

Ai is just another tool to produce a result.
Use it to do good work which provides more value for your clients.

 

Asked by

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kennon

motion designer

Answered by

Picture of Nicholas Robb

Nicholas Robb

Founder, Design Hero
Author of Life by Design

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