As a graphic designer for 25+ years, I recommend getting used to, and enjoying, rice and beans.
If current “AI” is taking one’s job as a graphics designer, it means that one isn’t a very good graphics designer.
I think more likely answer is that most businesses are cheap and a mediocre image generated by AI is good enough vs paying a human to make a really good one.
This is something people always miss in these discussions. A graphic designer working for a medium marketing company is replaceable with a Stable Diffusion or Midjourney, because there, quality is not really that important. They work on quantity and “AI” is much more “efficient” in creating the quantity. That too even without paying for stock photos.
High end jobs will always be there in every profession. But the vast majority of the jobs in a sector do not belong to the “high end” category. That is where the job loss is going to happen. Not for Beeple Crap level artists.
I would question the efficiency claim. Uber and the like claimed incredible market dominance, driving local food delivery and taxi services out of business. They’re only now really being forced to find profitability.
I wonder if AI is going to be similar. The powerful models right now, as I understand it, have ludicrous power requirements. I don’t know their balance sheets, but in the current race to market share, I’m skeptical that most of these services are in the green.
What that ultimately says about the future I don’t really know. Like it could be we reach some point where the models get better, or more specialized, or something and profit arrive. Or maybe theres a point of diminishing returns where the profit just can’t be made, and once the hype falls off (and investors stop clamoring for AI) these companies will ask what they’re getting for the money spent.
(And of course I could just be straight up wrong about profits today not being there.)
Replacing a human with any form of tech has been a long standing practice. Usually in this scenario the profitability or the efficiency takes a known pattern. Unfortunately what you said is the exact way the market always operated in the past, and will be operating in the future.
The general pattern is a new tech is invented or a new opportunity is identified, then a bunch of companies get into the market as competing entities. They offer competing prices to customers in an attempt to gain market dominance.
But the problem starts when low profit drives some companies to a situation where either they have to go bust or dissolve the wing, or sell the company to a competitor. Usually after this point a dominant company will emerge in a market segment. Then the monopolies are created. After this point companies either increase the price or exploit customers to get more money, and thereby start making profits. This has been the exact pattern in tech industries for several decades.
In the case of AI also, this is why companies are racing to capture market dominance. Early adopters always get a small advantage and help them get prominence in the segment.
They are absolutely eating the real costs in order to gain market share. I suspect that there’s going to be a mad dash to rehire humans when the bill comes due and the VCs want profits.
You can only cut out so many people in so many industries before the economy collapses. I’d like to see what it would look like if like 30% of people lost their careers to AI. Maybe there would finally be a push for UBI and/or stronger tax laws for large corporations.
Almost, the likeliest answer is that CEOs and the ruling class have no fucking clue whether AI can be good enough to replace graphic designers but they also know that this was never the point, AI is a weapon of class warfare, and a nuclear one at that.
Even if the entire industry crashes and decides it does actually have to hire lots of human artists back, those artists will be hired as alternatives to cheap AI and graphic design will have permanently been dissected and destroyed as a decent career for hardworking people who may or may not be the most talented people in the world.
If you (as in anybody reading this not who I am responding too) think this isn’t happening you need to shut your mouth trap and go read a book about the Industrial Revolution not written by an apologist for the ruling class.
High-end businesses that need high-quality design would never use output from an “AI”.
If they do, that means they don’t take design seriously, and are fine with “not a very good graphics designer”. So my point stands, IMO.
If they do, that means they don’t take design seriously
The diploma mill MBAs that run the place don’t know (or care) what good design is.
They only know how to look at business costs as “cutting into our profit”.
Yeah, not a high-end business.
These days they’re aware that good marketing & design = $$$.
I could not care less what low-end suits decide, they’re not what brings designers money.
More “AI” garbage means that good designs will have an easier time crystalising.
Yeah, not a high-end business.
You are incredibly naive.
Nah, I’ve just been in the industry long enough to not be scared of competition. Quality is something that a lot of well-paying businesses very much appreciate.
A crappy visual generator is on-par with an intern, at best.
The people who are startled the most, probably have never actually done design large-scale.
Good GFX designers are expensive. AI is cheap. Welcome to capitalism.
Yeah, quality is expensive, welcome to Earth.
That’s not capitalism, that’s economics. It’s the way it should be.
I invest half of my life’s time studying and honing my skill. I will charge accordingly for it.
You missed the point. Where I made it rather clear why AI is chosen over GFX designers. Why buy good and expensive, when you can have mediocre and dirt cheap? That’s capitalism.
You’ve made it clear, but it seems you’re unaware of how the design industry works.
You cannot beat a Nurburgring lap record with a slow, cheap car. You CAN do laps, but “doing laps” is not what the high-end companies want & need.
You cannot replace quality, expensive work with cheap work and expect the same result. Otherwise, companies would hire 1st-year-dirt-cheap freelancers, or outsource to fivr. Companies that do that are mostly starting themselves or are so cheap, that they are of no value to the designer.
Stop the “AI” dooming that’s only beneficial to the prople who sell it.
None of the highly successful people I know within the industry is worried about the generative garbage, because it’s all that is.
Did you land your gigs at high end companies right out of uni?
No, I ate shit the first few years after uni, making coffee and changing texts on visuals.
Are you truimg to imply that a crappy image generator that can barely make text and has trouble generating the appropriate amount of fingers has taken over THE ENTIRE visual design industry?
We probably live on different planets.
Most clients don’t understand art or graphics to begin with, I guess. They just wanted someone good at Illustrator.
Most clients don’t understand art or graphics to begin with, I guess.
That means shit prompts and shit visuals.
They just wanted someone good at Illustrator.
Well, that’s where the “not very good at graphics design” comes in. If you’re only hired because “you know illustrator”, that says more about you than the client.
Your attitude says more about you than your supposed knowledge does, if you think AI won’t have a catastrophic impact on the value of your work, of the artistry of what you do in relationship to being valued by society, you are an utter fool.
AI = productivity goes up, quality goes downI think the bitter lesson here is that there’s a bunch of jobs where quality has zero importance.
If you take for example, content marketing, SEO, and ad copy writing… It’s a lot of bullshit, and it’s been filling the web with gpt-grade slop for 20 years now. If you can do the same for cheap I don’t see a reason not to.
Fair point. There are lot of morons who should be replaced. But we are talking about freelancers, not about SEO or content marketing, more like content filling. But it got worse since AI rise up.
But we are talking about freelancers, not about SEO or content marketing, more like content filling
Most SEO is done by freelancers (at least in my industry). When i talk about content marketing i mean anybody who writes blog posts and LinkedIn posts for companies. It was already shit long before AI arrived.
I used to write that kind of stuff for a living when I was really poor and scraping by, it paid by the word and so low that you could realistically only crack minimum wage if you kept typing continuously and didn’t stop to think or do any research.
Yeah I’m not bashing anybody, my wife did that for a couple years I know how it is. There was a kind of golden period where it would even pay enough to let you do some quality stuff but when VC money stopped raining the market slumped almost immediately.
I think the quality definitely degraded, but that’s exactly what capitalism wanted. It’s going to darwin a big chunk of us through climate change that’s accelerated by the electricity needs.
Kind of depressing that the answer to not being replaced by AI is “learn to use it and spend your day fixing its fuckups”, like that’s somehow a meaningful way to live for someone who previously had an actual creative job.
Automation-prone fields like writing, software, and app development saw a 21% decrease in job listings
Maybe, but hard disagree that software is being automated away.
It’s a little worrisome, actually. Professionally written software still needs a human to verify things are correct, consistent, and safe, but the tasks we used to foist off on more junior developers are being increasingly done by AI.
Part of that is fine - offloading minor documentation updates and “trivial” tasks to AI is easy to do and review while remaining productive. But it comes at the expense of the next generation of junior developers being deprived of tasks that are valuable for them to gain experience to work towards a more senior level.
If companies lean too hard into that, we’re going to have serious problems when this generation of developers starts retiring and the next generation is understaffed, underpopulated, and probably underpaid.
AI is also going to run into a wall because it needs continual updates with more human-made data, but the supply of all that is going to dry up once the humans who create new content have been driven out of business.
It’s almost like AIs have been developed and promoted by people who have no ability to think about anything but their profits for the next 12 months.
I just tend to think of it as the further enshittification of life. I’m not even that old and it’s super obvious how poorly most companies are actually run these days, including my own. It’s not that we’re doing more with less, it’s a global reduction in standards and expectations. Issues that used to be solved in a day now bounce between a dozen different departments staffed with either a handful of extremely overworked people, complete newbies, or clueless contractors. AI is just going to further cement the shitty new standard both inside and outside the company.
Yep. Life does just seem… permanently enshittified now. I honestly don’t see it ever getting better, either. AI will just ensure it carries on.
It looks like we are already at the point with some AI where we can correct the output instead of add new input. Microsoft is using LinkedIn to help get professional input for free.
But this is the point: the AIs will always need input from some source or another. Consider using AI to generate search results. Those will need to be updated with new information and knowledge, because an AI that can only answer questions related to things known before 2023 will very quickly become obsolete. So it must be updated. But AIs do not know what is going on in the world. They have no sensory capacity of their own, and so their inputs require data that is ultimately, at some point in the process, created by a human who does have the sensory capacity to observe what is happening in the world and write it down. And if the AI simply takes that writing without compensating the human, then the human will stop writing, because they will have had to get a different job to buy food, rent, etc.
No amount of “we can train AIs on AI-generated content” is going to fix the fundamental problem that the world is not static and AI’s don’t have the capacity to observe what is changing. They will always be reliant on humans. Taking human input without paying for it disincentivises humans from producing content, and this will eventually create problems for the AI.
“we can train AIs on AI-generated content”
and 20yrs from now polydactylism will be the new human beauty standard
But humans also need input as well.
The scales of the two are nowhere near comparable. A human can’t steal and regurgitate so much content that they put millions of other humans out of work.
It’s the same in many fields. Trainees learn by doing the easy, repetitive work that can now be automated.
Yep. I used to be an accountant, and that’s how trainees learn in that field too. The company I worked at had a fairly even split between clients with manual and computerised records, and trainees always spent the first year or so almost exclusively working on manual records because that was how you learned to recognise when something had gone wrong in the computerised records, which would always look “right” on a first glance.
I get sooooo much schadenfreude from programmers smugly acting like their jobs aren’t going to be obliterated by AI… because the AI won’t be able to do the job correctly, as if that matters in this late stage of collapse and end state capitalism.
Y’all (programmers and tech people) cheered this on and facilitated the ruling class destroying countless decent, good careers and now it is everybody else’s turn to laugh at programmers as they go from having one of the few non-dysfunctional careers left to being worthless chatgpt prompt monkeys that can never convince management they are valuable and not just a subpar, expensive alternative to “AI”.
This is going to be awful, but that doesn’t mean I can’t find the silver linings!
Maybe if programming wasn’t full of overconfident naive libertarian adjacent people y’all could have stopped this by unionizing but again… just check hacker news and all the boot licking for the ruling class there to see why that didn’t happen lol.
I use it for software, but you really need to know what you are doing to understand what is wrong and ask it to redo it in a different way. I still think it saves time, but the ability to generate fully realized applications is a ways away.
The headline says “digital freelancers,” so maybe it’s talking primarily about small jobs that were being outsourced. A 21% decrease in regular job listings would be more concerning because of the amount of incorrect information and buggy software about to be created than job loss.
Well at least the buggy software will eventually generate more jobs because they need more hands fixing everything while AI can’t do it.
They just pass those problems on to their customers these days.
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I was traveling this week, and saw a couple very obviously AI-generated billboards for the city’s downtown. Something about downtown eats or something. They were, and I’m being extremely nice here, absolutely hideous. I have never, in all my life, seen such ugly billboards. And, while they were different, they were basically the same thing (does that make sense? Them being different, but the same? Not really sure how else to describe it). I was actually looking for a place to eat, and those things deterred me from going downtown. Ended up finding this cute little coffeeshop in some random side road. No food, but holy crap the coffee and crepes were good!
Are crepes not a food?
I mean… they do have protein, fruits, and such, so, yes. But I was craving some pasta. I guess a crepe is like a sweet pasta. I did feel the craving vanish… …
Precisely what designers do - they make the visuals Pleasing. Doesn’t mater if it’s for goat sacrifice service or granny’s muffin shop.
It is a skill that can barely be learned by a person. Often very good designers have ‘talent’ or ‘good eye’.
Even though art is subjective, you can still pretty much rank designers.
This is one area where I am vehemently in support of IP protection for all the writers and artists’ works being used. Unfortunately, unlike when it comes to suing individuals who copy something, the wholesale theft of generations of art and writing by AI companies is just being let slide.
