The Future of The Design Profession is Worrying in the Short Term.
Design will reward the talented, good ones, not the average ones.
If you were an artist who used to draw paintings and you read on the news that there's this new technological tool that could draw things, you would be tempted to try it out. And if you go to Midjourney or GPT-4 and try out some of those portraits, you're going to know one thing for a fact: your job is threatened.
The Value Proposition Is Changing
Why would a person pay thousands of dollars for your piece of art when Midjourney or GPT could do it just as well, if not better? I've spoken to multiple artists about this, and their answer is very direct and reasonable: Most people invest in art not because of the art itself, but because of the artist behind it and the story—which makes sense. An image generated through AI doesn't really have that much of a compelling story.
But the reality of that market is that not all people invest in art because of the artists. Some people actually buy art just to decorate their houses. And for that purpose, a huge chunk of the market is getting disrupted.
The majority of people might not be able to afford a $3,000 painting when they can get one that looks almost the same for two dollars. At the end of the day, most visitors to their house aren't going to ask where the painting is from as much as they'll just appreciate the psychological feeling it gives them when they look at it.
It is a truly ethical problem when it comes to artificial intelligence and artists.
The Design Industry Is Even More Vulnerable
Now zoom out a bit. If you're thinking of the design industry in particular (which I know many people are working in), it's also getting threatened as it derives from the same concept. The concept of design—whether it's graphic design, interior design, architecture, or whatever sort of design—has the same vulnerability as what artists are facing.
You're looking for a presentation design. You'll either pay a presentation designer a couple thousand dollars to design this for you, or just use an online tool. And here it actually doesn't matter (contrary to paintings) whether AI made your presentation. What matters is the output and only the output, which creates an even bigger problem for designers.
When Only the Output Matters
If the output is the only thing that's important, then the job of a designer these days is to always be better than AI tools. And in this sense, over and over again I've seen that if you're fighting against AI in the past year, then there is a very small chance you'll win, because of the speed and investment poured into artificial intelligence.
I tried some AI tools like Tome and Google Gemini for PowerPoint or presentation design, and I was impressed—not because they were great, but because they were almost as good as the average designer out there. This gives them the power to disrupt the design market for the masses, because it's not just about one good presentation designer. It's about the average presentation designer and what they're capable of doing.
The Coming Disruption
So yes, when it comes to markets being disrupted, design is going to be disrupted by artificial intelligence in the extremely short term. Companies are already thinking of options to replace the executional element of design with artificial intelligence tools.
Months are going to pass. Flashy AI tools are going to show that they can do what the average designer does, and managers will have no option but the common sense and logical choice: to let go of designers if they're not doing a job as good as those AI tools out there.
And then the problem begins.