{"id":21780,"date":"2019-11-21T13:02:54","date_gmt":"2019-11-21T13:02:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.heartinternet.uk\/blog\/?p=21780"},"modified":"2019-11-21T13:02:54","modified_gmt":"2019-11-21T13:02:54","slug":"the-rise-of-the-robots-will-ai-take-over-graphic-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.heartinternet.uk\/blog\/the-rise-of-the-robots-will-ai-take-over-graphic-design\/","title":{"rendered":"The rise of the robots: Will AI take over graphic design?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Is AI going to take your design job? Well, certain tabloid newspapers<\/a> certainly want you to think that 52% of all jobs could be taken by \u2018robots\u2019 (which aren\u2019t the same as AI, please note) within ten years. It\u2019s true that AI already exists and is already functioning in our world. It is helping farmers<\/a> kill weeds without harming or polluting crops. Image recognition AI is helping look for signs of diabetes<\/a> in people\u2019s retinas. AI is good as these are detail-oriented jobs which require accessing and filtering a vast amount of data.<\/p>\n

But that isn\u2019t going to put half the population out of work.<\/p>\n

Even so, Elon Musk – one of the world\u2019s brightest and richest men (and founder of his own AI company) – is quite animated<\/a> about AI, saying that we are \u201csummoning the demon\u201d? Is he over-reacting? After-all, Facebook uses AI to target advertising at its users. AI powers digital assistants like Siri and Alexa. Indeed, Google\u2019s search engine has been dependent on AI since day one. They\u2019re all good things.<\/p>\n

Have you trained the autosuggest function on your phone to predict the types of words and phrases you\u2019re likely to use when texting? That\u2019s AI. When you\u2019re working on your computer in a platform like Google Docs, does it accurately suggest corrections to your typos? That\u2019s AI. Does your streaming service suggest playlists that nail your taste in music? You guessed it: AI!<\/p>\n

These are all good things that AI offers, so why are some people scared?<\/p>\n

A lot of this thinking comes from the way AI (or \u2018supercomputers\u2019 as we used to call them) have been portrayed in the media. Watch a science fiction film and you could be forgiven for being afraid.<\/p>\n

On the trAIl of AI<\/h2>\n

Anyone who watches science fiction movies has been aware of AI – Artificial Intelligence – for some time. Robots in TV shows have been \u2018intelligent\u2019 for decades, from the unimaginatively named \u2018Robot\u2019 in Lost In Space<\/em> through to the diminutive Twiki in Buck Rogers in the 25th Century<\/em> and the Pinocchio-like Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation<\/em>. The Star Wars<\/em> movies, famously, gave us the AI Laurel and Hardy double-act of R2D2 and C3PO.<\/p>\n

These AI robots were generally seen as mostly benign, possibly because they look (vaguely) human. The way non-humanoid AI has been seen in movies, however, is very different.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s take Hal 9000, for example. The film 2001 <\/em>never really bothers to explain why HAL goes mad, but the novel tells us that he was programmed to always tell the truth and, at the same time, to not tell the astronauts about the existence of aliens. HAL decided that the simplest way to successfully do both these things was to kill the astronauts.<\/p>\n

When these computers became really scary, however, was when science fiction filmmakers imagined them taking over from we poor, illogical humans. In WarGames <\/em>an AI computer was given control of our nuclear defence arsenals and promptly turned them against us, because it thought it was playing a game. It did, eventually, realise that some games can\u2019t be won so shouldn\u2019t be played, and decided it would prefer a nice game of chess.<\/p>\n

SkyNet, the AI in the film The Terminator<\/em> did not come to the same conclusion. It feared being switched off by humans, so protected itself by creating Terminators.<\/p>\n

Do you want Terminators? Because that\u2019s how you get Terminators!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

So, it\u2019s fair to say that AI has had a bad press.<\/p>\n

But let\u2019s take a breath, calm down, and look at what AI really is.<\/p>\n

Giving AI a fAIr hearing<\/h2>\n

Not so long ago (within the lifetime of many designers still working), Graphic Design was a job done with pencils and rulers, scissors and glue. Then the Apple Mac led the way to taking all (well, nearly all) Graphic Design onto the screen. There were just so many more things that could be done at the click of a mouse.<\/p>\n

Where AI can help with on-screen design is to quickly put together a range of suggestions, whether that be in product design or web design. These suggestions can be assembled from the available elements, employing the skills and rules the AI has been taught. The latest artistic composition tools<\/a> allow designers to create sketches, and the AI will contribute existing completed assets that resemble or work with the sketch, live, while the composition is taking form. This can help speed up the design process by helping creatives avoid reinventing the wheel. But a client still needs to okay the design. They still need to like it and, as any creative who has ever worked with a client will know only too well, there\u2019s no accounting for (lack of) taste.<\/p>\n

Effective websites are designed for two audiences – search engine bots and human clients. A webmaster has to use all the well-established techniques of web-design, coding and SEO to attract the attention of the search engine spiders, but that is not an end in itself. The search engines bring humans to your site. That is the endgame! The content needs to be relevant to those humans, and that\u2019s something that only another human can truly decide.<\/p>\n

Similarly, when you are posting your content on social media, images need to conform to established and measurable rules, such as image size, file format and colour models; but the creativity behind the image, the strategic thinking that will make people stop scrolling and engage, that\u2019s all human.<\/p>\n

Hopefully you will notice that, in all of these applications, the AI is doing the research, it\u2019s assembling data or assets that it has found, it is not creating. The truth is, a lot of the work of building a website – for example – is not creative, it\u2019s about following rules and paying attention to tiny details. These are things that computers are very good at because, unlike humans, they don\u2019t get distracted or bored.<\/p>\n

They also don\u2019t create.<\/p>\n

WAIting for AI<\/h2>\n

AIs do not (yet) have ideas, they just assemble information that they have been given by human programmers. And they don\u2019t yet do it perfectly, so they can\u2019t be set unsupervised tasks.<\/p>\n

In that sense, AI is still growing up!<\/p>\n

There are limits to machine learning<\/a>, just as there are limits to human learning. It takes time. There is a Cognitive Psychology experiment in which a scientist programmed an AI to recognise a panda bear, by checking for the following features:<\/p>\n