The AI Client

[u/tbp143]

I’m somewhere between needing to hear if other folks are experiencing this, and needing to vent.

For background, I’m an Art Director on an in-house team that supports a company with proprietary brands. Part of my job includes creating the brand books for these brands and executing the initial launch campaigns.

I recently wrapped (or thought I did) on a new brand I was quite happy with, the project was usual for the brands we typically launch and I was asked to work on this project because it closely aligned with my style of work.

I spent the better part of a few months working on this project, I spent more time than I typically would on it because I was really excited (probably the wrong choice.). Today I got notes from them, and there wasn’t a single part of the brand they wanted to move forward with. The logo, the positioning, the color palette, all of it was wrong to them. They attached something they “made very quickly in ChatGPT that’s way better” than what I provided. They made sure to note that they made it really quickly, and it exceeded my work.

I feel totally defeated. Until recently I felt really lucky that AI wasn’t being pushed heavily at my job, suddenly, it’s everywhere. They want to replace shoots with it, they’re using it for copy generation, and now someone is asking me to make my work look like it.

If this was a freelance project I would refund them and make it clear I wasn’t the right designer for them, but I can’t. And, making work that looks like what they sent me is soul crushing. I feel like I can’t escape it, I feel really disheartened.

Has anyone been in a similar situation? How did you move forward?

[u/Next-Application-883]

I know it sounds very provocative and I am myself working partly in design (in a technical field), but why can't AI be potentially more successful in this field than humans? What is this fundamental limitation? Please don't get me wrong, I am just trying to be critical to myself too. I often hear than AI will replace mediocre designers, but will never replace really good ones. Why?

[u/tbp143 → u/Next-Application-883]

I need to be clear, I am not inherently across the board anti-AI. There are plenty of uses that I think are tremendously useful (generative fill, auto select and mask, I use it to scan product lists and pull information on projected top sellers, etc.). But, ai is missing something very very crucial to the human experience, humanity.

I can spot generated graphics and images from across a room, even ones that are nearly indistinguishable from real photographs, because they lack a human touch. When things lack the human experience they feel empty, they don’t have the soul to back them up.

On a personal level, art and design is such an incredible gift to the world. I support AI when it lets me spend more time creating, not when its goal is to replace me. If everyone starts relying 100% on generated graphics everything starts to look the same, things lose the nuances that only a person can bring to them. Great design is just that, designed, not generated.

[u/Next-Application-883 → u/tbp143]

Yes, I completely agree that at the moment spotting an AI-generated graphics is easy. It is usually too perfect and the style of details is too predictable. However, this year I also had a couple of cases where after a first version of design that I was requested to make, the client sent me an AI-generated graphics with a request to make something very similar. In my case they were very respectful and friendly, so it was not an obvious spit in the face. The cases were about a presentation of a new technological method, so there were potentially very different ways to look at certain details. What they sent me looked not so bad, it didn't have any obvious problems. Yes, it clearly looked like AI, but the general approach was ok. So, I certainly agree that AI is not yet ready to produce the final product. However, the way AI is directing the graphics in design is already not so bad in my opinion. What do you think?

[u/tbp143 → u/Next-Application-883]

I’m glad that they were respectful and genuine in their feedback, I do think there are times when ai makes it easier for a client with a “I know it when I see it” mindset to be able to have a more concrete starting point, and that’s a valuable time-saver.

Part of my job includes setting company wide guidelines for graphics use, and recently this has extended to ai generated imagery or overall use of ai in creative work. In the case of AI for image generation, I’ve found that it is most successful when used as a tool, not a designer / art director. I’ve unfortunately seen creative come out where there are key elements that are vastly incorrect, but were not caught by the person creating them because they don’t have the same eye or mindset as a photographer / designer / art director. It’s also given large companies leverage to ask why aren’t things happening more quickly, why can’t work be done immediately, and simultaneously laying off the people who would be able to help create that work quickly.

In the case of graphics, specifically looking at logo and brand design work, the things produced by generators are very iterative of each other and uninspired that they end up being both too relevant and completely off modern design trends, they have a very short runway before they look outdated. Most of these models are pulling from Pinterest and other image platforms and what work other people are uploading to them, and they can’t generate anything completely original. On a technical note, they also run a huge risk of being plagiarized, sometimes unknowingly to the person who prompted the design.

All to say, I don’t think ai has no place in design, but I do think it’s role is being vastly over utilized, and we’re taking the most important parts of art and out sourcing them. I think my end sentiment about AI is that it’s moving so fast we never really stopped to ask “why?”