Technology is changing our work
By technology here, of course I mean AI.
I have been keeping an eye on how AI is affecting our work within Design—big D, so all of its disciplines. It's obvious some parts are more affected than others, and some will be levelled to the ground, at least in terms of demand. I'm going to make some predictions and we'll see how wrong I was about them.
TL;DR: I find it hard to believe that AI will ever be able to replace creative humans. But on the other hand, the creative work as it was until recently is completely, and forever changed. If you think you can ignore this shift and continue to exist in a creative role, you are ignorant.
Some parts of design are easier to delegate to technology than others. The closer your work lies to execution, the more ripe your job is to be abstracted away. You might still play a role in it, but it will be a different kind of work going forward.
Let's take a moment to think through how AI might affect some common design roles.
UI designers
I'm afraid your days are numbered. The role as it is today has no business existing anymore. UI is more-less a solved problem. The whole “draw an interface, then implement it by reinventing the wheel over and over again” dance is done with. Today we have excellent, malleable libraries, tools, and design patterns which solve 90% of the complexity within user interface design, and paying someone to paint a facade over it just doesn't sound like a real job.
If you want to work on digital products and user interface in the future, become an engineer. You now belong on the front end, and it's something you should have seen coming. The answer is yes, designers should code. The product of your work is not a mockup anymore, but a functional user interface ready to be plugged in to the software it is made for.
If all you want to do is create pretty images, move into graphic design, and learn to work with marketing folks. Study typography, lettering, something which is still hard for AI to replicate.
UX & product designers
Get as close as possible to the user, and become a god of research, analytics, and heuristics. Ditch the traditional design part of your job, keep the lo-fi stuff. You are now 100% that “other part of design”.
The world still needs you very much because it needs someone to understand the problems, and find solutions for them.
Specialists: graphic designers, illustrators, etc.
You are the most affected ones here, and your jobs will change the most. The technology has had so much material to train on within your fields, that it's even now capable of producing results of satisfactory quality for less important purposes.
This will dramatically change for the worse—for you, but for the better for everyone else—within the following 12 months.
All work which is non-essential will basically disappear from the job market, leaving enough work only for the ones with a very niche specialization the technology still hasn't had a chance to train much on, or for the ones who have been working on novel ways to circumvent their own demise.
My advice for you: work on figuring out the ways to circumvent your own demise.
Product designers, whatever design generalists
No one can touch you. You're now more valuable than ever.
If you can wield this new technology, they can now hire one of you and get a whole team's output. Use this to your advantage before it becomes the norm. It will take some serious getting used to, as your one of your soft skills is becoming your main hard skill: context switching.
Who knows, maybe you can go true full stack now?
How do we handle this?
I strongly believe that creative humans will never be replaced. I need to believe this, because I don't really like the other option.
For some reason all this seems paradoxically natural. It's the advancement in technology that is pushing us as creatives and professionals into better understanding, and perfecting our craft. It is to be considered a challenge, to produce work and perform what no technology can do.
Everything that this technology can do today is because some human has already done it. This technology is by its nature an extractive power feeding on what humans already know, and have already done. And it is contributing to the destruction of our planet along the way. It will continue to need to absorb new things in order to stay useful, and to keep up with the demands people make on it.
We still don't know what happens when derivative work is produced out of derivative work—machines learning from results they've produced themselves—especially when there are many cycles of this, but I don't think it will be something we'll find particularly useful, or pretty for that matter.
Your job will change and you will have to adapt, because as companies who employ us figure out the ways to use this new technology to their advantage, their demands for people who are able to use it will increase, and this is where you come in. Learn to use it.
On the other hand, just continue to make genuine stuff. Something no one still made. There's plenty left to explore, even if it seems like everything in this world is repeating itself. How do you recognize that something is genuine? It keeps you up at night? A light turns on inside when you think about it? You get excited about it!
Most jobs will still be there in a couple of years. The world will still need products of a human's work. It's just that that “work” part will be different. For now this is just another tool, although one you can't afford not to learn how to use I'm afraid.
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