State of the Art: How AI is Influencing Design
While AI is used primarily for optimization and speed, it has virtually endless potential when it comes to the world of design. With the help of AI, designers can cherry-pick options, make swift adjustments, and produce work at a fraction of the cost and time spent, making it an attractive tool for businesses across virtually every industry. Let’s dive into exactly how.
Art Smart: How is AI Being Used in Design
With the help of AI, designers can automate repetitive tasks, such as resizing images, and free up more time for creative problem-solving. AI can also assist with design decisions by analyzing data and providing insights into user preferences and behavior, helping artists create more personalized and effective designs.
Even more impressively, AI-powered tools can help generate new design ideas and variations, enabling designers to explore a wider range of options and push the boundaries of what's possible. These generated images can be used as final products or serve as inspirational content. AI’s power lies in its speed to rapidly analyze large amounts of data and output alternative designs. These can then be reviewed by designers to select and improve the generated images. This not only increases speed, but helps to reduce costs, improve efficiency, and create multiple designs that can be A/B tested with different user groups for faster results, and ultimately sales.
Putting the Solution in Resolution: Resize, Enhance, Automate
Looking to change an image’s resolution, size, or background? AI can drastically simplify the process. While photo editing is old news, photo manipulation seems like it’s constantly changing, and thanks to AI, designers can now use this advanced software to deal with pesky imperfections, improve poor image quality, and even restore missing parts of an image. So not only can designers effortlessly transform crowded, pixelated images into clean ones, but they can also correct lighting and color in a matter of seconds. Below are just a few of these super popular tools:
Cut and Space: Background Editing
Whether you’re new to the field or a seasoned designer, removing background objects can be challenging and incredibly time-consuming. Enter: AI. With tools like Removebg, VistaCreate, Clipping Magic, and Photoscissors that work by using an algorithm to detect the main and secondary objects using visual recognition, you can cut a picture respectively—and within seconds. It can then be further refined for better results, allowing designers to be more productive and focus on more important tasks.
Picture Perfect: DALL-E 2
Need to create an image to help illustrate your idea? Look no further than Open AI’s incredibly impressive, DALL-E 2. Although still fairly new to the public, it’s already changing the design
game—like in this magazine cover by digital artist, Karen Chen.
Having learned the relationship between images and text, this innovative AI system is able to create realistic images quickly and effectively. Just describe what you’re looking for with as much detail as possible, hit “generate,” and DALL-E 2 will produce an unlimited number of stock photos for your design projects. And not only will it create an image from a description in a specific style, but it can also make changes to existing images based on natural language instructions and create a range of images stylistically similar to—or inspired by—the one you upload.
Dream Big: Midjourney
Following the wild success of OpenAI’s Dall-E 2, came an increase in AI design programs, including Midjourney, one of the biggest (and arguably most unique) generators. Unlike Dall-E, Midjourney adds a more dream-like style to users' requests. It starts by prompting a phrasing input for an image, like a dog wearing a scarf in the style of a Frida Kahlo illustration, and in just a few seconds, produces multiple attempts at the new artwork (see below). And the awes of Midjourney don’t stop there—the just-released V5 now includes an image-synthesis service, which can produce photorealistic images.
Make it 3D: The Rise of Virtual Influencers
It’s no secret that AI has revolutionized the use of design in business, and virtual influencing is taking that another step further. A virtual influencer is a computer-generated character designed to interact with people on popular social media platforms. They’re created using advanced computer graphics and AI technology and are designed to have unique personalities, interests, and traits meant to resonate with their target audience.
These virtual influencers can be used for a range of marketing and advertising efforts, promoting products and services in a more engaging and interactive way than traditional advertising, especially younger audiences who are more likely to engage with digital content. While virtual influencers are not real people, they’re designed to look and act like it, and are generating a significant following on social media platforms. In fact, some have millions of followers and are considered to be influential in shaping opinions and behaviors due to higher engagement rates (great news for businesses without that Super Bowl budget). And creepy out or not, thanks to AI face-generation tools like TL-GAN, now you can design a custom hyper-realistic photo of a human that’s never existed. Just draw a realistic image of a human to represent a brand online, feed it a couple of parameters, and a fresh face appears for your next marketing campaign.
Art for All: Benefits and Drawbacks of AI Design
While AI can be a powerful tool for design, like other industries, there are some drawbacks. For example, AI relies on pre-existing data and algorithms to make decisions which can limit its ability to come up with truly creative, innovative and truly original design concepts. Another drawback is that AI is only as good as the data it’s been trained on. If the training data does not accurately reflect human needs and preferences, the resulting designs may not be well-suited to users given that we are (hopefully) better equipped to understand and meet the needs of real people. Also, if the training data reflects biased or discriminatory attitudes, the resulting designs may also reflect those biases, whereas humans can be mindful of these ethical considerations and work to create designs that are more inclusive and equitable.
As technology expert and IBM CEO, Ginni Rometty, suggested, “the initials AI would be more helpful to artists if they were understood by designers as augmented intelligence, instead of the scarier-sounding artificial intelligence.” AI is best leveraged as a design tool helping augment the ability to optimize and streamline art projects. Thanks to the advancement of AI design tools, we are seeing a future without barriers to artistic endeavors, giving virtually anyone with a creative idea a means of expressing themselves. And although the rapid advancement of AI technology will make the work of designers significantly easier, having additional knowledge and expertise in this ever-changing technology may very well help them stay competitive. As we look to the not-so-distant future, it is clear AI will help designers spend less time on laborious, repetitive tasks and potentially free them up for more creativity somewhere else. But being able to replace the human touch and creativity that can only come from life experiences has a long way to go.
